The scale of the work required to do this honestly boggles the mind, and that's just putting it all together.įirst, someone had to figure out how to make this whole system of tens of thousands of bricks to work together.ħ. You know how we mentioned that using redstone blocks you can create binary switches and make computers? Setting up several thousand of these blocks, some people have even made a very basic 2D Minecraft that you can play - inside Minecraft. Using special "redstone" blocks that can have more than one state, people have built calculators and even computers, investing a huge amount of time and effort to work it all out and then put them together.Ħ. People have made reproductions of Hogwarts and real world locations like the Eiffel Tower, giant Mario's bestriding the blocky tiles, and even simple towers to protect themselves. The more you mine, the more materials and combinations become possible, and after that, you can start to build highly complex structures. Keep crafting and your mining becomes better. From there, you can turn the planks into a crafting table, where you can make more complex items - such as a wooden axe, with which you can get wood faster. The next step is to use the crafting grid to turn those blocks of wood into planks. That's the most basic thing you can do though. So you can hit a tree, and get some wood, for example. In survival mode, you start the game empty-handed and need to hit blocks to collect them. Funnily enough, while Minecraft has been described as digital Lego at least partly for this reason, there are now official Lego Minecraft sets you can buy.
This is a deliberate stylistic choice, although some players use mods to change the way Minecraft looks. Everything is made up of blocks - including your character, and even the water looks blocky. Minecraft has a unique visual style that has inspired quite a few imitators by now. You can play Minecraft by yourself and create things on your own, and if you want, you can connect to this huge community in multiplayer worlds, where you can work together to build things. Taking into account all platforms, Minecraft has sold over 54 million copies. Whether you think that Minecraft is a game or not, there's no denying that it is a success.
Minecraft has sold over 54 million copies You're free to build large projects, and just have fun.ģ. Then there's Creative mode, where you have access to most of the resources through a menu, and you can fly around the world. You can make armour and weapons, and build defences, breed animals and more. In Survival mode - which is the closest Minecraft gets to a game, you have a health bar which can be depleted by attacks from monsters, starvation, suffocation and more events. The game itself doesn't really have a goal - you can explore the world, and build what you want. While Minecraft has many game-like elements, it's really much more like digital Lego. Today, you can get Minecraft for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita.
Minecraft was originally released as a PC game, but over the years as its popularity grew, it was ported to more platforms. An alpha is what comes before the beta - where you're not just testing for bugs but still developing the key features, and creating art, sound and other assets in case of video games.
You might be familiar with the concept of a beta, where software is released but continues to be developed to remove bugs. This should be obvious, but Minecraft is a video game that was first released in an "alpha" state in 2009. The game itself was released nearly five years ago, so this isn't an in-depth explanation - just a quick guide to get non-gamers up to date with what the hype is about. News that Microsoft has acquired Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion should have gotten your attention, so let's take a look at what Minecraft is. With over 54 million copies sold, Minecraft represents the biggest niche audience since gaming itself.