What Is Minecraft?

Minecraft is a sandbox indie game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. It was publicly released for the PC on May 17, 2009, as a developmental alpha version and, after gradual updates, was published as a full release version on November 18, 2011. A version for Android was released a month earlier on October 7, and an iOS version was released on November 17, 2011. On May 9, 2012, the game was released on Xbox 360 as an Xbox Live Arcade game, co-developed by 4J Studios. All versions of Minecraft receive periodic updates.
The creative and building aspects of Minecraft allow players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, gathering resources, crafting, and combat. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: survival, which requires players to acquire resources and maintain their health and hunger; and creative, where players have an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no health or hunger. A third gameplay mode named hardcore is the same as survival, differing only in difficulty; it is set to hardest setting and respawning is disabled, forcing players to delete their worlds upon death.
Minecraft received five awards from the 2011 Game Developers Conference: it was awarded the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award, and the Best Debut Game Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards; and the Audience Award, as well as the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, from the Independent Games Festival in 2011. In 2012, Minecraft was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the category Best Downloadable Game. As of October 23, 2013, the game has sold over 12.5 million copies on PC, and over 33 million copies across all platforms.

Gameplay

Minecraft is an open world game that has no specific goals for the player to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. However, there is an achievement system. The gameplay by default is first person, but players have the option to play in third person mode. The core gameplay revolves around breaking and placing blocks. The game world is essentially composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes—that are arranged in a fixed grid pattern and represent different materials, such as dirt, stone, various ores, water, and tree trunks. While players can move freely across the world, objects and items can only be placed at fixed locations relative to the grid. Players can gather these material blocks and place them elsewhere, thus allowing for various constructions.At the start of the game, the player is placed on the surface of a procedurally generated and virtually infinite game world. Players can walk across the terrain consisting of plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various water bodies. The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting 20 real time minutes. Throughout the course of the game, players encounter various non-player characters known as mobs, including animals, villagers and hostile creatures. During the daytime, non-hostile animals, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn. They may be hunted for food and crafting materials. During nighttime and in dark areas, hostile mobs, such as large spiders, skeletons, and zombies, spawn. Some Minecraft-unique creatures have been noted by reviewers, such as the Creeper, an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player, and the Enderman, a creature with the ability to teleport and pick up blocks.

The game primarily consists of two game modes: survival and creative. It also has a changeable difficulty system of four levels; the easiest difficulty (peaceful) removes any hostile creatures that spawn.

Survival mode

In this mode, players have to gather natural resources (such as wood, stone, etc.) found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn at darker places on the map, necessitating that the player builds a shelter at night. The mode also features a health bar which is depleted by attacks from monsters, 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. Health replenishes when players have a nearly full hunger bar, and also regenerates regardless of fullness if players play on the easiest difficulty.There are a wide variety of items that players can craft in Minecraft. Players can craft armor, which can help mitigate damage from attacks, while weapons such as swords can be crafted to kill enemies and other animals more easily. Players may acquire different resources to craft tools, such as weapons, armor, food, and various other items. By acquiring better resources, players can craft more effective items. For example, tools such as axes, shovels, or pickaxes, can be used to chop down trees, dig soil, and mine ores, respectively; and tools made out of better resources (such as iron in place of stone) perform their tasks more quickly and can be used more heavily before breaking. Players may also trade goods with villager mobs through a bartering system. Emeralds are often the currency of the villagers, although some trade with wheat or other materials.
The game has an inventory system and players are limited to the number of items they can carry. Upon dying, items in the players' inventories are dropped, and players respawn at the current spawn point, which is set by default where players begin the game, but can be reset if players sleep in beds in-game. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn. Players may acquire experience points by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, breeding animals, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects.
Players may also play in hardcore mode, a variant of survival mode that differs primarily in the game being locked to the hardest gameplay setting as well as featuring permadeath; upon players' death, their world is deleted.

Creative mode

In creative mode, players have access to most of the resources and items in the game through the inventory menu, and can place or remove them instantly. Players, able to fly freely around the game world, do not take environmental or mob damage, and are not affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating large projects.