Redstone is Turing-complete, so anything a regular computer can do. I remember building a 4 bit calculator in Minecraft when I was 12.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
19 points (91.3% liked)
Asklemmy
50413 readers
627 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Not much, as the computer would be limited to something like 1000 transistors in total or something, if you build the computer flat on the landscape, because only around like 30K blocks of surface area are loaded at each moment (and therefore can contribute to calculations), and it takes around 30 blocks to build one transistor gate.
Someone made a whole series on how to build a general pupose redstone computer. You can program it to do anything you want with already written programs like a calculator, connect4, a maze generator or even Tetris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAZEXqWLTmY
Anything a real PC does, given infinite space and creativity. You're just simulating binary physically.
would it not still be digitally?
digitally physical?
my head hurts..
Digital (discrete, e.g. binary) is mutually exclusive with analog (continuous, e.g. voltage), but either can be either physical (existing in the real world), or virtual (simulated, represented).
A digital clock can be physical or virtual. A virtual clock can be digital or analog.
Btw I don't think it makes sense to say redstone computers are "simulating binary", at least not any more than real computers do. It's just another digital computer, running in a virtual environment rather than a physical one.
It is a bit confusing.
Minecraft is a digital simulation of a physical (albeit blocky) world.
If we treat minecraft as a physical world (one simulated, but that's beside the point), we can claim that it's a (simulated) physical simulation.
Yes, calculating with moving parts are how the first computers/calculators worked. Nowadays, you'll usually see them represented by relay computers, which are usually an educational experiment, or meant to be used in harsh environments where a modern computer couldn't function properly.
Anything an 8-bit pc can do. There are technical limits to what Minecraft can handle and
People have built 16 bit and 32 bit computers in Minecraft, the tighter restraint is the limited clock speed (resulting from suboptimal simulation efficiency)
And by limited, we mean like, on the order of Hertz probably.
I feel like you need to give more details about what you mean by "do". It's a Turing complete system, but if you mean to advance gameplay objectives, that's a more complicated question. Especially because it's a fairly open-ended game in the first place.
This being Lemmy, everyone is going straight to computer science.
I remember someone made a working gameboy emulator work in minecraft.
No fucking way?! Seriouslu
Now use your simulation of Minecraft in Minecraft to build a computer to play Minecraft.
Iโve seen a scientific calculator
Lose a lot of your time.
That kind of goes without saying lmao
Crappy DIY "ASICs"