OK, I know that someone built a cell phone in Minecraft not that long ago, but Mario Maker isn’t the most expansive toolset, and yet someone’s built a god damn math machine.
Dubbed The Cluttered-Chaos Calculator—705C-0000-01B3-FE78—Mario Maker creator Giant strung together a Rube Goldberg-style device that, on the surface, looks like complete madness. What’s happening behind-the-scenes, though, is a calculation. It’s now possible to do simple math in a Mario Maker stage.
There’s a video demonstrating how this works:
See those numbers below? You pick two—in this case, 6+6—and let the level do the rest of the work.
On reddit, where Giant goes under the name Helgefan, they explained the logic:
The Cluttered Chaos-Calculator is a digital circuit consisting of logic gates such as AND and OR not unlike an electronic calculator. However, instead of 2 different voltage levels, shelmet (1) or no shelmet (0) are used as binary states (bits). Simple adding machines have been created in the past with Super Mario Maker, but to my knowledge this is the first one with a decimal conversion and proper display of the result. For clarity, have a look at the big supplemental image!
Helgefan also created an image showing how the stage does the math:
Ridiculous? Ridiculous. Ridiculous.
There’s a very lengthy and technical explanation on reddit, which mostly went over my head. People have created similar machines in Mario Maker before, but as Helgefan points out, this one is capable of showing the result of the problem.
You keep surprising me, Mario Make fans. Keep it up.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.