Player

The Player is the character played by the players. He is seen wearing a blue 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, jumping 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 four blocks horizontally when sprinting. The player cannot sprint if there are only 3 bars or less left in the hunger meter. Sprinting is activated by double-tapping the forward button (default is "w" key) then holding it.

HUD
The HUD consists of the user's health bar, hunger bar, experience bar, and hotbar. The armor condition bar appears above the health bar if the player is wearing any armor.

Experience
Beta 1.8 introduced the ability to gain experience points via experience orbs when killing mobs. However, experience points and leveling is not yet utilized in the game. 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 creative mode, the player has the ability to fly by double tapping the space bar and 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 known official plans to implement female character models or sounds.

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.

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. (On A side note to this, the "beard" was sometimes mistaken for a "mouth." This was seen as a pixelated smile, and gave the player a very non-threatening visage.)
 * 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.