Basics of Minecraft

Basics of Minecraft


I'll start you off with some back story to the game. Minecraft is a game
created by a guy named Notch. It is a giant sandbox style game. For those who
don't know what a sandbox game is, it is a type of game where the player is
free to play the game however they choose. There are no goals set by the game,
no missions, nothing. You decide how to procede through the game.

The game at the time of writing is in beta. You can buy it for about
20 Euros. I'm not going to waste time by converting that to monetary units
for other places; you can do that yourself. If you pre-bought the game
while it was in Alpha, you get the updates at no extra cost. If you bought
the game after the beta was released, you have to pay for each update. Yeah,
it's kind of dumb, but I guess that's the price you pay for being late in
knowing about the game. Note that I don't think that, but I imagine that's the
mindset of a lot of other people.

There is also a "classic" mode to play online on the Minecraft site. It is
free to play, but very much outdated. I recommend playing that to see if you
like it, before shelling out the money to buy the game. You can also join
multiplayer servers to fiddle around with other people. I don't have much
experience regarding this, but I'm pretty sure that there are two kinds of
servers: build and survival. Build is just a bunch of people building (and
destroying) stuff for the sake of building and destroying stuff. Survival
is a fight to survive against mobs (covered later along in the guide). I
won't go into any detail about multiplayer, having next to no knowledge about
it. This guide will focus on the beta version of the game.

Now, for the actual basics of gameplay. You're main objectives within the game
are to collect blocks to build shelters, tools, etc. You can collect, or
"mine" these blocks by hitting them by hand or with tools until they break. A
smaller version of the block will then appear. It can be collected by walking
up to it. I'll go in to further detail about this in the next section.

Of course, you need to know how to move around right? The controls for
Minecraft are your standard WASD controls with some action controls:

W - Move Forward
S - Move Backward
A - Move Left
D - Move Right
Left Mouse Button - used to 'mine' stuff, attack mobs with tools
Right Mouse Button - places blocks, opens chests/crafting bench/forge
I - opens your Inventory
Left Shift Key - sneak, which allows you to not fall off ledges, however if
you stride straight off far enough you'll fall anyways; also
allows you to sneak around mobs so they might not notice you
Numbers 1 to 9/ - select various items assigned at your disposal, details
Scroll Wheel about this will be covered later
Move your mouse - look around
F3 Key - Look at your frame rate (FPS) and your current co-ordinates in your
world; not as important
F Key - toggle fog level, which can help with game lag
ESC Key - auto-saves your world, allows access to the options menu

There are four difficulty levels in Minecraft: Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and
Hard. Peaceful does not spawn any mobs at night, aside from ones that won't
hurt you (pigs, cows, chickens, sheep). People generally don't like this
option because it removes the challenge, but use it if you want. I only use it
if I'm building something large and don't want to be interrupted, otherwise I
just leave it on Normal. The other three levels - Easy, Normal, and Hard - are
different in that they spawn a larger number of harmful mobs, and that these
mobs are harder to kill and they do more damage to you as the difficulty goes
up.

If you die in game (you lose all your hearts), you'll be sent back to where
you spawned when you started the game. You lose all your items in your
inventory (none in your chests though). The items are where you died, and you
have 5 minutes to go get them again. After that, they're gone. You can
receive damage in game from mobs (harmful ones), or from falling from heights,
where the damage received is proportional to how far you fell. If you fall
from 4 blocks up (the threshold of fall damage), you barely get any damage,
and that's with no armor. If you fall from, say 30 blocks up, you'll get a ton
of damage, armor or not. High enough and you die, regardless of armor.
Needless to say, put your most important and hard-to-replace items in chests,
where they'll be safe if you die.