Microsoft announces Minecraft modding add-in for Visual Studio

Microsoft announced that users will be able to “mod” their Minecraft using an easy-to-use tool in its Visual Studio programming software.

Aidan Brady, a 17-year-old high-school student, showed off the tool for modifying the game on stage at Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco. The Minecraft modding tool is an add-in for Visual Studio that lets you change the basic functions in the enormously popular Minecraft world-building game, which Microsoft bought last year with the $2.5 billion acquisition of developer Mojang. Minecraft has become popular for everything from teaching programming to just messing around in a virtual environment.

The Minecraft mod tool lets you create your own mods or use templates that have been created by other modders, said Briana Roberts, Microsoft Student Experiences lead, during the appearance on stage.

Brady, creator of the popular Mekanism mod in Minecraft, showed how things can now get much easier. With tweaks of a few lines of code he was able to create bigger explosions for TNT items in the game world. The Intellisense feature within the Visual Studio software includes the modding tools, but it is not a replacement for the existing open source Eclipse tool.

“You can build whatever you want,” Brady said. “It’s so cool.”