Gameplay



Gameplay in most game modes of Minecraft consists mainly of adding and destroying a variety of different blocks in a randomly generated world.

With these blocks, players can manipulate the world around them, building and destroying structures. As gameplay in Minecraft is so open and unguided, players often set their own goals and play the game as they see fit. An example of this is the Minecraft sport, Spleef.

Game modes


The five game modes in Minecraft are Survival, Creative, Adventure, Spectator and Hardcore. In the level.dat, Survival mode is, Creative is  , Adventure is  , and Spectator is. Hardcore is Survival with the addition of   (for Survival and Creative, hardcore=0 ). This knowledge allows hacking to change game modes by editing the world's level.dat. The command "/gamemode" can be used to switch between these. Example: "/gamemode 1" would put you into creative mode.

You can also change the gamemode in minecraft pocket edition by quitting the world and going to edit world tapping creative or survival and returning to game.

Survival
In this mode, players have to gather all their materials to build, craft and gain experience points. There is a health, hunger and armor bar, an inventory and, when underwater, an oxygen bar. If you die you go back to your spawn point.

Creative
The player will have access to an infinite amount of almost all blocks and items available, and can destroy them instantly. Players are invulnerable and do not have health, armor, or hunger, and can fly. The player has access to items not available in Survival mode, e.g. spawn eggs. The player will not see command blocks if you look through the creative GUI - you need to spawn command blocks with the /give or /setblock commands.

Adventure
Players can interact with objects such as levers and buttons, and can interact with mobs. However, they can only break blocks with tools with a CanDestroy data tag, and only place blocks if the block they are holding has a CanPlaceOn data tag, making this mode good for adventure maps.

Hardcore
In this mode, which plays in the same way as Survival mode, the difficulty level is permanently set to "Hard" and the map must be deleted upon the player's death.

Technically, Hardcore is a game mode modifier rather than a game mode. However, without cheating, it is only possible to get "Hardcore Survival". To attain "Hardcore Creative" mode, the player must edit the game world with external tools, or opening to LAN, and enabling cheats. There is almost no visible difference between "Hardcore Creative" and "Non-Hardcore Creative", because in Creative mode the only way to die is to fall into the Void or the /kill command. Because of this, "Hardcore" usually refers to "Hardcore Survival". On a server, if someone dies, they will be banned. If everyone on a server gets banned, the world for the server will be deleted. When looking at a hardcore singleplayer world, the gamemode is "Hardcore Mode!" and the color is red.

Upcoming
In 1.9, there will be a "Spectator" option for those who die in Hardcore, so the player can continue to explore the world in spectator mode, rather than having the world get deleted automatically.

Spectator
This game mode was implemented in 1.8. When in spectator mode, you can clip blocks, see what other entities are seeing by left-clicking on them, and you're invisible to everything and everyone except for other spectators. You can't interact with blocks, entities or your inventory. When in third-person mode, you look like a transparent, floating head with no body. You can use the scroll wheel to adjust the speed at which you are flying, unlike flying in creative mode.

Table of game modes
Below is a brief summary of the different available features in each game mode. This table also includes Classic, which is the older, free version of Minecraft.