Discovering the Coordinates of a Block

When you are creating objects in the world you need to know the X, Y, Z coordinate of the place in the world where you want to start your creation.

There are 3 easy ways to do this as follows.

Player Position

You can always use your player’s position to build from. e.g. assuming you have defined the Pagoda Function. You could build a pagoda around your player like this:

build_pagoda(player.world.position)

It might also be good to use a variable to store your player’s position. Then you can walk away from it and turn around to see the pagoda build.

pos = player.world.pos
# now walk away and turn around
build_pagoda(pos)

Minecraft Diagnostic Info

You can turn on Minecraft Diagnostic information in the game by pressing F3. This will show you the X, Y, Z coordinates of the block you are looking at. Look at the block you want and it will highlight with a black outline. Then read off the coordinates from Targeted Block near the top right of the screen. Hit F3 again to turn off the diagnostic information.

Once you know the coordinates you can create a variable to hold them as follows:

# assumes you read X=200 Y=-10 Z=54
pos = Vec3(200,-10,54)
build_pagoda(pos)

The Selection Sign

When you place the Select sign in the world it will update the copy buffer coordinates. The copy buffer start is always the coordinates at which you last dropped a sign. You can ask the world what its current status including copy buffer start and end is by tying world e.g.:

In [10]: world
Out[10]:
Minecraft Interactive World Builder status:
copy buffer start: Vec3(x=620, y=71, z=-1623)
copy buffer stop: Vec3(x=621, y=71, z=-1626)
copy buffer size: Vec3(x=1, y=0, z=-3)
paste point: Vec3(x=620, y=71, z=-1623)
player: TransformerScorn
player position: Vec3(x=620, y=72, z=-1625)
player facing: Vec3(x=0, y=0, z=-1)

In [11]:

You can then copy and paste the start value and assign it to a variable like this:

pos = Vec3(x=620, y=71, z=-1623)
build_pagoda(pos)

Even easier you can use the world variable to get the current copy buffer start position like this:

pos = world.copier.start_pos
build_pagoda(pos)

This is the easiest and most versatile way to discover a block’s coordinates.