Gameplay

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game.[5] The game also features an optional achievement system.[6] Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives.[7] The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a 3D grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things.[8] The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems.[9][10] Comparatively, the game's physics system has been described as unrealistic, with nearly all blocks unaffected by gravity.[11]

An example of Minecraft's procedurally generated terrain, including a village and the default skin Steve.

Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or axes), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores,[12] and torches that produce light—or exchange items with a villager (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa.[13][14] The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items.[15] The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes.[16]

A free example of Minecraft gameplay footage, from the official Xbox México YouTube channel, under the CC BY 3.0 license (in Spanish)

 Some of Minecraft's monsters, displayed from left to right: a zombie, a spider, an enderman, a creeper, and a skeleton. All can spawn in the Overworld.

New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex,[17][18] but are able to create and upload their own skins.[19] Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures.[14][20] Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves.[21][22] Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water.[23] Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks).[24] There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively.[25]

Generation

The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player).[26][27][28] Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures,[29][30] worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not.[31]

Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns.[32] The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away.[31][33] Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky.[34]

Dimensions

Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava.[28][24

The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal.[42] The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island.[43] Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough,[44] which takes about nine minutes to scroll past,[45] is the game's only narrative text,[46] and the only text of significant length directed at the player.[47]: 10–12  At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely.[48]

Game modes

In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items.[28] Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night.[28] The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty.[49] If the hunger bar is empty, automatic healing stops and depletes. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful.[49]

Upon losing all health, items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be reset by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor.[50][51] Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, breeding animals, and cooking food.[52] Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects.[21]

The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying.[53] Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update,[54] and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended.[54][55]

Creative mode

In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of nearly all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly.[56] Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, while their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger, there are some rare cases when they can be killed.[57][58] The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance.[56]

Multiplayer

See also: Minecraft server

Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, LAN play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted).[59] Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have local area network support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup.[60] Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server.[59] Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players.[61][62] Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players.[63]

Minecraft Realms

In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own.[64][65] Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use IP addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time.[66] The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps.[67] Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps.[66] At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016,[68] with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017,[69] and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play.[70] Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018.[71]

Modification

Further information: Minecraft mod