Minecraft is a best-selling electronic game in which players explore and build worlds made of virtual cube-shaped blocks. Players can play alone or share the worlds they create over the internet. Minecraft is categorized as a sandbox game. Much like a playground sandbox, the game encourages creative play by providing players with material that they can shape as they wish. The game does include challenges to overcome and monsters to fight, but these features are optional. Critics have praised Minecraft’s open-ended gameplay and simple, charming aesthetic.
Each block in Minecraft consists of stone, water, dirt, lava, or one of many other materials. The player can gather or “mine” blocks to obtain these materials for use in crafting or construction. For example, players can use stone to make tools. Many blocks in the game can be stacked to form pillars, walls, and more complex structures. A material called redstone is used to build virtual circuits. Players can use redstone to simulate electric circuits or even computers within the game.
Much of the game world is procedurally generated—that is, the blocks that make up such features as trees, lakes, and mountains are not placed ahead of time by game designers. Rather, they are randomly positioned according to a set of programming rules. For this reason, no two Minecraft games look alike. Procedural generation also enables a Minecraft world’s size to be practically limitless.
The Minecraft world is made up of various “biomes,” each with distinctive plants, animals, monsters, and resource blocks. Many Minecraft biomes are based on real biomes, such as the savanna and the taiga. Players can build structures called portals to travel to other “dimensions” of the game world, which feature more fantastic biomes.
Minecraft is playable in various modes, which determine whether certain rules of the game are in effect. For example, Minecraft’s survival mode limits the players’ starting resources and challenges them to survive attacks by monsters. In the game’s creative mode, players have unlimited access to most of the game’s resources, and no monsters attack.
Many Minecraft players collaborate on enormous creative projects within the game. Some players have used blocks to replicate detailed architecture and landscape features from the real world or from books, motion pictures, or other video games. Others have designed and created virtual cities with thousands of buildings.
Markus Persson, a Swedish programmer, created an early version of Minecraft for computers in 2009. With the money from early sales, Persson set up a company called Mojang, which released a full version of Minecraft in 2011. The game also became available on mobile phones, tablets, and video game consoles. In 2014, Persson sold Minecraft and Mojang to the Microsoft Corporation for $2.5 billion. In total, the game has sold over 200 million copies.
Mojang has published various related games that take place in the Minecraft world. In 2016, the company released Minecraft: Education Edition, a version designed for teachers and students to use in the classroom. An augmented reality game called Minecraft Earth was available for smartphones and tablets from 2019 to 2021. Minecraft Dungeons (2020) is an action-adventure game based on completing missions. In Minecraft Legends (2023), players command groups of allies to battle enemy armies.
See also Electronic game.
