"The problem with programmers is that, given the opportunity, they will start programming"

Developer: I want to apply to your company. Company: We can't hire you because you are too young. The developer:

He made a CPU in Terraria AND touched grass, that's some serious dedication

Not only did he make a pc inside terraria, but when he realized it wasn't possible, he made a mod for the game to make it possible, absolute mad lad

That kid has a bright future. Mad respect! And it's always a pleasure seeing Terraria get some attention.

"I got a multiplyier working so the next obvious step was to build a computer" "I just learned to walking so the obvious next step was to a marathon" "I petted a cat so the next obvious step was to tame a wild lion in africa"

It's like a law of the universe or something. "If you give people the ability to build basic logic gates, there will be someone building a computer" The Law that follows is, "Someone will try to port Doom to it". There is something beautiful about a project like this. It's raw, unadulterated and honest. I've recently seen a video about how an electromechanical Jukebox from the 1970s or 80s did its logic. And holy 💩, how did we get from something so direct and simple to not even being able to heat our car seats without paying subscriptions to someone somewhere?

I thought this kid was genius when seeing the difference between his POC and the properly implemented computer. But when he started to explain his mod and what it does, and the many languages he used to implement all the componenets, I had no more words to describe that dude.

my whole interest in electronics and computers is rooted in a previous obsession with witchcraft and aliens. So yeah, its magic.

Someone is going to use his mod to run Bad Apple on Terraria. Just a matter of time.

New Interview question, explain the difference between these 2 Terraria circuits (interviewer slides 2 pictures across table)

This is the "instagram effect" times 1000x, i feel so terrible at programming now haha

I started thinking it was just going to be an 8-bit CPU in terraria (already impressive). I wasn't expecting a fully complaint RISC-V CPU, rewritten game engine, and the ability to write programs for it in Rust.

The storytelling abilities of this damn kid too, geez, absolutely amazing

Me in circa 2007: I just made an adder using Digital Works Circuits for my Internal Systems course assignment, so the obvious next step is to just call it a day and work on my C++ assignment tomorrow... That guy: I just made adders and multipliers in a game that's not really designed to do much complex circuits, so the obvious next step is to make a complete implementation of the RISC-V ISA. I could SO relate with what you said in intro!

Oscillating crystals are tiny, pure glass discs that when attached to alternating current start to vibrate and force the frquency of the current closer towards its own natural resonance. Its not nessecary to build an electric clock but you can add it to one to make the clock much more accurate. since its super cheap, they are always added by default.

Ok maybe I should just work at McDonalds, I clearly can't program... This kid just made me feel like a neanderthal

There is actually a fast way to trouble shoot that issue. You can use gimp to do so. Create two layers make a copy of a known good section then past it over the entire map. Then you can use a filter "color erase" to find the difference in them. It will leave the different green wires showing. If you don't know what section is bad vs good. Just copy any one of them. If the one you copy is good you will only see a few or the one issue. If the section you copy is the problem section you will see a lot of locations as differences.

The guy using powerpoint as an IDE was already insane to me. This got to another level.

the gates he's using resemble transistors, which are like switches but instead of a lever to actuate it you have an electric signal.

I don't know man, i mean, Tom could do all this in like 30 minutes max, cuz he's a genius.

I absolutely love this kid. I can't wait for him to get to his first interview and show off his creations. They're going to be falling over themselves to hire him.

Ok I was impressed with CPU building and all that but when he hit the point where “the game engine engine couldn’t handle it so I rewrote it” I just started laughing.

So basically he proved we're living in a simulator and we've created computer same way he just made a computer in terreria... I'm going back to sleep now 🤣

fun fact: The guy played a little bit of Terraria(8372 hours) before he started creating a computer in Terraria

The clock can be thought of as a wiggly stick, that pushes the switch. If you push a wiggly stick, it bends and flexes - it takes a moment for your energy to reach the switch. If you run forward holding the wiggly stick, it jiggles around while you run - you are constantly putting energy into it but the output of energy is not constant. You push energy into a quartz crystal, that energy then comes out in certain intervals. It's essentially that simple. The clock isn't a wire that allows current to pass through, it takes energy in, 'stores' it, and releases energy at it's own frequency. Same thing happens when you put energy in by tapping it - the energy released is in the same form as if you added electric energy.

"There's some serious grass going on" is now my favourite phrase xD

Have you watched the 8-bit series by Ben Eater? It’s mind boggling to think about the complexity that is involved in the tools we have today.

i gona say it, because this is literaly the best example of how human well educated, well eat, with amoun of resources (love, inspiration, educated family) can do a amazin stuff just for fun.

I do appreciate it. We're talking about components that have been engineered for decades to reach the scale of atoms. Friggin' ATOMS. Or just so webpages load fractions of a second faster we have globally distributed networks so the physical distance that a packet of information has to travel is kept to a minimum. That people have been studying relentlessly to create more efficient algorithms to sort sets of data or to find a specific piece of data in a larger set and it's created a near art form, a discipline, and a now mandatory practice for future developers to get the best jobs... I appreciate it all. Newton said "if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Our generation casually practices magic because we rest upon the bodies of generations of giants. We are incredibly fortunate.

Beyond the pure technical benefit of having built something hard, he also made a clear presentation of what he had made in a way that the average person could understand

This player is smarter than that 17yr/o "software engineer" from a video you showed

What is even better than this is the guy who made 16 bit CPU with only 8 basic TTL-like chips and memory... Very slow, but real CPU - many in the 80s would have been so happy for that thing as it would have been cheap to assemble home small computer in times CPUs were so expensive... This also came out lately on hackaday. I like how this guy did not just and-or gate it all, but use this stateful block too. All of these are real cool deeds ;-)

10:00 Quartz is used in watches because it oscillates at a stable frequency of exactly 32,768 times each second when electricity is passed through it. You then measure the vibrations using a digital frequency counter and bobs your uncle you have a reliable clock. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator#:~:text=Quartz%20crystals%20are%20manufactured%20for,radios%2C%20computers%2C%20and%20cellphones.

We've had the Iron age. We've had the Stone Age. This is the Pissin' About Age. ~Karl Pilkington

I tried building a computer in Minecraft once, it helped a lot with my understanding of all low-level stuff.

"From Nand to Tetris" was a legendary class that got me understanding where he was going from the jump...you can make a computer from *anything* that go 0 1! This kid's brilliant and an insane attention to detail

when I dropped out of uni for computer science I bought a book from amazon entitled "how to build a computer", it was a very short book which basically outlined what the kid did in the video. I read some of it, realized it wasn't really that hard and actually just a matter of following instructions, and carried on playing piano.

When designing chips, debugging is usually done by having unit tests for each small module used in the bigger design. If some bug DO leak out on the actual silicone chip, well there is no way to change that unless you do some software patch.

18:30 "Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture"

as someone who does wiring and has made about 4 basic CPUs in terraria, it's very similar to real life and you do not need to exclusively use faulty gates. the only thing you really need to keep in mind is how wires interact on the same object criticisms: "a lot of circuits have to be redesigned in this new paradigm": no, they don't. "this is a compact circuit to add two one-bit numbers": that is a very large circuit. instead, use an or gate, an xor gate, and an and gate, place them next to each other in that order, put three off lamps on top of each one, horizontally connect wires going across, connect or and xor via one wire, xor and and via another, the or-xor wire is carry and the xor-and wire is sum. this is tileable with no gaps and is the most compact design i know of

I'm an X US Naval Nuclear Reactor operator who then majored in EE and CS. Guess i never felt inspired to build something like this in game because of the headaches of building them in real life. I find it quit impressive that people do this stuff. I am curious why he didn't use a map editor for terraria and chose to make it all inside terraria the way he did. i would have thought the map editor would have been faster. Well maybe not if you have to keep switching back and forth to test it.

This is the son of my mothers friend that I constantly was hearing about through my childhood :D

The last question in my Digital Logic Circuit course's final exam was to construct a 4 bit processor with basic arithmetic operations like add, subtract, multiply and divide. we were also supposed to have appropriate registers on it to store the results.

My side project when I was 16 was to build a Java app that roles dice for DnD. I'm still quite proud of randomly generating a Nd20 roles. Just saying.

that "yo i got kids" got me dieing

12:30 A clock signal is just a tank circuit that produces an oscillation within a tight frequency range. In this case, the origin of the word tank comes from a fish tank of water (filled to about halfway up the height of the glass walls) that is free to slosh around back and forth or oscillate like a pendulum. A natural oscillation circuit is a wire coil and a capacitor that is hooked up to an amplifier that keeps the water sloshing back and forth in a resonant situation. An amplifier tends to be one or more transistors. The circuit is fed back its own voltage level amplified and slightly out of phase with the oscillator tank circuit's current or voltage signal. In a capacitor, an electric field on some conductive plates are allowed to charge with positive on one plate and negative charges on the other plate. During the charging process, electron particles collect on one plate, while the opposite connection has electrons removed from it producing a positive polarity equal and opposite to the one opposite to it. A coil permits direct current flow easily but restricts higher current transitions by building a magnetic field around the coil as the current flow increases. The coil's magnetic field collapses if the current is taken away, and as the magnetic field collapses the coil's windings absorb back the established magnetic field creating a reverse current flow in the coil. A coil and capacitor can be placed into a parallel or a series configuration, but the tank circuit typically has a capacitor in parallel with a coil. The electrons within this circuit flow first one direction, then the other direction in an oscillation at a resonant frequency that is given by a physics equation. To know how a bipolar transistor works one must first know how a diode works. A diode permits current flow in only one direction. A silicon diode is created with, what else, silicon with roughly half of p or positive material that has an almost full outer electron orbital (physics model) that can be seen by the S, P, D, F, etc, orbital shells of an atom. The chemical properties of these atoms are displayed in the periodic table of the chemical elements. The other silicon half of the diode is doped or infused with atoms that have only a single electron in their outer orbital shell--to make N or negatively polarized silicon. When the P and N doped or infused silicon are joined together in a junction, it produces a PN junction diode. This is because a natural electric field is produced from one doped part to the opposite polarity portion. It was discovered by experimentation that if you reinforce the electric field, then no current can flow until the field grows in size to such an extent that the field gets stronger and stronger until the force is just too great and the circuit gets a breakdown situation where the extent of the field gets larger than the PN junction boundary itself and a sudden arc of current flows through the device backward in a largely destructive way unless measures are taken to limit the current flowing through there using a series resistor of high enough resistance, but if you opposed the PN junction established electric field, then the field collapse being attempted permits only partial field collapse due to the rate of how many electrons are coming into the PN junction's field. As the field collapse that is underway reduces the field size, the diode's in-line innate resistance to current flow shall cause the junction to heat up. In the first case, the PN junction diode is accumulating a greater field size, it is just like the charging of a capacitor. A bipolar junction transistor inserts a third signal as a control into the junction area. It is called the base material. The typical configuration of the doped or infused silicon is either PNP or NPN with the middle letter being the base junction that typically acts as the input terminal that controls the transistor's current flow. Transistors and resisters in various configurations act as amplifiers. Some amplifiers invert the input signal while others do not. An amplifier has an innate delay due to junction capacitance that must be either charged or discharged depending on the incoming signal for the circuit. If the bipolar junction or diode input capacitance is too high, it shall make the signal output lag its input signal more and thereby limit significantly the highest frequency range supportable by the amplifier and whatever oscillator

12:01 Humans do anything for cats. We love our masters!

I'm a huge Terraria fan, I'm in the beggining of my studies in javascript to code for Minecraft and I also want to learn C# in the future to create mods for Terraria. I don't know what kind of content is your channel about but I really loved your reacting (chat is hella funny too), and I'm staying. 💗

You must watch the video where Minecraft was made using Minecraft redstone

The kid is next level genius. I mean, yeah, building a full on computer in Terraria is incredible. But not necessarily unique since the same thing has been done in Minecraft. But then he sat down and learned how to modify Terraria. In 3 months and 600 hours, he's basically taught himself a high level language, assembly, and the inner workings of a CPU. That's about 12 credit hours at a university (with labs).

We only relied on Malaria to treat late stage Syphilis between 1917 to 1940, and it was just to prolong the life of the patient. However in 1940 we got introduced to Penicillin. And the use of Malaria to treat Syphilis got a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927. The world is strange.

I don't have impostor syndrme... I'm working on my own data structure right now.

Malaria causes a high fever which can kill the syphilis infection, you can survive malaria with treatment, but syphilis was a terminal disease. This was during the pre-antibiotics era. Now malaria is the more difficult to cure, as syphilis can be knocked out with a round of antibiotics.

If you want to understand, read Charles Petzold's book: Code. It's basically a childrens book, by which I mean that it is written in a way that anyone can comprehend, while not compromising the essentials. Read the book and you can, theoretically, build a computer with nothing but transistors, or similar.

"I'll give you a few seconds" Bruh, I paused it for like a minute to look and then Prime paused for a bit. We ALL have had a "few seconds" lol

"I have kids" yo, you don't even need to go that far. I have a beer and a bag of chips. I won't even put that down to think about what it would be like to even watch someone do that for 5 minutes, let alone plan, execute and debug an actual computer in terraria. no. I've sipped my beer twice just while typing this, no way

I sometimes see genius stuff and my brain goes "I want to be like him". In other cases i see genius things and I feel like an ant carrying bread crumbs to the nest for a reason I don't know while.

Computer clocks basically are magic Source : Resonant frequencies chapter in Chemistry

Get real now. You don’t even know how a computer works, Netflix dude.

"I figured a way to add two numbers together. Obviously the next step is built an entire CPU." 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Can't wait until you discover dwarf fortress computers

So much foreshadowing in this about the prime now lol

This obviously took a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do, and honestly very few people post-college really have that time to devote to something like this. Then add a wife and four kids However, even with the praise I think the difficulty and discipline required to do this was severely understated. Twitch chat saying that it's just NAND gates all the way down - it's not even close to that fucking simple. It clearly took a lot of research and knowledge to have to adapt the architecture to work in Terraria. Then he just casually mentions writing a mod which completely rewrites the whole damn wiring system. Not to even MENTION how he didnt go absolutely insane debugging this fucking thing. There were many places he could have just ended it there but he went the whole mile.

And this is exactly why it's entirely possible that we're in a simulation.

damn and i thought i was epic for building an 8 bit adder inside minecraft oh btw, can we get a reaction to a minecraft supercomputer next? ive seen some of em being able to compute graphs

this kid is absolutely cracked out of his mind

My mind was already blown by the first part, but after minute 21:30 it was unreal

The base of sequencial electronics is the Flip-Flop (the output is a function of input and internal state 0 or 1). A register is a bank of flipflops. The ALU is a bank of registers wich imputs are both data and code (the instractions). From electronics to assembler, then to C, etc. The path of old school engenieurs...

Building a computer is not particularly difficult if you learn logic gates and the Von Neumann architecture (and have a lot of determination to see it through). What IS hard is optimising it so that you actually get performance in a simulator, building custom tooling for it and setting up automated pipelines and testing for it. That's the shit that impressed me from this. Nice.

19:47 This part reminded me of my dad. My dad used to work as an electrician. You know the funniest part? He was colorblind.

I feel stupid! And I even had basic CPU design in college 😂 This little guy is simply a bloody genius! And I see him make it very very far! He’s not only got a genius mind but also sheer grit and determination.

MIT should just give him an honorary PhD.

The gate he was describing is a transmission gate, it is commonly used to a limited extent in large MUXs for example. The problem is that it kinda degrades your signal meaning with low-voltage CPUs you can‘t have many of them in series before needing a ‚proper‘ gate to restore the voltage levels. They are very commonly used to design larger cells though and are also in things like flip-flops. Also, I a, very tempted to get OpenROAD to work with Terraria and then be able to build what this kid did in like an hour. It would be very funny. Anyway, kid, if you read this, come to ETH Zürich (or a university near you) and get into electronic engineering (none of that computer science business, that is for the less intelligent). You will be able to build microcontrollers and other compute structures in the real world by poking a rock just the right way, its a great time!

I had no idea this was even possible in Terraria, stuff you'd dream of but never know how to do, while you have mr primeagen talking about butt chugging coffee!

The "state" is more of his "clock". Since he is doing things by hand, it is slow. He has to accumulate all of the settings first, then release the clock in the form of what he is calling "state". Going further since you mentioned it. The clock is just a rhythm. The crystal is used because it is consistent. At each cycle, the computer performs an operation based on the instructions supplied at that moment. In between those instances are the opportunity to set the next instructions. That's all it is. If you were adjusting the instructions as the clock is executing, everything would be chaotic and computers wouldn't be very useful because they wouldn't produce consistent and reliable results. The malaria to cure syphillus worked because syphillus is a parasite. Inducing a high fever over a long time kills the parasite. Malaria induces a massive fever and can be managed until to clear the infection... often.

Absolute galaxy brain move to mod the wiring system, god tier perseverance.

Thank you for the motivation at the end of the video!

For anybody wondering, it works because syphilis can't survive the temperatures induced by malarial fever. Also a lot of humans can't survive it.

This kid reminded me of how much science in computer science that I’ve forgotten over the years. I think smoke is coming out of my ears as the gears start churning again

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

I can't believe you reacted to this.

25:16 Who’s Zed? Bruce Willis: Zeds dead. Zeds dead.

Take a vibrating quartz crystal sandwiched between two metal plates. Quartz is piezoelectric meaning it turns mechanical oscillations into electrical oscillations which can be amplified. It also turns electrical oscillations into mechanical oscillations so some of the amplified signal gets fed back into the crystal to keep it vibrating. The vibration is basically a soundwave echoing inside the crystal so the frequency is the speed of sound through quartz times the distance it travels. High frequency crystals are just thin discs with the sound wave going from side to side while low frequency crystals are shaped into tiny tuning forks.

Dude was not about to rebuild his computer and decided to change the game lmao

That is so inspiring! I must dig out my Terraria and do something with it!

I took a computer organization class this summer so I'm glad I can understand most of the video

The combination lock is just a bunch of and gates where one of the inputs is the previous input's output, and the the other is the switch for that and gate, then he just uses not gates to select which one needs to be on/off

Started doing a course recently called Nand2Tetris. It effectively walks you through building basic logic gates, composing them into a CPU and memory, right up to writing software in assembler then a high level language (I think, haven't got that far yet). It's taught so well, would highly recommend if you enjoyed this video!

this was like going back to computer architecture class, but instead of pain, it's terraria 😂

The "yup" after "everything is stored as 1s and 0s" had some strong "ah finally something I understand" vibes

@7:35 looks like a d-latch with pwm clock signal. basically toggling the out put with the pwm signal, basically a sort of buffer.

His level of dedication is high. I remember being 16 and doing absurdly tedious things because I was "building something" and I was inspired. I wish I still had what I built or preserved it in some way. I also wish that at least one of the adults in my life gave a rats butt, regardless, I understand how this kid feels. Enjoy it while you're young.

This kids gonna be a millionaire by the time he's 35... and here I am at 27 just getting exposure to the entirety of CS.

1 year later : "Oh, and now I do it in VHDL and made my own ASIC"

16:45 if you build stuff like this, you can quickly trace back invalid values since you can see all the lines and states...

Gotta say, if it was just building the CPU I wouldn't be impressed, since it's relatively easy to do, once you know the logic behind it all. But this kid REWROTE the fucking game to be efficient enough for him to finish the project. Now *that* is crazy.

If you ever feel useless, remember that this video exists.

Reminder that this is the worst his Terraria computer will be. We will see a doom clone that copies the rom into a schematic that you can copy into the game.

Prime: brilliant, brilliant, marvelous! Kid: Zed Prime: What did you just say to me?