Minecraft

(by gadgetpants)

Minecraft is a sandbox building game originally conceived and programmed by Markus “Notch” Persson. The independent company, Mojan, currently runs and maintains the game and portions of its community. - It is programmed in Java and can be downloaded to computer or played through a web browser. It is **very** light in both graphics and process power. Many describe its graphics as an 8bit world in 3D - The focus of the game is that of creation and construction. Literally you are “spawned” in a world can immediately begin to explore and build.

Game mechanics: 1. You obtain materials by digging, cutting and mining. Doing so will provide you with basic resources such as dirt, sand, gravel, stone and wood. - Digging and mining can reveal more valuable resources such as iron, gold and diamond among others. - You can increase the efficiency of your resource acquisition by creating tools. You can “craft” yourself items like an ax for harvesting wood, a shovel for dirt, gravel and sand, and a mining pick for harder ground substances like stone and precious metals. 2. With the materials you collect you can build whatever you want within the limits of the game. You can build a tower of stone that reaches to the clouds of the game world. Or you could pile dirt in a location forever. - The game is a construct of cubes. You obtain cubes of dirt or stone and then can place them back onto the ground or wherever. - Basically you build forms of anything you can imagine but with the limitation of it needing to be an arrangement of cube shaped materials. 3. The controls are simple. Left click collects, right click builds. Space is jump and WASD are the directional commands.

Why build? You can choose to build or not to build or to explore or what have you. However, at night monsters come out and without a fortified location, you will be destroyed and will have to re-spawn. You can quickly construct yourself a safe house by say, collecting some dirt and piling it around you. But if you have any artistic inclinations, you will probably want to expand your brief circle of dirt into something more impressive. A grand castle complex of soaring turrets, stalwart parapets and stores of arms might be such an option.