For ACDC 2026, we’re claiming the Thieving Bastards badge!

When we started building our Minecraft House Builder solution, we made a conscious decision early on: why reinvent the wheel when brilliant people have already solved these problems? YOLO! We only got this much time!

@For good measure we included a video of building in action!

Our solution is essentially a carefully orchestrated symphony of third-party tools, each doing what it does best.

At the hardware level, we use the BBC micro:bit as our motion sensor controller. This tiny educational microcontroller, running MicroPython, connects to an ESP8266 WiFi module to communicate with the cloud. We did not build our own microcontroller. We did not write our own WiFi stack. We stood on the shoulders of BBC and Espressif.

For our Minecraft server, we run PaperMC, the high-performance fork of the Minecraft server software. On top of that, we layer several community plugins: Bluemap for browser-based 3D maps, Chunky for pre-generating world chunks, Chunky Border for world boundaries, and TerraformGenerator for custom terrain. Each plugin represents hundreds of hours of development we did not have to do ourselves.

The real magic happens when AI enters the picture. We use the MCP Protocol from Anthropic to let AI agents interact with our Minecraft world. This open protocol lets us bridge the gap between language models and game actions.

For image processing, we rely on OpenCV, the open-source computer vision library that has been refined by thousands of contributors over two decades. When our camera captures the physical building plate, OpenCV does the heavy lifting of detecting what was built.

Finally, Azure Functions ties everything together, providing serverless compute that scales automatically. Microsoft handles the infrastructure so we can focus on the fun parts.

The result? A working prototype built in hours rather than months. Every hour we saved by using existing tools was an hour we could spend on solving the actual problem: letting people build in the real world and see their creations appear in Minecraft.

That is not cheating. That is engineering.