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 four game modes in Minecraft are Survival, Creative, Adventure and Hardcore. In the level.dat, Survival mode is gametype=0, Creative is gametype=1 and Adventure is gametype=2. Hardcore is Survival with the addition of hardcore=1 (for Survival and Creative, hardcore=0). This knowledge allows hacking to change game modes by editing the world's level.dat.

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.

Creative
The player will have access to an infinite amount of 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.

Adventure
Players can interact with objects such as levers and buttons, and can interact with mobs. However, they can only break blocks with the correct tools, making this mode good for adventure maps. Although this game mode has been released, it is still in its early stages, lacking in many features including the ability to toggle the use of tools by players.

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. 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. 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.

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.