An Adaptive Landscape: Modeling Evolution in Minecraft
Kenyon Nystrom, Matthew Rasmussen, Benjamin Santos, and Eric Wright
About the project
For our Comps project, we modded the #1 best-selling game of all time, Minecraft, adding in simple evolution for both trees and sheep. The goal was to see if Minecraft could be used as a teaching tool to help teach and reinforce evolution and it's complexities through stealth-learning. We used a specific Minecraft modding toolchain called Fabric that allowed us to decode, extend, and modify Minecraft's Java-based source code. We decided to focus on a few select evolutionary sources: mutation, natural selection, and gene flow. Evolution is such a complex topic and with Minecraft there are so many possibilites, that we hope this project will be a launch pad for many Comps projects to come.
Tree evolution
*trees are growing at 30x the normal speed for sake of demonstrationSheep pathfinding and grazing
About Us
Kenyon Nystrom
Computer Science Major, Art History Minor
Matthew Rasmussen
Computer Science Major, Digital Arts & Humanities Minor
Benjamin Santos
Computer Science Major, Spanish Minor
Eric Wright
Computer Science/Economics Double Major
![](img/super_sheep.png)