What’s So Great About Minecraft?

This is a game that not many gamers can say that they can get into, due to its non linear style of play. In fact this game strives to inspire creativity and wonder to what one can do within this sandbox of a world. There is always something new to discover whether it be a new mechanic, a new item or a new mob (creature) . Such as something that I didn’t know about with the new Slimeblocks, which are a recent addition to the game, in which one can use them with the redstone mechanics to basically act like glue. It can hold blocks or drag blocks when it is used with pistons. It opened a lot of possibilities for those that like to dabble in this sort of gameplay mechanic.

The one thing that never ceases to surprise me though, would be the modding community and what they can come up with. A lot of the popular mods out there nowadays are usually big mods such as Pixelmon and Galacticraft. The one thing that was smart of modders that I am thankful for today, was the creation of mod-packs. Mod-packs are exactly what they sound like, a pack of mods that are put together for the enjoyment of a player. Normally a mod-pack has it’s own launcher or a launcher for a few packs. One of the most popular launchers is Feed the beast. It has huge mod-packs that you can choose what can go in and what can’t. Like say if there is a mod that you want in the pack that isn’t already there, all you would need to do is download that mod and add it in right in the launcher. So far I personally like the Monster pack which has a ton of mods that are technical as well as having to do with the exploration side of Minecraft. I want a lot of modders to continue in what they do because they are doing a great job.

Speaking of creativity, there are a lot of people who don’t play with mods. This is called playing Vanilla Minecraft, plain, old fashioned Minecraft. They can really take the basic game to its limit by building structures, exploring the whole world, obtaining all its riches and showing their own flare with their buildings. No two worlds are the same and the same could be said about the players. The non linear gameplay really shows with how each player decides to start and how they progress within their world. One can build castles while another builds a farm, someone can find diamonds on their first day while another stays for days without even seeing gold. A big variety difference also shows with how each world is randomly generated but there is a way to generate the same world twice. Each world has a seed code that can be used to regenerate the world that is once played in and can be played over again. Then there are the people who do just building. Whether they build structures or towns or even pixelart people take the creative mode as a relaxing way to express themselves. Now if only I was a great builder.

There are a lot of different mechanics within the game itself that can be easily missed without prior knowledge. Redstone is one such mechanic as it is like electric circuitry in the real world. There are XoR gates, gates, bud switches, etc. Like a light switch, how you flick a switch to turn things on and off, there are levers and other ways that the same thing can happen. With this you can make a wide variety of machines such as a semi-automatic tree farms. Another thing that is used is controlled monster spawning, which is used to gain experience for levels and enchanting as well as to obtain the loot that is dropped. Source blocks, water or lava blocks, are what you would pick up with a bucket and there are ways to generate source blocks by placing two source blocks side by side with a one block gap in between. However this won’t work with lava. Now enchanting one’s gear is a way to power themselves up. This requires and Enchantment table, where all the enchanting will be done, bookshelves and levels. The bookshelves are there to basically rank up the enchanting table by giving it more knowledge, so to speak. If you look closely with the particles on, you can see texts that float towards the table. Now to do the actual enchanting you would need levels to put into the enchantments and now I believe you need lapis as well to enchant. Each enchantment requires different amounts of each depending on which enchantments are generated, It’s basically playing the lottery.

Hopefully I have made you aware of some of the many versatile things you can do within this game. You can change the scenery and the world itself with a mod. Let your creativity flow when shaping it to what you want. Maybe throw some fancy doors or lightings within your castle. Don’t forget though, the world is your oyster.