This is the fifth lesson in a series introducing 10-year-olds to programming through Minecraft. Learn more here.

Audio: You've probably already heard of MP3 files, but Minecraft uses a different kind of music/sound file called OGG. Although we won't be trying to create our own music, if we do want to change any of the background music or sound effects, we can convert from MP3 to OGG using a program called VLC.

Archive: An archive file contains other files and possibly directories. Any resource mods that we make for Minecraft need to be packaged into a specific type of archive file (ZIP) and then copied to %appdata%\Roaming\.minecraft\resourcepacks. We'll use a program called 7-Zip to create ZIP files.

There's another type of archive file called JAR that stores application code; we'll talk about those a bit more in the development section.

Files Wrap-up

So far we've talked about four different types of files, what extensions they have (for Minecraft), and an application we can use to either create or edit them.

  1. Text (.txt) - Notepad2
  2. Image (.png) - Paint.Net
  3. Audio (.ogg) - VLC
  4. Archive (.zip) - 7-Zip

Time to start coding! :)