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 known as "Steve?" (Notch likes to put a question mark at the end).

Health
The player has 10 hearts. When the player's hunger bar is over 9 points, his health will slowly regenerate by half a heart every five seconds. The hunger bar depletes slowly when the player does things like running, sprinting and mining, and it can be refilled by eating food.

Sprinting
As of Beta 1.8, the player is 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. You sprint by double tapping your forward button (default is "w" key) then holding.

Bugs

 * When you get out of a boat sometimes your right arm can still have the pose it did when it was in the boat.
 * When you get out of bed you may be in the position you were in while sleeping.

HUD
The HUD consists of (in 1.8) the player's reticle, Hotbar (also called Action bar) and a health and armor rating, (if wearing armor) 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 implemented 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.

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 however, the player is able to jump 4 blocks while sprinting as of the 1.8 update.
 * In the .png file he is named char which is short for character.