Minecraft has always been a platform for modders to show their talents, ranging from recreating large buildings to running computer systems in the game. Now, a new project is taking that creativity to another level by running Minecraft on COBOL, a programming language designed in 1959. Although COBOL remains very relevant today, the shortage of developers proficient in the language has become a major challenge.
Moddermeyfa recently published tools and instructions for running a Minecraft server using COBOL, a programming language created in the 1950s and 1960s for commercial IT systems. Despite COBOL's enterprise focus and the developer's lack of experience, this alternative version of Minecraft runs smoothly and supports most of the game's basic features.
The ongoing project, called CobolCraft, doesn't yet include all of Minecraft's features. However, it does support some key features such as unlimited terrain generation, saving persistent world data to disk, importing existing worlds, player inventory management, and basic block functionality.
The game also supports multiplayer with up to 10 players, and provides features such as chat, server status updates, server configuration options, and whitelisting.
While CobolCraft may never support the most complex multi-state block interactions, simpler items such as torches, stone slabs, stairs, doors, and beds will all work perfectly fine.
This module is primarily designed for Linux, but a platform-independent version is available via Docker. However, the project is still not tested on Windows.
Running CobolCraft on Linux requires a number of tools and dependencies, including cobc, make, g++, zlib, curl, and the latest version of Java. Detailed instructions can be found on the developer's DockerHub page.
Perhaps the most profound takeaway from this project is that nearly 70 years after COBOL's creation, new developers can still learn COBOL. Originally designed for business systems, COBOL still runs on IT mainframes today and handles a large number of business transactions, but it is increasingly difficult to find coders who are proficient in COBOL.
Meyfa had no experience with COBOL before developing CobolCraft. In addition, games like Minecraft are not suitable for COBOL's enterprise-oriented design, so the coding skills required for this project are particularly high.
CobolCraft is built using GnuCOBOL, an open source fork that developers have maintained for more than two decades. For those who are curious, a Getting Started Guide to GnuCOBOL Writing is available here.
Translating Minecraft into an ancient programming language is arguably another fascinating achievement in the game's history. However, Minecraft has long been a proving ground for ambitious projects. Previously, modders have created recreations of the original Legend of Zelda, Google Earth voxel converters, PCs capable of running Doom, and even simulated the entire known universe in the game.