Player

The Player is the character played by the players. He is seen wearing a blue, tied up shirt and a pair of jeans, but this can be changed (see customizing). He is unofficially known as "Steve?".

Health
The player has 10 hearts. On all difficulties the player can heal himself by eating food. Generally, eating cooked food will heal more than eating it raw, but in some cases eating the food raw is impossible. In peaceful difficulty, health regenerates by half a heart per second. In the 1.8 update, the food mechanic was changed-- No longer does eating food regain health, but instead fills the Hunger Meter, which goes down when the player does things like running, sprinting, and mining. When the player has over 80% on the hunger meter, his health will slowly regenerate.

Sprinting
As of Beta 1.8, the player will be able to sprint, draining the food bar considerably faster than usual while doing so. The player can jump 4 blocks far when sprinting. The player cannot sprint if there are only 3 bars or less left in the hunger meter.

HUD
The HUD consists of (in the 1.8 Pre-Release) the player's reticule, Hotbar (also called Action bar) and a health and armour rating, (if wearing armour) both on the left hand side of the screen, armor bar above the health. The hunger is on the right hand side and the XP bar is just above the hotbar and stretches along the length of it. Before the 1.8 Pre-release, the armor rating used to be on the right hand side, where the hunger bar is now.

Experience
In Beta 1.8 Notch plans on implementing leveling-up in minecraft. You will level-up by getting enough experience, and you will lose all your experience when you die.

Modes

 * In survival mode, The Player is able to place and destroy blocks, and use all tools available.
 * In classic creative mode, the player has the ability to place infinite number of blocks, but with no use of crafting or tools. He is also able to destroy all blocks in one hit, even Bedrock.

Customizing
A player can change their character's skin; this can be done on the Preferences page of Minecraft.net by uploading a valid .PNG image file, which will then replace the default skin.

While you can use a female custom skin, there is only one player model, and a male sound set. This is due to the fact that when creating a skin, you are only editing the textures of the player model, and not the properties themselves. There are currently no official plans to implement female character models or sounds.

Trivia

 * After the Beta update, the default texture for the player was replaced with a beardless version. The bearded version is still obtainable by downloading the reference skin at minecraft.net/profile.
 * Given that the densest substance available in the game is gold, the player is capable of carrying 44,518,667 kg if he fills the entire inventory with gold blocks and wears a full set of gold armour. However, given that the lightest substance in the game is feathers, and presuming that a feather weighs approx 4g, the player cannot carry any more after reaching a burden of 4.6kg.
 * The player's eye level (According to coordinates while pressing the F3 button) is 1.62 meters, if every block is assumed to be one meter tall. Using some math, this means that the player height is approximately 1.89m (=6.2 feet).
 * The player can jump about one block high, and about two blocks long.
 * In the .png file he is named char which is short for character.