SunBlock: The Solar-Powered Minecraft Server

In February 2024, I joined a research project at Concordia University investigating modded Minecraft on a solar-powered server. Why we started this is a question for (Dr.) Bart (Simon). But when he described what they were doing, I was in.

The project had started a few months before, sometime in the Fall 2023 term. They had already gotten a 20Ah battery connected to a solar controller, a 100W solar panel, and an off-brand mini PC. 20Ah is a tiny battery for a computer. Montreal in the winter is cloudy and dark. And to top all that, we were placing the solar panel indoors because we didn't have anywhere to place it outdoors in the university yet, through tinted windows.

And that's how we started on SunBlock: a fully solar-powered Minecraft server, bringing solar data into the game, exploring what kind of player behaviour emerges when we impose real-world material conditions on the player inside the game-world, on a solar-server.

When I joined the team, the project had slowed down a bit, with every other team member's busy schedule; it was the second month of the term, the semester had picked up the pace. But since I had just left my startup and finished all my master's coursework, I was looking to get my hands dirty. Soon after, everyone else dispersed and only Bart and I were left on the team. That picture up there is us setting up SunBlock on the institute's terrace on the afternoon of the April 2024 solar eclipse.

I like to think of SunBlock on three layers. All hardware -- the panel, battery, server, and controller, is on the Physical layer. The web server, data management, power management, game instance management, anything that runs on the OS, is on the Logical Layer. And everything inside Minecraft is the Game Layer.

I make this abstraction for us to be able to control the complexity of a system that we are designing and exploring from multiple lenses (sociology, game design, software dev, electrical & electronics eng., photonics, etc.) while having control from metal to minecraft. Thats a lot of variables. Especially when we are keeping it low spec, and our team is only a sociology professor (Bart) and a Computer Scientist (Me).

tbc.