libredstone
===========

*a C library for interfacing with Minecraft file formats and protocols*

This is a (work-in-progress) C library for everything Minecraft. Right
now, the focus is on reading and writing region and NBT files, but
this will later expand to include the survival multiplayer protocol,
to ease writing clients and servers.

Also (eventually) included are a few command-line tools for
manipulating files and interfacing with SMP servers.

libredstone is highly POSIX reliant, so for Windows users, you'll want
to compile under cygwin until someone is brave enough to port the mmap
calls to win32 calls. It also uses a few C99 features so a fairly
modern compiler is also needed. Other than that, reliance on external
libraries has been kept to the bare minimum.

libredstone is released under the GNU LGPL, so see COPYING for
details. The command line tools are licensed under the GPL itself,
which can be found in tools/COPYING.

Why C?
------

C is a lowest-common-denominator language, meaning that it is
relatively easy to use from almost every other language. With
libredstone, you could write Minecraft tools in C, Python, C#, Ruby, ...

There are a lot of libraries out there written to deal with Minecraft
stuff, but a ton of them are written in Java or .NET languages, which
can be *really hard* to work with from other languages. The few C
libraries that are out there are nice, but usually limited in scope
(writing region files, in particular, seems to be a rare feature).