Introduction
What is it?
The Game
MC (Minecraft)is a 3D (three-dimensional) sandbox game with a significant focus on players’ freedom to do whatever they please. To the point that they can change nearly anything about the dynamically generated world they spawn into, including the ground, caves, plants, mobs(Mobile entity), blocks, and items, however they want. It was initially created by Notch, AKA Markus Persson, in 2009. From the game's creation, Notch almost exclusively developed it until Jens Bergensten, AKA(also known as) Jeb_, started helping him. But, since 2014, after Microsoft bought Mojang Studios and, by extension, MC, Jeb has become the head of development.
Survival Gameplay
In survival, the player can die seemingly endless ways while managing their materials and hunger. Like most games in this genre, it has an end, literally called the End, with a giant dragon circling in the middle of several ginormous obsidian pillars. The player can get there whenever they like if they have the necessary items to get into the end portal and find it. But there's no guarantee they'll live to see the end of the game without the proper gear.
But because MC is a Sandbox game, the player doesn't even have to think about fighting the dragon if they don't want to. They could just build whatever they could imagine, mine, craft, collect all the types of mobs in a zoo, or whatever else they could want to do.
Creative Gameplay
This game mode is very similar to survival, but it differs because the player doesn't lose health or hunger, has infinite access to everything, and can fly around. And because they have every block, item, mob (with spawn eggs), and so on, they can create whatever they can imagine as they can in survival, just at a grander scale and quicker. It also means they can defeat the dragon as soon as they want.
Game Versions
You can play MC on pretty much anything with a screen. But MC found that all those different versions made it unnecessarily complicated to update each one separately, so, to simplify this, they separated all the versions of the game into two (pretend) buckets: a Bedrock Edition bucket, which is console and mobile versions, and a Java Edition bucket which is the PC (personal computer) versions.
But when the game first came out in late 2011, each device had its own named version. But, in late 2017, in the "Better Together Update," they renamed all the versions to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, and for the PC versions that were changed to Minecraft: Java Edition.
Spin-offs
MC Education Edition
Initially, it was an exclusive tool for schools and classrooms to teach their students various topics. But it was recently released to the public.
Minecraft Dungeons
A dungeon crawler that's playable on several different consoles and Windows computers. The player has a slew of quests to complete (including the main story quests) using a variety of weapons, items, and classes to defeat enemies and the main antagonist.
MC Story Mode
A story-heavy adventure game based on MC that had around eight episodes, including the DLC (downloadable content), and a season pass. It was developed by a third-party company, Telltale Games and Mojang Studios. In November 2018, Netflix and Telltale released an interactive version on the streaming service. Sadly, it was removed from Netflix in December 2022 because of Telltale Games' closure in May 2019.
MC Earth
An AR (augmented reality) game that was exclusive to mobile devices about building and collecting materials by visiting real-life places. Released in July 2019, only in closed beta due to being discontinued in June 2021 because of the Covid pandemic. Anyone with Rubies (the game's in-game currency) was given Minecoins (Minecraft's in-game currency) as a replacement. Anyone who had bought anything in-game was given a copy of Bedrock Edition MC.
Terms
- Seed
- A string of numbers that determines what your world will look like. It determines where biomes will be, structures like villages, the end portal, and more.
- Biome
- An area in a world with unique characteristics.
- Peaceful mode
- A toggle in the settings that turns off hostile mobs and losing hunger bars so that the player doesn't have to worry about them at all.
- Keep Inventory
- A toggle in the settings that makes it so that when the player dies, they dont lose anything in their inventory.
- Harcore
- A mode of MC where if the player dies, they lose access to that world instead of respawning.
- Respawning
- After dying, the player gets recreated at their last saved bed or, if they haven't slept in a bed, where they spawned into the world.
- Vanilla MC
- The base version of the game without any modifications.
- Role-Playing Game
- A type of game where players take on the roles of imaginary characters in a fictional world.
- Dungeon Crawler
- A type of role-playing game where players navigate a labyrinth (the dungeon), battling different monsters, avoiding traps, solving puzzles, and looting (stealing) treasure as they explore.
- Sandbox Game
- A type of game that gives the player a high degree of freedom to explore and interact with the world as they please.
- Quests/Missions
- A task that the player or group of players can complete to earn a reward.
- Classes
- Different playable characters that each have a list of different skills.
- Antagonist
- The bad guys or guys that are villains of the game.
- Spin-off
- A separate game with concrete ties to the game it's based on and isn't treated as a successor to the game’s source material.
- Point-and-Click Adventure Game
- A game that’s mainly controlled by the player's points and clicks.
- DLC
- Is additional content players can download after the game's initial release.
- AR
- Is where the content is digitally overlayed on top of the real world.
- A Structure
- A building, city, shipwreck, or anything simiar that spawns into the world along with the grass, mountaians, rivers, and what not.
- 3D
- Is where the game has graphics computed in three-directional dimensions.
- Entities
- Another word for mobs.
- Dimensions
- Other worlds are characterized by their biomes, structures, and mobs.
- Spawning
- When a player or mob is created and placed in the world.
- The hotbar
- A selection bar at the bottom of the screen.
- The experience bar
- Shows the player their current level and how close they are to the next one.
- World origin
- The (0, 0, 0) of the world.
- Overworld
- Equivalent to Earth with grass, cows, mountains, villages, and things like that.
- Buffs
- Beneficial status effects temporarily modify things.
- Realms
- A personal multiplayer server for the player and their friends.
- Commands
- Advanced features activated by typing certain strings of text.
- Game tick
- 20 of these equals one second and happens every 0.05 second in game.
- Collision
- Stops entities from going inside of each other.
- Cool-down
- The time the player has to wait until they repeat the action.
- Spamming
- Using the same item or doing the same action several times in a row.
- Smelting
- A way to get refined goods from raw materials with a furnace or something similar.
- Light level
- The specific level of light that certain objects give off. Level 0 is complete darkness, while 15 is the opposite.
- Canonical
- Something that happened or appeared in the official story.
- Mojang
- The game studio behind MC.