Experience



Experience points were added to Minecraft during the first part of the Adventure Update. They were originally revealed by Jeb during an interview. Experience can be obtained by gathering Experience Orbs from defeated mobs and players. Gathering experience points increases the player's levels by gradually filling a bar on the bottom of the screen until a new level is achieved when the bar is full. Each level up will reward the player with Skill Points, which Notch has said may be used for buying things such as increased jump height and increased maximum health.

Jeb has stated on Twitter that Experience Orbs will not drop unless the creature is killed by a player, rendering grinders useless for farming experience (although grinders can be converted to funnel monsters to an easily player kill-able location to grind xp). Jeb released a picture of the 1.8 GUI list, which shows the experience bar, among other things. As of Beta 1.8, there is no measurable benefit to gaining Experience Orbs and levels. The ability to spend Skill Points will be added in 1.9. As of yet, it does not show how many skill points a player has.

Bugs
In 1.9 Pre-release, jumping causes the experience bar to go up in experience.

Trivia

 * In Beta 1.8 Pre-release 1, when the player died, they dropped all of their experience orbs individually. This created a problem with retrieval of drops if the player had accumulated a large sum of experience, due to the extremely large amount of orb items created at the specific point. On SMP servers, this could be enough to even crash a server.


 * In Beta 1.9 Pre-release, the player gained Experience from jumping. This was part of code left in by Jeb for testing Experience.