Minecraft Gameplay

*Minecraft* is a three-dimensional sandbox 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. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, and players have the option to play in third-person. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes and fluids—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water and lava. The core gameplay revolves around breaking and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a 3D grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can "mine" blocks and then place them elsewhere, which allows for constructions to be built.

The game world is virtually infinite, and procedurally generated, using a map seed, as players explore it. The map seed is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation unless manually specified by the player. Although there are limits on vertical movement, *Minecraft* allows for an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane, only running into technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached. The game achieves this by splitting the game world data into smaller sections called "chunks", which are only created or loaded when players are nearby. The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields; the terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves and various water bodies. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle; one full cycle lasts 20 real-time minutes.

[1]A few of the hostile monsters in *Minecraft*, displayed from left to right: zombie, spider, enderman, creeper and skeleton

Throughout the course of the game, players encounter various non-player characters known as mobs, consisting of animals, villagers and hostile creatures. Passive mobs—such as cows, pigs, and chickens—can be hunted for food and crafting materials. They spawn in the daytime, while hostile mobs—such as large spiders, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places, such as caves.Some creatures unique to *Minecraft* have been noted by reviewers: 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's physics system has often been described by commentators as unrealistic. All solid blocks except sand and gravel are not affected by gravity. Liquids continuously flow for a limited horizontal distance from source blocks, which can be removed by placing a solid block in its place, or by scooping it into a bucket. Complex systems can be built using primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates built with an in-game material known as redstone.

*Minecraft* has two alternate dimensions besides the main world—the Nether and the End. The Nether is a hell-like dimension accessed via player-built portals; it contains many unique resources and can be used to travel great distances in the overworld. The End is a barren land consisting of many islands. A bossdragon called the Ender Dragon dwells on the main island. Killing the dragon cues the game's ending credits, written by Irish novelist Julian Gough. Players are then allowed to teleport back to their original spawn point in the overworld and continue the game indefinitely.

The game consists of four game modes: survival, creative, adventure, and spectator. It also has a changeable difficulty system of five levels. For example, the "peaceful" difficulty prevents hostile creatures from spawning, and when playing on the "hard" difficulty players can starve to death if their hunger bar is depleted.

### Survival mode

[2]The *Minecraft* crafting screen, showing the crafting pattern of a stone axe

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. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter at night. The mode also has 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. 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 or continuously on "Peaceful" difficulty.

There are a wide variety of items that players can craft in *Minecraft*. 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 acquire resources to craft tools, such as axes, shovels, or pickaxes, used to chop down trees, dig soil, and mine ores, respectively; e.g. 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 can construct furnaces which can smelt food, process ores and materials, among others. Players may also trade goods with villager NPCs through a bartering system involving trading emeralds for different goods, and vice versa.

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 their spawn point, which is set by default where players begin the game, and can be reset if players sleep in a bed. 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. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. Hardcore mode is a survival mode variant that is locked to the hardest setting, and has permanent death, where the world is deleted if the player dies. When a player dies on a server set to hardcore mode, the player is put into spectator mode.

### Other modes

[3]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. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters do not take any damage and are not affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating large projects.

Adventure mode was added to *Minecraft* in version 1.3; it was designed specifically so that players could experience user-crafted custom maps and adventures. Gameplay is similar to survival mode but introduces various player restrictions, which can be applied to the game world by the creator of the map. This forces players can obtain the required items and experience adventures in the way that the mapmaker intended. Another addition designed for custom maps is the command block; this block allows mapmakers to expand interactions with players through scripted server commands.

Spectator mode allows players to fly around through blocks and watch gameplay without directly interacting. In this mode, instead of having an inventory the player has the ability to teleport to players in the world. It is also possible to view from the point of view of another player or creature.

### Multiplayer

Multiplayer in *Minecraft* is available through player-hosted and business-hosted servers and enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. Players can run their own servers or use a hosting provider. Single-player worlds have local area network support, allowing players to join worlds on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. *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 to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. Player versus player (PvP) can also be enabled to allow fighting between players. Many servers today have custom plugins that allow the player and the server actions that are not normally possible. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without the hassle of setting up their own. Unlike standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and servers do not use IP addresses. Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their realm, with up to ten players online at any one time, and the servers do not support user-made plugins. Players can also play custom *Minecraft* maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, it was announced that Realms would enable *Minecraft* to support cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android versions starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and eventually support for virtual reality devices. On July 31, 2017, Microsoft released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play.