In the most basic of terms, Minecraft is a game about placing blocks. The games graphic style also reflects its basic concepts: you’re a little cube person, living in a world made up of countless cubes representing everything from water, to grass, to trees, to lava, and everything in-between whose job it is to do whatever you want. Yet this is not going to get you very far, as there is no tutorial what-so-ever and without some sort of guidance your first night is going to be harrowing experience. You are either going to be eaten by a zombie, shot by a skeletal archer, chased by a giant spider, or blown into a million pieces by a nasty little creature called The Creeper (most likely, you’re going to die from all of them all of the time). Once you learn how to start constructing basic tools (such as pickaxes, shovels, and swords), you can then start to mine various materials that then let you construct other things. A quick example is making a wood pickaxe to mine rock faster, then constructing a stone pickaxe (using the stone you just mined) so you can mine coal, combining the coal with wood sticks (which you got from either chopping down a tree with an axe, or by punching it down with your fists) to make torches so you can light up an area, and prevent monsters from spawning near you (they only spawn in the dark, which is what makes the night so terrifying). It seems like a lot, but once you get the hang of things you’ll be spelunking like the rest of us looking for diamonds and other rare materials, all in the name of fun.
One thing that draws a lot of people to this game is how open it is. There are no missions and there are no goals; you’re just a person in this world, and you get to do whatever you want. You want to explore the world, and find amazing vistas and caves spawned by the procedural generation of the world? Go right ahead. Or say you would like to build a castle, or recreate a scale replica of the Enterprise? Well, you can do that too. Whatever you want to do, you can do it. The game is like a box of Lego that has been dumped into a sandbox, and your imagination has been kicked into high gear.
In my single player game, I have spent the last couple of months (on and off) adding more and more to my world. I started off building a couple of towns, following them up with a personal mansion, a pyramid (The Temple of the Sun), an inn with a working fire place and jukebox (The Forest Edge Inn), and a long and winding road that connects them all. I am also working on a town in a frosty tundra region, and I have plans for a couple more large monuments (The Temple of the Moon being the next big one). For me, the style of the game makes me think of the old school RPGs of NES and SNES, and those games are what are inspiring me to build this cohesive little world. I will get some pictures from the multiplayer server soon; I want to get one when all of us are on and I can get some shots of everyone just doing their thing.
Every so often I also get a wanderlust that is only cured with hours of mindless wandering around the world, watching it form around me, and exploring what it has to offer. So with that in mind, I will leave this post with a couple of random screens of what I found the other during my wanderings; wanderings that should have been me working on another pointless paper. And what the hell, here are also some screens of the buildings I have made.
I would like a screenshot of the scale replica of the enterprise. thanks in advance.
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