“ Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by Mojang. A sandbox game is a video game with a gameplay element that gives the player a great degree of creativity to complete tasks towards a goal within the game, if such a goal exists. Some games exist as pure sandbox games with no objectives. These are also known as non-games or software toys. More commonly, sandbox games result from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres & allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with an open world concept which gives the player freedom of movement & progression in the game's world. The "sandbox" term derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets children create nearly anything they want within it. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early test versions, it was released as a paid public alpha for personal computers in 2009 before releasing in November 2011, with Jens Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft has since been ported to several other platforms & is the best-selling video game of all time, with 200 million copies sold & 126 million monthly active users as of 2020.In Minecraft, players explore a blocky, procedurally-generated 3D world with infinite terrain, & may discover & extract raw materials, craft tools & items, & build structures or earthworks. Depending on game mode, players can fight computer-controlled "mobs", as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. Game modes include a survival mode, in which players must acquire resources to build the world & maintain health, & a creative mode, where players have UNLIMITED POWER. Players can modify the game to create new gameplay mechanics, items, & assets. Minecraft has been critically acclaimed, winning several awards & being cited as ONE OF THE GREATEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, & the annual MineCon conventions played large roles in popularizing the game. It has also been used in educational environments, especially in the realm of computing systems, as virtual computers & hardware devices have been built in it. In 2014, Mojang & the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. A number of spin-off games have also been produced, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, & Minecraft Earth. Minecraft is a game that has no specific goals to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of FREEDOM in choosing how to play the game. However, there is an achievement system known as "advancements" in the Java Edition of the game, & "trophies" on the PlayStation ports. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option for third-person perspective. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes & fluids, & commonly called "blocks"—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, & lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up & placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a 3D grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can "mine" blocks & then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. The game also contains a material known as REDSTONE, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, & logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. The game world is virtually INFINITE & procedurally generated as players explore it, using a map seed that is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). There are limits on vertical movement, but Minecraft allows an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane. Due to technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached, however, there is a barrier preventing players from traversing to locations beyond 30,000,000 blocks from the center. The game achieves this by splitting the world data into smaller sections called "chunks" that are only created or loaded when players are nearby. The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields; the terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves, & various lava & water bodies. The in-game time system follows a day & night cycle, & one full cycle lasts 20 real-time minutes. When starting a new world, players must choose one of five game modes, as well as one of four difficulties, ranging from peaceful to hard. Increasing the difficulty of the game causes the player to take more damage from mobs, as well as having other difficulty-specific effects. For example, the peaceful difficulty prevents hostile mobs from spawning, & the hard difficulty allows players to starve to death if their hunger bar is depleted. Once selected, the difficulty can be changed, but the game mode is locked and can only be changed with cheats. New players have a randomly selected default character skin of either STEVE or ALEX, but the option to create custom skins was made available in 2010. Players encounter various non-player characters known as mobs, such as animals, villagers, & hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, & chickens, can be hunted for food & crafting materials. They spawn in the daytime, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, skeletons, & zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies, skeletons & drowned, underwater versions of zombies, burn under the sun if they have no headgear. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper, an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player, & the enderman, a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks. There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk variants that spawn in deserts. Minecraft has two alternative dimensions besides the overworld, which is the main world: the Nether & the End. The Nether is a HELL-LIKE dimension accessed via player-built portals; it contains many unique resources & can be used to travel great distances in the overworld, due to every block traveled in the Nether being equivalent to 8 blocks traveled in the overworld. The player can build an optional boss mob called the Wither out of materials found in the Nether. The End is a barren land consisting of many islands. A boss dragon called the Ender Dragon dwells on the main island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which upon entering cues the game's ending credits & a poem written by Irish novelist Julian Gough. Players are then teleported back to their spawn point & may continue the game indefinitely. ”
