81–90 of 154 posts
This is fiendishly clever, and really quite elegant. I made some of my own notes on how this works here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/
But highly impractical and far beyond what CSS should be used for.
That's why it was done
For fun and to see whether it could be done
Very impressive! As I've hit my mid-life slide and (regressed|progressed) back to my youth-self, I've found myself just writing a bunch of apps and sites in html and css and really enjoying it. One thing I still would like to see cracked is a random-like number in pure CSS. You can almost us there with some of the math functions and browser attributes, but I haven't found anything reliable.
Can LLMs help?
To answer your question, LLMs confirm you can't generate a random number in CSS.
If anyone's wondering how it manages the state, a quick peek into the source code shows that it uses radiobuttons and the HTML contains all the blocks you could ever possibly place.
Very impressive! As I've hit my mid-life slide and (regressed|progressed) back to my youth-self, I've found myself just writing a bunch of apps and sites in html and css and really enjoying it. One thing I still would like to see cracked is a random-like number in pure CSS. You can almost us there with some of the math functions and browser attributes, but I haven't found anything reliable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only guessing, but I have a theory that Mojang considered that circa 2017 :D In 2019 they released a web version of minecraft classic, as a quirky marketing thing for the game's anniversary. But what they released turned out to be built on my open-source voxel engine, and when I dug around their code I realized they'd yoinked my engine a solid two years earlier. And the demo they released was probably not two year's…
Humorous postscript, btw: two months after Mojang forked my voxel engine, somebody left an anonymous "this is awful, you are a terrible programmer" comment on the engine repo. It's probably a total coincidence, but I like to imagine that the comment came from somebody at Mojang, and that my awful code is the reason why minecraft isn't a web app today :D
Web-based minecraft, when?
The full java version of the game was ported to webassembly/webgl a while ago. It's called eaglercraft: https://eaglercraft.com
This is fiendishly clever, and really quite elegant. I made some of my own notes on how this works here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/
But highly impractical and far beyond what CSS should be used for.
This is fiendishly clever, and really quite elegant. I made some of my own notes on how this works here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/