Minecraft
Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Formally released on 18 November 2011 for personal computers following its initial public alpha release on 17 May 2009, it has been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles.
In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated, three-dimensional world with virtually
infinite terrain made up of voxels. Players can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures, earthworks, and machines. Depending on the game mode, players can fight hostile mobs, as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game’s large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities.
Originally created in 2009 by Markus “Notch” Persson using the Java programming language, Jens “Jeb” Bergensten was handed control over the game’s continuing development following its full release in 2011. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the cross-platform version based on the mobile Pocket Edition which replaced the existing console versions in 2017. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang’s original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences.
Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 350 million copies sold (as of 2025) and 140 million monthly active players (as of 2021). It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time; social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the
Annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing the game. It also has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as they grew up playing the game online at a young age. The game’s speedrunning scene has attracted a significant following. Minecraft has been used in educational environments to teach chemistry, computer-aided design, and computer science. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A live action film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025, and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time.
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. The game also features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. 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. 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. Comparatively, the game’s physics system has been described as unrealistic, with nearly all blocks unaffected by gravity.
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, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with a villager (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes.
New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including
Animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. 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.
Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. 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). 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.
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.
The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their
zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand.
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. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. 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.
Which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game’s only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player. At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely.
Game modes
Survival mode
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 in order to survive at night. 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. If the hunger bar is empty, automatic healing stops and depletes. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful.
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. 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, animal breeding, 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.
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. Adventure mode was added to the game in a
post-launch update,modifying the game’s world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended.
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. 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. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance.
Modification
The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add
a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media.While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds.
Players can also create their own “maps” (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and “command blocks” in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation.
Cultural impact
In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called the game the “most important game of the decade” in its 2010s “decade in review”. In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development.
Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via
Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs.Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube’s gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube’s biggest game globally.
Minecon and related events
Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes;
exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual “Minecon Earth” livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to “Minecraft Live”, included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, “Minecraft Live” became a biannual event as part of Minecraft‘s changing update schedule.[citation needed]
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