Mojang, the original developers of Minecraft have ported Minecraft to the Raspberry Pi. The result is called Minecraft Pi Edition. It is not the full Minecraft implementation, it is closer to the mobile version of Minecraft, but none the less a lot of fun.

This tutorial will show you how to install and run Minecraft Pi Edition on a Raspberry Pi.

To install the software, you will need to use the command line. Because Minecraft will only work if you have keyboard, mouse and monitor connected to your Raspberry Pi, there is little point installing it using SSH.

It's easy to install if your Pi doesn't already have it, in the command terminal, run this command at the shell prompt:

sudo apt-get install minecraft-pi 

sudo apt-get install minecraft-pi 

Old instructions

Originally you'd have to run the following but its no longer required now that you can run the single command above!

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.minecraft.net/pi/minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.minecraft.net/pi/minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz

The end result of all this will be a folder called mcpi in your home directory.

Minecraft can be run from the command line with:

minecraft-pi

minecraft-pi

or double clicking on the Desktop icon

Note that to get Minecraft to fit on the Raspberry Pi some shortcuts were made in the graphics code. This means that you can only play the game directly on the Raspberry Pi with the keyboard, mouse and monitor connected directly to it. It will not work over a remote connection like VNC.

You can find out more about the Raspberry Pi port of Minecraft here.

About the Author.
As well as contributing lots of tutorials about Raspberry Pi, Arduino and now BeagleBone Black, Simon Monk writes books about open source hardware. You will find his books for sale here at Adafruit.

His latest book: "The Raspberry Pi Cookbook" is out December 2013.