My First 7 Hours of Minecraft

The sun rose on my first day in Minecraft. I found myself on a beach on a clear sunny day, surrounded by a beautiful pixel-art landscape. I went for a walk. In the distance, a pig was hopping up and down the ledges of a small hill, fringed with little yellow pixelated flowers, in the shade of a small tree. I did what any normal person would do in this situation. Strode purposefully up to the pig and beat it to death with my bare hands, stripped the tree of all its leaves and tore up every flower I could find.

As I finished smashing the tree to pieces and collecting its wood, the sun disappeared below the horizon. “Ooh, night time!” I exclaimed gleefully, “I wonder what else I can terrorize under the shroud of darkness?!” Little did I know, that the placid and beautiful environment that is Minecraft had more to offer than simple violence against defenceless farmyard animals… and as a zombie prized open my skull to feast on my delicious brains, I began to wonder… what’s this game all about anyway??

So, what is Minecraft? That was the question I just couldn’t seem to get an answer to. I’d seen the YouTube vids of people making mine-cart rollercoasters, 1:1 scale models of the star ship enterprise or just messing around with the water, fire and explosive physics of the game world. “So it’s a sandbox?” I asked. Well, yes and no is the answer. Like any PC game worth its salt, Minecraft has opened itself up to the modding community who have produced countless skin packs, level editors and world generators, allowing a user to create pretty much anything they want. However to the casual observer, this might look a bit daunting and it’s easy to forget that as well as all the crazy modding and the awesome 200ft statues of Mario, there is a game in here as well.

If you’re like me and new to the whole phenomenon, then your first 20minutes of Minecraft will probably have been similar – a confused wander round the landscape, trying to interact with it until you inevitably die. You quickly learn that, if you want to survive, you’re going to have to build yourself a shelter and hide away from all the things that go bump in the night. You’ll need to harvest blocks of material from the environment in order to build your shelter. You can create tools to help you do this quicker by combining different in game elements: wood and stone in certain quantities and combinations will fashion you a sword or a pick axe. The meat you gain from slaughtering pigs can be cooked and eaten and the leather you pick up from killing cows can be used to make armour.

So you’ve successfully built your shelter and the beasts of the night are safe on the other side of your sturdy front door. What do you do now? I was loathe to go outside again and be part of the brain-buffet so I spent my time expanding my home. You can dig away at blocks in the walls and floor. If you harvested some wood during the day time, it can be combined with coal to make torches that will both light your home and keep the beasties from spawning inside next time the sun goes down. I dug down a little. Then a bit more. I fashioned myself some steps and added another room to my shelter. Within an hour or so I had a tunnel that stretched for what seemed like miles underground. I eventually broke through into a massive underground cave, complete with its own sub terranian river and lake. The deeper you go, the more you’ll find, including rarer, more durable materials that can be used to create more complicated items. The crafting system is huge and very simple to use. All manner of switches, rail tracks, mine carts, explosives, tools and armour as well as dozens of decorative items for your house can be created and there’s hours of fun to be had harvesting the resources to do just that.

The landscapes for each single player game of Minecraft are procedurally generated, which means they are different every time you play. The land to be explored above ground is huge and the day-night cycle means that if you want to do so, you’d best bring tools, weapons, armour and provisions. To get to those snow-capped mountains in the distance might take a couple of in-game days, meaning you’re going to have to set up a shelter & defend yourself until dawn.

The possibilities for single player adventures are vast. Minecraft also allows you to host or connect to a world, making multiplayer possible. I haven’t tried this yet but there are already some hilarious machinima popping up that demonstrate what is possible when teams of people work together to create their own towns and cities.

Minecraft is 25% off all the way through the beta phase. Although the game still sports its “Beta” tag it didn’t seem very buggy to me at all. You can pick it up at www.minecraft.net for $14.95. So do it!