How to Play Minecraft

Minecraft is a video game with a virtual open world where players can dig, mine, build, craft, and put magic on things. The game is usually called a "sandbox game" because players can make their own worlds and experiences, and there are really no limits to what they can do. Minecraft is different from most video games because you can control the game. It even has options that let players act as moderators and add their own coding/modding directly into the game! This article features a complete guide on how to play Minecraft.

What is Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios. In this game, players explore a blocky 3D world, craft tools, and items, and build structures. The game features different game modes including Survival, Hardcore, Creative, Adventure, Spectator, and Multiplayer. Depending on the game mode you choose, you have to fight mobs or cooperate with or fight against other players. 

How to play Minecraft

Getting started

It's very easy to start playing Minecraft. First, you have to buy the game and put it on your computer. Installing the game is done when you run the launcher you downloaded from the Minecraft homepage. You can also play the game in your browser. Now it's time to sign in, get around the main menu, and choose the type of game you want to play. See our beginner's guide below.

Logging in and exploring the main menu

The launcher takes you to the News screen, which shows links and game updates. In the lower right corner, enter your username and password and click Log In to go to the main menu.

This list shows what you can do when you click on the main menu buttons:

SinglePlayer: Begin or keep playing a simple game. The rest of this article talks about the different ways to start a game in SinglePlayer mode.

Multiplayer: Play online with other people.

Language: Change the language that the text in Minecraft is written in. Use the small button to the left of the "Options" button that looks like a speech bubble with a globe inside it.

Options: Change game settings like sound, graphics, how the mouse works, how hard the game is, and other general settings. 

Quit Game: Close the window to end the game, unless you're playing in "In-Browser" mode.

Start your first game in SinglePlayer mode

Follow these steps to start your first single-player game:

Click the SinglePlayer button to see a list of all the worlds.

If you have never played Minecraft before, this list should be empty.

To start a new game, click the button that says "Create New World."

The page for making a new world comes up.

Put any name you want in the World Name text box, and then click the Create New World button at the bottom of the screen.

To turn cheats on or off, click the More World Options button, then click the Allow Cheats button.

When you turn on game cheats, the level of difficulty goes up or down as you play, and you can switch between Creative mode and Adventure mode. When you're just starting out, cheats give you more power over the world.

When you're done making your world, the game starts by making a new world and putting your character (called a "avatar") in it.

Minecraft Game Modes

There are different ways to play Minecraft that let you see the open world in a different way. There are the following types of Minecraft game modes:

Survival: After being thrown into a new world at random, players have to try to stay alive by gathering materials, building shelters, getting more experience, and fighting off mobs that want to hurt them.

Creative:  is a game mode in which players have instant access to almost all blocks and items, can't get hurt or killed, and can fly. The goal of this game mode is to make your own worlds.

Adventure: To finish an adventure, players use objects (like levers and buttons) and mobs.

Spectator: Can't be seen by anyone and can't interact with blocks, entities, or your inventory. Most of the time, this mode is used to look at the worlds that other players have made.

Hardcore: It is like survival mode, but it always has the "hard" level of difficulty and players can't come back to life. If you die, the map is deleted (or you permanently become a spectator).

In Minecraft, if you choose SinglePlayer and Survival mode, your first day can be both very exciting and very stressful. You are thrown right into a world with few resources, and you have to get ready to make sure you can make it through the first night when hostile mobs are more likely to attack you.

Most of the time, your first day in Minecraft is spent gathering resources, punching wood, killing animals, building or finding a place to live, gathering food, etc.

GamePlay

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox game with no required goals. This gives players a lot of freedom to choose how they want to play.

But there is a system for getting achievements, which is called "advancements" in the Java Edition and "trophies" in the PlayStation ports. By default, the game is played from the first-person view, but players can choose to play from the third-person view.   The game world is made up of rough 3D objects that are mostly cubes and liquids. These objects are often called "blocks," and they represent things like dirt, stone, ore, tree trunks, water, and lava. The main part of the game is picking up and putting these things down. The blocks are set up in a 3D grid, and players can move around the world as they please. Players can "mine" blocks and then put them in other places to make things. Many reviewers have said that the game's physics system doesn't make sense.   Redstone is a material in the game that can be used to make simple machines, electrical circuits, and logic gates. This makes it possible to build a wide range of complex systems. 

The game world is almost endless and changes as players explore it using a map seed that comes from the system clock at the time the world is made (or manually specified by the player).

There are limits to how far you can move up or down, but Minecraft lets you make a world that is as big as you want. Players can't go farther than 30,000,000 blocks from the center, though, because there are technical problems when they get there. The game does this by breaking the world data into smaller pieces called "chunks" that are only created or loaded when players are nearby. The world is divided into biomes that include deserts, jungles, and snowfields. The terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves, and different lava/water bodies.  The game's time is based on a cycle of day and night, and one full cycle takes 20 minutes of real-time.

When starting a new world, players must pick one of five game modes and one of four levels of difficulty, which range from easy to hard. When the game's difficulty goes up, mobs do more damage to the player and there are other effects that depend on how hard the game is. For instance, on the peaceful difficulty, hostile mobs don't spawn, and on the hard difficulty, players can die of hunger if their hunger bar runs out. Once you choose a mode, you can change the difficulty, but you can't change the mode without cheats.

The default character skin for new players is either Steve or Alex, but in 2010, players were given the option to make their own skins.

Mobs are non-player characters like animals, villagers, and creatures that want to hurt the player. You can hunt passive mobs like cows, pigs, and chickens for food and materials for making things. They spawn during the day, while zombies, skeletons, and other hostile mobs spawn at night or in dark places like caves. Some hostile mobs, like zombies, skeletons, and drowned (zombies that live in water), will burn in the sun if they don't have anything on their heads. Other unique Minecraft creatures are the creeper, which sneaks up on the player and blows up, and the Enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks. There are also different versions of mobs that appear in different environments. For example, zombie husks appear in deserts. 

The Nether and the End are two other worlds in Minecraft besides the main world, the Overworld.

The Nether is a hell-like dimension that can be reached through player-made portals. It has many unique resources and can be used to travel long distances in the overworld, since moving one block in the Nether is the same as moving eight blocks in the overworld.

The player can build a boss mob called the Wither out of things they find in the Nether. This is an optional thing to do.

The End is a barren place made up of many islands that float above a dark, never-ending void. On the main island lives a boss dragon called the Ender Dragon. Killing the dragon gives you access to an exit portal, which, when you go through it, plays the end credits and a poem by Irish author Julian Gough. The players are then taken back to where they started the game, and they can play for as long as they want. 

RELATED: How to teleport in Minecraft.

Play the game

Gather resources

Most Minecraft is about gathering and using things from the real world. When you first start playing Minecraft, you'll need to get the following:

Dirt: It is a block that is used a lot in the game. Dirt isn't very useful later in the game, but it can be used early on to make a good temporary shelter. The dirt is very useful because you can use it to make a dirt stair if you fall into a deep hole and can't get out on your own.

Wood blocks: If you hit a tree, you'll get a wood block. Wood is used to make everything from handles for weapons and tools to torches and other crafting tools.

Gravel and sand: Both of these are like dirt and can be used to make floors or walls. Gravel and sand both fall when there are no blocks on top of them.

Wool: Sheep can be killed to get wool. When making a bed, you need three pieces of the same color of wool and any kind of wooden planks. A bed is an important piece of equipment to have early on in Minecraft if you don't want to get frustrated.

Create a temporary house

Create a temporary house This will give you a place to hide when the night cycle of the world starts. The easiest way to build a house, as suggested by Mojang, is to find a hill, mine out a cave in it, and put doors on it so that mobs can't get in. To make doors, set up two columns of wooden planks on the left side of your crafting table.

You should build your house out of dirt because wood is better for making tools. Remember to leave at least one hole the size of a block somewhere in the house so you can tell when it's daytime and get out of the house early to get more resources.

Build a crafting table

You can make just about anything in Minecraft with a crafting table. A crafting table can be made in your inventory.

Make a bed

Beds do two things: they let you sleep through the dangerous night cycle, and they reset your spawn point to the last bed you slept in. If you die, you won't start over at the beginning of the world. Instead, you'll start over next to your bed.

It's very important to make a bed as soon as possible, especially if you built your shelter far from where you started the game.

Sleep in your bed when the night falls

As said above, this will let you skip the night cycle, which is when the monsters (called "mobs" in Minecraft) come out. If you didn't have time to make a bed before nightfall, just stay in your shelter until morning.

Craft tools

Tools are the most important part of a successful Minecraft game because they let you get and make better weapons, tools, and armor later on. You'll need the following tools to get started:

Stone: It can be mined with a pickaxe. Start by making a wood pickaxe. Then, use the wood pickaxe to mine three blocks of stone to make a stone pickaxe.

Sword: Used to protect yourself from mobs. Any sword, even one made of wood, is much better than using your hands.

Axe: This tool is used to cut wood quickly. Even though you don't need an axe to chop wood, having one will make the job go much faster.

Shovels: They are used to quickly collect dirt, gravel, sand, and other materials. You don't need a shovel to get these things, but if you have one, it will go faster.

Know about the mobs

Know about the mobs Even though you might want to run away from every animal and monster you see, most mobs won't attack you unless you attack them first:

Peaceful: These mobs will never attack you, but if you attack them, they will run away. Examples include most livestock (pigs, cows, sheep, etc.).

Neutral: This means that these monsters won't attack you unless you attack them first. Endermen and Spiders are two examples (day only).

Hostile: These mobs always attack when they see you. Zombies, Skeletons, and Spiders are some examples (night only).

How to Survive in Minecraft

Find coal

Coal is an important source of fuel for the furnace you'll build later, and it's also a key part of torches.

Get some torches

With one stick and one piece of coal, you can make a stack of torches (or charcoal). Once a torch is set up, it can't be broken or put out. It can only be knocked out of place, at which point it can be picked back up and moved to a different spot.

Set up a lot of torches around your home. In addition to making the area brighter, torches increase the level of ambient light. This makes it harder for hostile mobs (like Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons, etc.) to spawn near your house at night, which gives you a sense of security.

To completely stop mobs from spawning near your house, you'll need to set up a lot of torches. Putting a solid ring of torches around your house is a safe bet.

Build a furnace

Build a furnace Furnaces can be used to cook food and turn iron ore into iron bars, among other things. Since you need food to stay alive and iron is one of the most common resources you'll find in Minecraft, a furnace will be very useful.
You can use your furnace by putting a resource that can be used in the furnace (like food or ore) in the top section and fuel (like coal, wood, lava, etc.) in the bottom section.

Explore the world and gather resources

Gather as much cobblestone, coal, iron, and wood as you can if you want to stay alive in Minecraft for a long time.
If you find a place with a lot of resources, like a cave, mark the way to it with torches or a trail of blocks that you can throw away.
You can make chests to store your resources so you don't have to carry them with you the next time you go exploring.

Build a new house

Even though your first temporary home will probably be rough and made of materials that don't go together, you can build a strong house once you have enough materials.
Dirt and wood are easier to blow up than things like stone (especially granite) and iron. This is helpful if you want to keep Creeper damage to a minimum.

If you have to, move things from your temporary house to your new house. When your house is close, this is easiest to do. If you'd rather use your old house as storage and build up your new one on your own, that's safer than moving.

Only move things in your house during the day. Do not break a chest while items are still in it. Move the items out of the chest and into your inventory, then break the chest to pick them up.

Find food

Your character can eat food to heal and fill up the "Hunger" meter, which goes down over time. Putting food in an oven that has fuel in it is one way to cook it. You can eat food by putting it in your equipment bar, selecting it, and pressing the "Mine" button (or tapping and holding the screen in Minecraft PE).

Avoid fighting mods if possible

Minecraft is not a game about fighting. You can make things to protect yourself, but if you go out and try to kill mobs, you are more likely to die than to live through the night. Even though there will always be exceptions to this rule (like if you need to kill a spider to get some string), it's always better to avoid conflict in Minecraft than to engage in it.

You should use a sword or an axe to fight mobs. Using your bare hands is not as effective as a sword or an axe.

Creepers, the green monsters that blow up, should be left alone. If one starts to chase you, hit it once and run away until it blows up.

If you don't look at or hit the tall black figures called Endermen, they won't attack you. If they are attacked, Endermen are very hard to kill with any weapon.

If you have a bow and some arrows, you can usually attack enemies while moving backward. Remember that some monsters, like Skeletons, also have bows and arrows.