The Glade 4.0

Official Minecraft Site

Minecraft? What's that?

Minecraft is a "sandbox" game. That is, there is no story line and no official objective. The game play centers largely around resource collection, exploration, crafting, and construction. What you build and how you build it is entirely up to you. Think something like Dwarf Fortress, if Dwarf Fortress were first-person 3D, user-friendly, and highly accessible (no micro-management!).

Depending on which version you play and how you approach the game, Minecraft can resemble anything from playing with giant-size Legos to a survival/horror game. Want to build your own personal Moria or Barad-Dur? Have it. Or maybe you want to make massive cliff dwellings, a floating sky fortress/airship or a massive Lothlorien-style tree city. Really, it's up to you.

Minecraft is a voxel-based game. If you don't know what that means, basically the world is composed of thousands of little blocks like Legos. Each block represents a certain kind of material or resource -- dirt, stone, coal, iron, etc. For scale, each block in Minecraft is roughly 1 meter on each side.

Who makes the game?

Officially, a company called Mojang Specifications. But the game is programmed entirely by its owner, Markus Persson, a.k.a. "Notch". I suspect that Notch is some kind of robot or advanced AI. Minecraft is currently in alpha status. It usually gets updated on a weekly basis during what the community calls "secret" Friday updates.

Versions

This can get a little complicated, so to simply things, there are really only two versions currently in play: Creative and Alpha. Going back further in time, there were also the Survival, Indev, and Infdev versions, but those are old and will be explained in more detail in the Alpha section.

Creative Mode

Most of the focus over the last several months has been on Alpha, so Creative mode doesn't have all the features available in Alpha, but unlike Alpha, Creative mode is free to play. In Creative mode, there are no monsters, and you don't have to gather any resources. Instead, you have an infinite amount of every type of block available at your fingertips to construct whatever you'd like. You can play alone or join a server for multiplayer constructions.

My favorite insane Creative mode megaproject is this gigantic scale-model of the earth:



Then there's a full-scale model of the Reichstag:



The USS Enterprise:



A 16-bit adder:



And now for a bit of history...

Initially, there were two branches of Minecraft: Creative, as explained above, and Survival. Survival mode was purchase-only, and unlike Creative, it had crafting, actual resource gathering, monsters, health etc. (hence "survival"). Survival mode was about, well, surviving. Digging in, making a walled enclave/castle/etc., and fortifying your defenses.

Development of Survival ended when Notch began working on its successor, Indev (short for "in development"). Indev was basically just the next major version of Creative. Somewhere along the way, Notch decided that he wanted to experiment around with an infinite world terrain generator. At this point he forked Indev into a new version called InfDev. InfDev featured an infinite world that generated new regions on-the-fly as you walked around. Unfortunately, the development got to be rather hairy, and Notch went back to working on new features in InDev and put the infinite terrain version on hold.

Eventually, Notch got around to merging these two versions together, which brings us back around to Alpha. Alpha is essentially the successor to all of the survival-mode versions that came before it: Survival, Indev, and Infdev. All present and future development on survival-mode Minecraft happens here. So without further ado:

Alpha

Like Infdev, Alpha features an infinite world. Okay, so technically there is an upper limit on world size, but it's something like 8 times the surface area of the Earth, so let's not quibble over details. Alpha is still a free-form sandbox game, but unlike Creative, 1) it has monsters that want to kill you and 2) you must sow if you wish to reap (figuratively and literally). If you want to build an enormous Tower of Babel, that's entirely possible, but first you'll have to make tools and quarry the stone.

Alpha's terrain generator is amazing. The exact "flavor" of each world is determined at creation. Eventually there will be biomes, but for now, your world might consist of steep "Matterhorn" style mountains or gently rolling hills. It may have lots of oceans or few, snow or no snow, sylvan woodlands or sparse grassland. The landforms it generates are often jaw-dropping. It does from time to time generate impossible (in the real world) terrain, but this is part of its charm. As someone once said, the terrain generator sometimes takes a crap, but when it does, it craps awesome.

Alpha, like Indev, also has a cave system as part of the terrain generator. Watch your step as you explore -- you never know when you're going to stumble across a great chasm in the earth. YMMV, but personally, caves are just about the greatest thing ever. Caves are a great way to find mineral resources (and lava! ) and also a great way to get sucked in to Minecraft for hours on end. If the cave you find happens to open up into a major cave system (and they often do...) you can usually explore for miles in every direction without running out of cave. It is powerfully addictive.

This is also where much of the survival-horror aspects come into play. Minecraft monsters are generated anywhere that there is darkness. At night, they can be found roaming out in the open but not during the day. In the darkness of caves, they may be lurking anywhere. You can light the way as you go with torches to claim the caves back from the darkness, but first you'll have to clear the way. Of course, there wouldn't be any sense of tension if it were just a constant onslaught of monsters. Minecraft doesn't fail to deliver where that's concerned. No, instead you'll blithely clear through 15 minutes of dark, eerie caverns without encountering anything more than an underground river, only to have a sudden "oh god. Did...did that shadow just move?" moment.

And that's if you're lucky. Some monsters can be heard well before you see them, but the dreaded creeper (a.k.a. "hug cactus") only makes faint occasionally footsteps when you get very close. Creepers are the terrorists of Minecraft. They sneak up on you explode, taking a decent chunk out of both you and the nearby terrain. Never. See them. Coming:



One of the more charming aspects of Minecraft is that you really can build your own self-sufficient Moria. With a little bit of work, it's quite possible to establish not only underground agriculture, but even underground orchards.

Is there multiplayer survival mode in alpha?

Yes! This was recently added, in fact. However, it's still very much a work-in-progress. It's fair to say that it's highly glitchy at this point, and most of the single-player features are missing. It'll get there eventually. In the meanwhile, it would probably be wise to get some single-player survival experience under your belt before messing with survival multiplayer (a.k.a. SMP) in the first place, so don't let that hold you back.

The server is also multi-platform, but be aware that you'll need some serious hardware and bandwidth to run a full 24-player server right now. The server itself and the client-server communication are still very much unoptimized.

So what does Alpha cost?

For now, just 10 Euros ~$13 USD. The price will double when Minecraft is out of alpha, so if you want tons of cheap entertainment, strike now. I've easily poured 40 or more hours into this game since I purchased it about a month ago, and I'm far from the most addicted person out there. Minecraft currently has 388,615 registered users (!), of which 71,358 (!!!) have already purchased the Alpha version. Stop and do the math on that ... Notch has already grossed about $900k USD on this game in the ~1 year its been in development. As a single-man coding army. Even at Sweden's abhorrent income tax rate ... .

What do I need to play this/what platforms are supported?

All you need is Java and a video card that supports OpenGL. The official Java 6 JRE is strongly recommended, as it may not work correctly with older versions or with OSS alternatives. Otherwise, you should be able to play it on anything. Certainly Mac, Windows, and Linux are known to work.


I don't know...I'm still not convinced

A typical day in Minecraft:



SsssssSSSssSSSss....



Letters from camp:



Other resources

Really, the best resource I know is the SA (Something Awful) Minecraft thread:

Minecraft: Gentlemen...Behold!

Fair warning: this thread moves incredibly fast. As in, 100+ posts per day. You have been warned.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I just messed around with the free version. I must say, it's quite a bit of fun. I started destroying blocks, tunneling underground. It was so cool to dig my way deep into the Earth, building rooms, hallways, and discovering huge caverns underground. It's very neat. I didn't really get into any of the mining, enemies, or farming, but it's very neat. I may buy it.

*update*
I bought it. Damn, this is addicting. I've already determined a massive project I'm looking to undertake. There's an ENORMOUS gap between mountains, and I'd like to connect my underground fort, with a bridge between the mountains. I estimate it'll take roughly 10 billion blocks to pull off, but it sounds like a fun project.

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Mwahahahah. Eeeeexcellent.

Megaprojects are the best projects. I built a third-order Menger sponge in creative mode before finding out that someone had already done fourth-order. I can't imagine...160,000 blocks placed by hand...

On my most recent world, I'm toying with the idea of building a completely enclosed "biosphere". Getting underground grass for subterranian baboo plantations will be the most annoying part, but I've started the process. In theory, it should be possible to get underground livestock if I can get a large enough field of indoor grass.

Minecraft has been the best gaming bang for my buck since Portal (not counting OSS games like Crawl).

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm not sure how these are selling points.

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For a lot of people (myself included), DF is overly complicated and unapproachable. I want to like it, but I just can't get into it. DF, to me, has far too many moving parts, to the extent that the mechanics of the game get in the way of its more tantalizing elements: expanding, exploring, and making massive, awe-inspiring constructions.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I've been playing the hell out of Minecraft since you introduced it to me. My huge project turned out to be easier than I thought it'd be. I now have a bridge connecting two huge mountains, HIGH above the ground. My main fortress is built into the first mountain, but I'd like to expand it into the second one, now that they're connected. I even took the time to build a roof for the bridge, so I suppose it's more of a tunnel. I didn't want any of the creepers or whatever to sneak in.

I plan on pursuing a larger project now that I'm done with this one. Currently, I've dug pretty deep and far into the first mountain. Last night, I fell down a waterfall, discovering an enormous cave. I'd really like to discover more diamonds; I've only mined two of them thus far. I'd also like to discover a "treasure room," though I don't really know what I'm looking for. Have you encountered one yet Stathol?

Rather than dig more, I may just start building a castle of some kind tonight. I'm still not quite sure what I want to do for my second big project. Perhaps I'll start digging up from my deepest point of the dig site, and see where I pop out at. It's so easy to get disoriented down there when you dig. I'm probably a long way from the point of entrance.

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I've run into treasure rooms occasionally. So far I've only seen spider, skeleton, and zombie spawners, though. No creeper dungeons, thankfully. There's not really any particular way to find them short of cheating and using one of the visualizer programs. If you go caving/strip mining long enough, you're bound to run into one eventually. About the only clue you get that one might be nearby is if you hear a whole lot of the same monster sounds in one place. That can just happen randomly, though, when you wind up with 3 or 4 zombies in the same tunnel.

Edit: Of course, if you see cobblestone in the middle of a cave (and you didn't place it) then it must be a treasure room. Every now and then you'll find one open to the world on a cliffside due to the way the world gen erodes them, I guess.

As for diamonds, they only show up when you're getting close to bedrock. If you can stand the boredom, the easiest thing is just to dig a shaft straight down with a spiral staircase until you hit bedrock, and then start digging sideways. You'll wind up with huge quantities of redstone like that, and eventually some diamonds.

Just be careful -- it is occasionally possible for there to be "holes" in the bedrock that are large enough to fit through. Falling through the world is not a fun way to lose all your stuff.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Played around with the free mode tonight a bit!

I am at once disappointed and kinda impressed. Disappointed because once I sunk my teeth in I saw how much potential it has... which isn't really met. So much can be added! I suppose the Alpha has more features but there could be a bazillion more and the game would still have room for others.

Creative mode seems little different than fancy first person LEGOs to me, which is itself enough I suppose. :p Not much interactivity beyond flooding stuff with somewhat questionable yet nonetheless amusing water physics. I built this kinda neat ...bridge/stairway structure thing out off the shore. It was fun. A little frustrating in building outward... needing to build towers so I can extend my bridge out a bit, when it's so easy to build in every other direction. Maybe I'm missing something though. It does make for a creative space to come up with workarounds...

The game murders my computer to death, too, which is kind of weird. Not that it's a monster of a machine by any means, but I can raid in WoW and play SC2 yet Minecraft stutters a lot. Granted, Java is Java and I don't know what sort of time this fellow has spent on optimizing the code. Apparently the framerate limit is either a) unworking or b) set at 120+ fps. 30 would've been nicer!

Bit sad that I didn't register at the time of making that bridge thing. Registration seems to be unworking today. Its memory shall have to live on in screenshots!

Notch has said that he wants to add leaning at some point to deal with that issue. And, yes, creative mode is basically like man-sized legos. Alpha has a lot more gameplay elements, including crafting, boats, powered minecarts (roller coasters, woo!), TNT, and magic "circuits" (you can actually make primitive logic gates...). Everyone has different favorite passtimes, but mine is definitely caving (hence the title). Alpha definitely has a ton more features than creative. The water and lava physics are a bit different too, though still "questionable", as you put it

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.