User:MentalMouse42/Overview

This is meant to be an overview of Minecraft, not from the pure newbie's or munchkin's point of view, but for someone who thinks of games in terms of structure and balance.

Basic structure
Minecraft is a hybrid game. Its original form was as a "sandbox" game, in which the player has pretty free reign to manipulate the world. However, it has since acquired an "adventure" component as well, in which the player is confronted by both the need (or desire) for certain resources, and hazard from various threats. There are three major game modes, each of which offers different emphasis on these two aspects of the game. Any of these modes can be played in single-player or multi-player modes. There are also both built-in features ("flatworld") and external "game mods" which can drastically change gameplay; I will not be discussing these.

World Structure
All the game modes share the same basic world structure: A grid matrix of cells (in-game, "blocks"), which is finite vertically, but which is automatically extended horizontally as the player(s) move about. In general, this generation happens far enough from the player to be invisible to them, though a rapidly travelling player might notice some related anomalies.

Each of these blocks can be empty ("air"), can be filled with some material, or contain an object ("item block"), which is usually connected to one or more adjacent blocks. There are also "entities", objects which may move across the grid, and (unlike blocks) are usually not limited to integral coordinates. These entities include the player, "mobs" both hostile ("monsters") and friendly, occasional vehicles, and "item entities" representing blocks and items which have become detached from the matrix proper. (There are a few immobile entities which are also fixed to the grid.) The player can convert blocks into items, and collect them in the inventory for later use. The player can do various things with items: most can be placed into the world, many can be converted into different items, and some consumed directly by the player. The inventory is large, and there is no encumbrance mechanic.

Game Modes
Creative mode is the purest expression of the "sandbox" aspect of Minecraft: Resources are infinite, obstacles can be wiped away easily, and the player not only invulnerable, but has total freedom of action, including access to many "internal" game commands for manipulating the world. In this mode, players can create huge and complex structures, or experiment with the subtleties of game mechanics. Creative mode also doubles as the "build" mode for creating "custom" maps, which can be copied for use by other players.

Survival mode represents a balance between sandbox and adventure aspects, somewhat biased toward the sandbox side. The prospect of injury and death appears, and also the need for food. These are represented by health and hunger "bars" (gauges) respectively. However, most hazards are avoidable, and food is plentiful. Death results in being respawned at a fixed or previously-chosen location, while the player's items remain at their death location (where they can be lost or destroyed). Environmental hazards also appear, notably monster attacks, falling, drowning, and burning. The level of hunger affects healing: near-complete satiation allows injury to heal over time, while starvation inflicts damage. Nearly any block or object can be destroyed, but some require special tools to collect them as items. Several difficulty levels vary the level of hazard, and add or remove various dangers, including making exceptions to the above. To summarize the difficulty levels:
 * Peaceful: No monsters are present, and food is not necessary for healing.
 * Easy: Monsters appear, but with weak attacks.  Starvation will reduce the player to at worst half their maximum health.
 * Normal: Monsters attack at nominal strength, and some have special attacks.  Starvation and poison can reduce the player to minimum (non-fatal) health.
 * Hard: Monster attacks are more powerful, and starvation can kill the player outright.
 * Hardcore mode: Identical to hard mode, but the player does not respawn upon death.  That is, death is a true "game over".

Adventure mode shifts the game strongly toward the "adventure" aspect of the game. Play is always, or at least begins, on a previously prepared map, rather than on the randomly generated and unlimited map of the other modes. Similarly, destruction and collection of blocks is more tightly limited. The map provides various constraints, resource limits, and objectives, and can apply special rules or responses for player action.

Of these modes, Survival at Normal difficulty represents the "canonical" Minecraft experience, and most of the following discussions of balance and game structure will refer to this mode. (While Creative mode is popular for artistic efforts, game balance and structure hardly apply to it.)

The Gameworld
There are actually three separate grids ("dimensions"), but two of them represent advanced segments of the game. The primary dimension or Overworld is 256 blocks high, bounded above and below by regions which the player cannot affect or (normally) enter. The top half of this range, however, is not populated by the game engine, and represents space for player constructions. This gameworld mimics a natural terrain, with pseudorandom variation providing a variety of environments ("biomes") -- these vary not only in appearance, but in available resources, and in some cases, game-rule modifications. The bottom quarter of the height range is occupied by oceans and the underlying mass of the terrain, the latter riddled with caves and other gaps.

The world is automatically generated as the player travels horizontally, and is nominally infinite. However, there remains one relic of scale: There are only three Strongholds per world, and all are generated within 1200 blocks of the grid origin. (These Strongholds provide access to the optional endgame.)

There are some global processes which occur occasionally, and simultaneously across the gameworld, but otherwise, the world is essentially static, with significant change introduced only by the player. However, parts of the gameworld can be created in unstable states, leading to changes happening shortly after generation. Due to performance considerations, all gameworld changes are limited to a certain range ("chunk update radius") around the player(s), including those processes previously begun by player action.

Discussions from this point on will increasingly refer to specific elements and contents of the gameworld.

Global Processes
All of these except the day/night cycle depend on the player's chunk update radius. (Weather technically happens outside the radius, but has no effects.)
 * The most prominent global process is the day/night cycle, which repeats every 20 minutes of play time. Night time reduces light levels, which affects not only in-game visibility, but the monster generation process described below.
 * There is also a pseudorandom variation in "weather", among "clear" weather, "rain", and "thunderstorm". The latter two impede visibility in their own right, and also reduce light levels, which again affects monster generation.
 * Thunderstorms also produce lightning, which produces a rare hazard for players, and also occasionally sets small fires on the landscape.
 * In desert biomes, neither rain, snow, nor lightning falls, but the reduction in light levels still occurs.
 * In "icy" biomes, rain and thunderstorm are replaced by snowy equivalents, which can deposit snow on the landscape and freeze surface water. This can set off other processes, mostly killing certain plants.
 * While most peaceful mobs are created with the terrain, a few are spawned afterward. Most require a minimum light level, so appear on the surface during clear days.
 * The only water mob (squid) is created in oceans as an ongoing process.
 * Hostile mobs, or monsters, are generated differently. They are created continuously, but only in darkened spaces.  Thus, they can always appear in underground caves, but on the surface they will appear primarily at night, and occasionally during thunderstorms.  This "natural monster spawning" only occurs within a certain range of some player (but is suppressed very close to them), and hostile mobs tend to despawn outside a somewhat larger range.
 * Some of these monsters (zombies, skeletons) are specifically destroyed by bright (clear-weather) sunlight, while others (spiders, Endermen) are "defused", becoming non-aggressive.
 * One type of monster (Endermen) makes occasional minor alterations to the gameworld, when present.
 * As noted above, parts of the landscape can be generated in unstable states, beginning processes which will proceed as soon as the player comes within update range of the area. These include:
 * Newly generated springs of water or lava will flow. They may form obsidian, stone, and/or cobblestone as water and lava interact.  Ocean or lake blocks may also flow into available openings to underground spaces, with similar results.
 * Some leaf blocks are generated in inappropriate places, and will die within a few minutes, perhaps dropping sapling items.
 * In Villages, Zombie sieges can occur, and kill off villagers.

Game Structure
Unlike many games, there is no advancement in the character's native abilities, only in the tools available. While there is a nominal "experience" mechanic, this is only used for creating and repairing enchanted (that is, more capable) tools, armor, and weapons. Survival mode offers no explicit mandate beyond actual survival (which is fairly easy), but the game offers an implicit "scavenger hunt": Collecting and creating various items offers new capabilities for the character. In the following, a material or item is considered "fully found" when the player has enough for immediate needs, and knows where or how to get more. For many items, even small amounts give basic capacities, but large amounts (either "farmed" or accumulated over time) give additional options.

The most basic "finds" are the various tool materials -- some are technically optional, but are likely to be found anyway in the course of finding later materials. In their usual order of appearance, these materials are: Wood, Stone, Coal, Iron, Gold, Redstone, and Diamond. Most of these provide more powerful tools and armor, but coal is for lighting (torches) and as a fuel for preparing other materials or items, while redstone provides some key tools (clock, map) and is used for "redstone circuitry".

Simultaneously with climbing the "basic materials" ladder, the player needs to collect an assortment of other items, and build up local capabilities. The most immediate need is for food -- while small amounts are available immediately, larger amounts will usually require farming. Indeed food has its own ladder based on the plants and animals available, and the farms built for each: Crop fields and animal pens represent "vegetable" and "meat" foods, while fishing provides a portable option. This process involves and produces a number of other materials as well. There are four different "crafting" mechanisms to create tools, but only two appear in the starting game: crafting "proper", and smelting.

In single-player, this provides a more-or-less linear advancement through the game. In multi-player, individual players can seek a similar path, but may have to deal with damage or resource exhaustion caused by other players. On the flip side, resources in general, including "key" items, can also be shared, or stolen. In a cooperative or light-fingered server, the group is likely to progress through the game as a whole, but a significant amount of resources can be diverted to competition, combat, and/or social endeavours.

Notable are three sets of "key" items, each significantly controlled, which in turn control progress through the game:
 * String provides a missile attack (and also a portable food source). Wool can be made from string, or found by happenstance; it permits the player to choose their respawn point, where they will reappear if killed.  Both these capabilities are critical for basic security, and are effectively requirements for moving from starting to early game.  The control is that string requires combat, at a stage when the player likely has inferior equipment.  (Wool need not involve combat, but is unevenly available.)
 * Diamond and mined Obsidian are required for enchanting (middle game) and casual access to the Nether (entry to the late game). They both require deep exploration and exposure to danger, and diamonds are very rare.
 * Blaze Rods and Nether Wart grant the ability to brew potions, a major factor in the late game. They are only found in Nether Fortresses, which must first be located in the Nether, and Blaze Rods specifically require combat with fairly dangerous monsters.

Starting Game
Initial goal items and structures:
 * Wood: Immediately provides the Crafting Table which allows for complex tools, and also is sufficient for the minimal "pole tools".  (Smaller amounts are combined with other materials for more advanced tools.)  As more is accumulated, a variety of utility items come into play, notably chests (storage) and fences (for both protection and farming).
 * Coal/Charcoal: Provides torches, the basic (and cheapest) light source.  Used to cook meats for greater nutrition and safety.  Later used to smelt (inter alia), iron and gold ore for use in crafting.
 * (Cobble)stone: Provides second-tier tools, which will remain useful later in the game as "disposable tools".  Also provides the furnace, used for smelting.  As a block, used for creeper-resistant building.
 * Seeds allow wheat farming (producing wheat and more seeds), and can be used directly for chicken breeding.
 * Wheat is used for bread, and later to capture and breed cows (meat and leather) and sheep (wool).
 * Eggs are used to produce chickens (meat and feathers, the latter needed to produce arrows).
 * Gravel produces flint, also needed for arrows. Flint also allows a tool to create fire at will.
 * String: Usually gotten from spiders, this allows production of bows and fishing rods. Note that this is the first "prize" that more-or-less requires conflict with monsters:  In Peaceful mode, it can be found by underground exploration, but in any other mode, the player will meet the spiders first.  In slightly larger quantities, it can also supply enough wool for a bed.
 * Fishing is the only way to accumulate large amounts of food portably, that is without building or visiting a farm.
 * Bows, of course, allow ranged attacks against monsters, notably the dreaded creeper.

Early Game
As the player attains basic food security, bow and arrows, and iron equipment, they move from the starting game into the "early game", where they can continue to build their capabilities, adding more options for food and equipment.
 * Iron: Provides effective (mid-range) tools and armor, and an additional group of miscellaneous tools.
 * Water: Requires iron (buckets) to manipulate effectively, used for crop farming, vertical travel, and other utility functions.
 * Bones: From skeletons, allows accelerated growth of crops and other plants.
 * Carrots and Potatoes: Initially likely to come from zombies, these represent additional food crops.
 * Potatoes, when baked, provide a more plentiful and efficient food than bread.
 * Carrots, besides being edible in their own right, allow capturing and breeding pigs.
 * Pigs provide meat, and can later be used for transportation.
 * Wool: Various utility purposes, but initially used to produce a Bed to choose the player's spawn point.  Getting more than the small amount used for the bed, requires wheat and iron, and a fair bit of wood to fence the sheep farm.
 * Saplings: Allows tree farming for larger wood supplies.

Middle Game
At this point, the player has begun to accumulate significant resources, including farms and other structures. They have developing stockpiles of wood, food, fuel, and iron, allowing more ambitious projects and moderately safe exploration of both the surface and underground. As the player explores and builds, they will acquire more of the basic and miscellaneous "targets", providing various additional capabilities. This phase brings in the third crafting system, where enchanting tables and anvils create and maintain enhanced tools, armour, and weapons.

During this phase, the player is likely to encounter one or more villages, which allow trading for various items. This trading can shortcut the search for many items, and can provide small amounts of certain late game items.


 * Gold: Provides clocks and miscellaneous tools for later parts of the game.
 * Redstone: Compasses, (thereby maps), and the variety of capabilities offered by redstone devices and circuits.
 * Leather: Used for books (needed for non-trivial enchanting) and some utility items.  Large amounts require a cattle farm.
 * Diamonds: Provides the highest tier of tools and armor, and is a "key" item for enchanting.
 * Obsidian: Requires diamond to mine, "key" item for enchanting, and required to enter the Nether (and thus the late game).
 * Lava: Various utility purposes, and occasionally useful for defense.
 * Sugar cane: Paper for maps and books, sugar for recipes and midgame brewing.  Boosting an enchanting table to full power, or use of multiple maps, will require enough to warrant at least casual farming.
 * Larger quantities of wood, iron, and coal, allow greater use of various tools, making it possible to, e.g. surround a village with a protective fence, or lay minetracks across great distances. Quantities of iron in particular allow for producing iron golems, railways, and heavier use of iron tools in general.

Some items aren't really required at this stage, but provide useful capabilities, or will do so in the late game:
 * Tamed "dogs" and "cats", for defense. These are each found in specific biomes, and require respectively bones and fish to tame.
 * Sand: Used to produce glass and explosives.  Glass is required for all brewing, and convenient for other purposes.
 * Gunpowder: Explosives and brewing.
 * Melons: Disproportionately difficult to find, these provide some food (competing with cookies), but are more important for brewing.
 * Pumpkins: Better light source/trail marker, protection from Endermen, potential food, later used for golem production.
 * Cocoa beans: Minor food role, notably cookies.
 * Snow: Used for snow golems (defense) and incidental purposes.
 * Various Dyes: Used for decoration and signage, most often with wool.
 * Clay Bricks: Essentially decorative purposes.
 * Saddles: Allows use of pigs for transportation.  Disproportionately scarce, but they don't wear out.
 * Emeralds: Building a stockpile of emeralds can get access to certain advanced items which would normally be expensive or limited to the late game.

Late game
Minecraft's late game begins with constructing and using a Nether Portal to access the Nether. This allows access to a new group of materials and their associated capabilities. Most prominently, finding and "beating" a Nether Fortress allows brewing of potions (the fourth and last crafting system), by use of "restricted" materials which are only found there (other brewing ingredients will generally have been found in the early or middle game):
 * Blaze Rods: "Key" item for brewing capability.  Also used for certain potions and to produce Eyes of Ender.  Fortress only, requires fighting a new monster.
 * Eyes of Ender: Allows limited access to an extra inventory, and can guide the player to the optional endgame.
 * Nether Wart: Also required for most potions.  Fortress only.
 * Wither skulls (Fortress only, fight a new monster): Rare item granting access to an optional boss fight.
 * Glowstone: Brighter light, used to enhance potions.
 * Soul Sand: Useful for traps and needed to farm Nether Wart.
 * Nether Quartz (As of version 1.5): Allows certain advanced redstone devices, also decorative uses.
 * Ghast Tears (fight a new monster): Used for regeneration potions.

Exploration of the Nether also adds a rapid-travel capability for moving between Overworld locations.

End Game and Extra Boss
While there is no particular requirement to face it, there is an optional "boss" fight which is recognized by the game and generally positioned as finishing the game. This requires using Eyes of Ender to locate a Stronghold and use the End Portal within, to reach "The End" and fight the Enderdragon. (And that's what I mean by "positioned as finishing the game"....) No new capabilities are gained by this, but many of the prior capabilities are required to complete The End.

With late-game capabilities, it also becomes possible to create the Wither and kill it to gain a special prize. Of course, by this point the player has officially beaten all the threats which the game has to offer, so the additional capabilities of the "beacon" are somewhat moot from a game-progression point of view. However, beacons probably do affect multiplayer play.

Ongoing Play
After acquiring all the capabilities and tools offered by the game, players can simply continue to explore the world, or work on various projects such as buildings, devices, or just rearranging the landscape.

Game Balance
Minecraft is somewhat casual about game balance -- it has to be, because the landscape is infinite anyway, and the player can always make more of it. That said, there is some effort in that direction, and it has generally improved over time. Here are some of the factors constituting game balance:

Time
In an infinite and bounteous world, the player's time is still limited. Large structures need time to build, remote locations take time for travel, crops and animals need time to grow (and more to be harvested or slaughtered), mining takes time to get through rock, and even monster spawning is weakly rate-limited. In the case of fishing, once string is available, time is the primary resource converted into food. Many material resources are normally scarce, but can be "farmed" -- if you want to invest the time, both for building the farm and running it.

A complicating factor here is the "chunk update radius": The world itself may be infinite, but only the area near the player experiences time, so only farms or other projects within a certain range will make progress. Effectively, time is also limited by space, forcing the player to actually attend to farms, or at least cluster them around their usual haunts. Building upward can be helpful here, as a tall tower or deep pits can include many projects within a small horizontal area.

Scarcity and Staging
As discussed above, the basic availability of items, and the effort needed to obtain them, is fundamental to the balance and progression of the game. Some items require fighting monsters or reaching remote areas, others need time to multiply. Note that there are several items which take a fair bit of effort to find, but once found, they can be farmed freely: Pumpkins, in the landscape or dungeon chest, Melons, in dungeon chest or trading, carrots and potatoes from zombie drops or villages, and all the biome-specific items and animals. Scarcity has more teeth for items that can't be farmed, most strikingly diamonds; in general, it interacts with renewability.

There is also the matter of "monster farms", which come in two basic varieties. One is based on rebuilding the area around a spawner. For a modest investment in materials and effort, this yields a steady stream of a particular monster type, which can be killed manually for experience and drops, or just slaughtered mechanically for the (common) drops alone. The other, more ambitious method, involves exploiting the "monsters from the dark" spawning mechanic, building a large spawning region designed to channel and concentrate the resulting monsters, again either for manual or automatic killing. This can involve major construction and a great deal of materials, but the reward is a massive supply of monsters, of all the nighttime types (though spiders and especially Endermen posing some practical problems.) In either case, manual slaughter can be made much easier by forcing the monsters into a pit trap designed to heavily damage them without actually killing them.

Many items are also limited by requiring prior finds or progress, but are available in small amounts before their "official" appearance, through trading or lucky finds.

Renewability Limits
Most, but not all items, can be easily farmed. Some can be farmed with more effort and heavy construction, or heavy exploitation of trading. Some can't be farmed at all -- they can only be gathered by exploring more territory.

This is most obvious with basic blocks: Stone, wood, and water can be farmed freely, but other landscape blocks can't:  Getting larger amounts requires despoiling the landscape, or at least scavenging more distant areas. And the basic blocks are also vulnerable to destruction by creeper blasts or careless TNT use. All are more-or-less commonplace, but carelessness or ambition can easily produce localized shortage.
 * Dirt is required for most farming, and for building "green" landscapes. While not actually consumed, it does get tied up by such uses.
 * Sand has several uses in crafting (glass, TNT, sandstone), all of them non-reversible transformations.
 * Gravel is slowly converted into flint, which is used for consumable arrows.
 * Lava is comparatively common at depth or in the Nether, but needs to be gathered at some hazard, and it can be consumed by smelting or conversion to obsidian. Furthermore, lava stored in buckets is unstackable (see below), requiring a lot of inventory or storage space.  It also blocks passage, and the common way to get past it is to destroy it by converting it to obsidian.  Obsidian itself is not used up (and can be created by other methods), but it's notable that gathering or reworking it suffers a heavy cost in time.

A similar pattern holds for mineral ores: Diamond and lapis lazuli (perhaps the most and least useful of the ores) cannot be obtained except by mining fairly deep. Redstone and glowstone can be obtained in small amounts by trading, while iron and gold can likewise be gotten in small amounts from certain monster kills. Farming these small amounts into a steady supply requires not just considerable effort and/or hazard, but considerable time as well.

Likewise for other monster drops: Farming monsters can involve considerable hazard, and some are extremely difficult to farm:  Especially, creepers (gunpowder), Endermen (their pearls), and Ghasts (their tears) require dealing with intimidating monsters which are prone to escape containment from their farms.

Inventory limitation (Encumbrance)
This is at first glance a weak constraint: The player's inventory is large, most items stack 64 to a slot, and there is no consideration of weight. Even so, once multiple resources, heavy mining, and crafted items come into play, it's fairly easy to fill the inventory. Furthermore, some items do not stack in the inventory, and others stack only to 16 instead of the usual 64. The affected items tend to be those of strategic significance (or in some cases, mischief potential for multiplayer), but all the basic tools for mining blocks are non-stackable. For many resources, the question will not be the "has the player found the item?", but "does the player have (enough of) the item with them?.  This is complicated by the point that anything carried on an adventure may be lost if the player suffers a "bad death".  In the late game, Ender Chests moderate the inventory limits a little bit.  Even so, there are a lot of different things to carry around:
 * Wood comes in four different types, and some of their related items share the split: saplings, planks, slabs, and stairs. The stackable wooden tools are also fairly numerous.
 * Stone similarly has three primary types (cobble, smooth, and sandstone), plus stone and clay bricks. Adding in slabs and stairs multiplies the variety.
 * Each monster and animal type has one or two drops, all different, and each crop likewise. The monsters also have "uncommon" and "rare" drops, which also take up new slots.
 * Mining can produce stacks of several different minerals and ores, along with huge quantities of cobblestone, gravel, dirt, and perhaps sand. Several of the ores also need to be smelted into yet more items.
 * Cooking or crafting various food items adds yet more variants, and a couple of food items are unstackable.
 * Working with redstone introduces yet another suite of distinct items.
 * A few items are unstackable themselves, but come from stackable components (mushroom soup, book-and-quill). This poses a hazard of filling up the inventory with an ill-advised crafting.  Filling buckets has a similar issue, as each filled bucket takes another inventory slot.