Minecraft is a sandbox video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang.
The game primarily consists of four game modes: survival, creative, adventure, and spectator. It also has a changeable difficulty system of four levels; the easiest difficulty (peaceful) prevents hostile creatures from spawning.[33]
Survival mode
The
Minecraft crafting screen, showing the crafting pattern of two stone axes
In this mode, players have to gather natural resources (such as wood and stone) found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items.[21] Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring the player to build a shelter at night.[21] 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, except in "Peaceful" difficulty, in which the hunger bar does not drain. If the hunger bar is depleted, automatic healing will stop and eventually health will deplete. Health replenishes when players have a nearly full hunger bar, and also regenerates regardless of fullness if players play on the "Peaceful" difficulty.
There are a wide variety of items that players can craft in Minecraft.[34] Players can craft armour, 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 resources to craft tools, such as axes, shovels, or pickaxes, used to chop down trees, dig soil, and mine ores, respectively; tools made of iron perform their tasks more quickly than tools made of stone or wood and can be used more heavily before they break. Players may also trade goods with villager mobs through a bartering system involving trading emeralds for different goods.[35] Villagers often trade with emeralds, wheat or other materials.[24][35]
The game has an inventory system, and players can carry a limited number of items. Upon dying, items in the players' inventories are dropped, and players re-spawn at the current spawn point, which is set by default where players begin the game, but can be reset if players sleep in a bed.[36] 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, armour and weapons.[33] Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects.[33]
Hardcore mode
Players may also play in hardcore mode, this being a variant of survival mode that differs primarily in the game being locked to the hardest gameplay setting as well as featuring permanent death; upon players' death, their world is deleted.[37] When a player dies on a server set to hardcore mode, the player is banned from that server.
Creative mode
An example of a creation constructed in
Minecraft
In creative mode, players have access to all of the resources and items in the game through the inventory menu, and can place or remove them instantly.[38] Players, who are able to fly freely around the game world, do not take environmental or mob damage, and are not affected by hunger.[39][40] The game mode helps players focus on building and creating large projects.
