15 ms·

The secret of Minecraft (2014)

220 points by prawn 2y ago

diggan 2y ago
> The genius of Minecraft is that the game does not specify how this is done. Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- HuoKnight 2y ago
  It tells you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table, beyond that there isn't anything (bedrock edition may be different I haven't touched it in a while)
  - wrkta 2y ago
    Even in Java there is a built in recipe book that tells you how to craft items that you have the resources for.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      The recipes are such a small amount of the secret knowledge now. There are so many quirks to the game to discover, even people playing 10+ years still find joy in discovering them (or being taught). Community is a huge aspect, shared learning, collaboration, cooperation Imagination also plays a big role. You have to create your own story and see things not as they are, but as what they are to the story. It's reminiscent of childhood and play. HermitCraft is the most notable example of this, but it's pervasive, especially among builders. (i.e. put a railroad on a smoker to make a grill, flower pot as a cup, extended piston as a table, or a fence post with a pressure plate as a table)
cedws 2y ago
Call me a hater but I think Microsoft ruined Minecraft. The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes. There are way too many blocks now so there's not as much need for creativity in building. Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.
- amiantos 2y ago
  It is interesting that despite the overwhelming success of Minecraft, Microsoft/the team building it still felt that it needed to have a full tutorial system and overarching story objectives tacked on it to further encourage players to get hooked on it if the open-ended aspect of it didn't appeal.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    After you've already attracted all of your primary audience, all you have left for growth are non-primary audiences. See also: bands pivoting from niche to mass market genres
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  I never understood the appeal of having game knowledge on a separate websites. I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company. But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.
  - Auracle 2y ago
    You know, for younger kids I can see the appeal. They might not have a device they can easily use to go on the internet, so you’d be able to do things your friends can’t and vice versa. I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.
HuoKnight 2y ago
The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.
- diggan 2y ago
  I only remember Minecraft from when it had no built in tutorials what so ever. Seems that has changed now at least, for better or worse.
- marcellus23 2y ago
  > Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.
- TheCleric 2y ago
  If memory serves, those things were added shortly after this was written, sometime after Microsoft purchased Minecraft. Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”
- phit_ 2y ago
  well the recipe book was only added in 2017, almost 8 years after the game was released.. so you haven't been playing that long
  - phit_ 2y ago
    hints like chopping wood were also added later in 2017
  - 2y ago
opan 2y ago
For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time. I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates. Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time. While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Not to ick anyone's yum, but when games begin to approach the same parts of my brain that I use for work, I question why I'm not just using them to make more money instead. But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.
  - Carlseymanh 2y ago
    I cannot think of any game that could approximate a full-time job as much as EVE (I am currently obsessed with factorio, which I play after working for 8 hours on production line automation systems)
rootforce 2y ago
I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play. It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too. Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.
- pizzafeelsright 2y ago
  Never played. No idea. We're big lego fans. Where should I start? Anything to avoid?
  - itronitron 2y ago
    If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc. If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode. Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.
  - rootforce 2y ago
    Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored. Avoid mods at first. Family friendly streamers are: - [Jax and Wild](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw) - [Grian](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu60aJht1DQwh https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu6...) - [Mumbo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U) -[Stinarose](https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose)
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored. When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them. That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.
codeulike 2y ago
One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.
- pphysch 2y ago
  I don't know that it's an "innovation" as much as a lucky break. I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.
  - preciousoo 2y ago
    I believe they solved (to a large degree) it in their C++ rendering engine that they use for Bedrock
    - astrobe_ 2y ago
      Yeah, Minetest which was C++ from the start manages well these days. It still offers distance fog, which I think is something you want anyway for aesthetic reasons - being able to see clearly 5 km away feels wrong, especially if your game does have a weather system. OP sounds a bit like "sour grapes" to me, especially in this case. Other games deal with the issue with level-of-detail (LoD) tricks, or make it a proper part of the game (e.g. the "popping" of objects like trees is animated).
    - codeulike 2y ago
      If you're playing over a network you still get chunks loaded infront of your eyes sometimes because it depends on the network/speed of the host
      - medstrom 2y ago
comprev 2y ago
I've never played Minecraft as such but have great memories of spending time with my nephews while they built things with this digital Lego. We also built loads of cool things with [my old] Lego too :-)
momojo 2y ago
> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world. This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta. Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more. They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into. My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.
- xmprt 2y ago
  It has a lot of parallels with Lego and not just the fact that they're both a bunch of boxes that you can attach together. I think the fundamental mechanics of Minecraft lends itself to a type of creativity that other games find it hard to recreate. By being so little, it manages to be so much more than the sum of its parts. Minecraft didn't have a proper ending for the first few years of its life.
- Pannoniae 2y ago
  > My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more. Yup, absolutely. It's very easy to get carried away with just adding more.... stuff, but more stuff isn't necessarily better if it doesn't improve the gameplay. The game doesn't become better by adding another type of tree or new random building blocks or whatever, only if they actually offer something unique and cool. Current Minecraft really suffers from this. Do we really need like 30 types of copper blocks?
nottorp 2y ago
The secret of Minecraft is that it's the Lego game without Lego corporate involvement. Or at least it was before MS bought it. These days you have to find servers that disable the chat censorship if you're an adult that plays with adults. And no, it's not kids only, as 90% of the other comments probably say.
infinitezest 2y ago
For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).
256_ 2y ago
I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011. To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them. For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.
- lolinder 2y ago
  See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    I'm the other way. I hosted a cracked 1.5.2b server for 4 years and it has a block shaped place in my soul.
  - 256_ 2y ago
    Hmm. I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft. How do you feel about modern Minecraft?
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft. I'm old. But to be fair, I got into Minecraft by helping my kid set up a server - and then he moved on and it became my server. At least it wasn't a puppy.
    - lolinder 2y ago
kevinsync 2y ago
Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him. I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol
- verdverm 2y ago
  I believe they also changed their policy so that if you buy Minecraft, you can access both Java and Bedrock (I only play Java)
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    Can confirm that you can buy it from the Microsoft Store as a bundle, so for $30-$40 you get both Bedrock and Java edition.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform Pray tell, where are the Mac and Linux versions of Bedrock? Have they removed the limitations on world and redstone updates in Bedrock yet, or is it still only updating right around you in the name of rendering distance?
  - kevinsync 2y ago
    Both fair points / complaints. I guess my original thought was really that Bedrock is a great Trojan horse for kids who would otherwise not discover the game because it runs on Windows, iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch etc (and by extension, possibly get into computers, coding, game design, etc as a result) Mac / Linux really ought to be supported too, but the vast majority of kids are elsewhere.
ilaksh 2y ago
He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret. I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off. It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features! Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve. And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first. Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.
- npunt 2y ago
  Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring. re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for. However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play. The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked. My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.
ForOldHack 2y ago
I have used the chat function, to steer children with very serious problems, into therapy.
BSDobelix 2y ago
If you are looking for a more customisable and open source version of a "minecraft engine" there is https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ with lots of mods, where the most Minecraft'ish is https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/.
lynndotpy 2y ago
Something else vital is that it ran on almost everything. Even before it expanded to every smartphone and console available, you could get it to run on a cheap and old laptop. Even 10fps was serviceable if you played on peaceful :) I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha. When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover. I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)
- hot_gril 2y ago
  My brother played on an iMac G5, while hosting a server on it too.
  - lynndotpy 2y ago
    Fun fact, ever since 1.3.1 (twelve years ago!) Minecraft used client-server architecture, even in singleplayer mode :)
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Yeah, which is why playing on a separate server was less resource-intensive than singleplayer. But my brother's server was public and had multiple players, so I'm surprised it could handle it.
mrob 2y ago
The "secret" knowledge isn't necessary if you're persistent enough. Japanese Youtuber PiroPito has an ongoing series of videos (with English subtitles) of an almost entirely unspoilered playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFdz8decGs1kHg- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd... Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.
mmis1000 2y ago
I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment. There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map. Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation. And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game. To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.
voidUpdate 2y ago
> Where do you learn them? Not in Minecraft. As of 1.12, click the green book in the crafting screen to be shown a list of recipes, which you can filter by what you can actually craft
instagraham 2y ago
This secret knowledge is common to older competitive games like Counter Strike. The game does not explicitly tell you about recoil control, or economy, or any of the other aspects that are crucial to surviving even entry-level ranked play. I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game. Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Competitive video games shouldn't have secret knowledge imo. Counter-Strike gets a pass because the game is simple enough to begin with. Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down. The "king" of knowledge-based gameplay is AoE2:DE (modern remake of Age of Empires 2). The old game was complex, but people learned it once. Now they keep adding or modifying civs to add in gimmicky mechanics.
  - instagraham 2y ago
    > Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down. It seems more common behaviour today, but remember CS came out in the era of zero-recoil arena shooters. I once made my friends play UT after several rounds of CS and then they struggled to play CS again due to UT's friendlier recoil (complete lack thereof)
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Or some shooters have a random spray around a fixed aim point, so pulling down doesn't help. I get that it's different, but it doesn't take long to figure out the rules.
sewak123 2y ago
[flagged]
00_hum 2y ago
i remember when the first demo of minecraft was released on a forum thread. the handfull of people who tried it didnt think very highly of it. one would imagine they all would have been excited that the most popular game in history had been released… they were too stupid to see what was right in front of them.
hot_gril 2y ago
Besides the lack of an ingame manual, a few things about Minecraft that might seem bad actually made it successful since the alpha: - time-consuming resource collection - lack of objectives - low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res - one-click sword combat mechanics - no official multiplayer server - Java (not common for games at the time) - glitches that don't completely break the game The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.

220 points by prawn 2y ago

> The genius of Minecraft is that the game does not specify how this is done. Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
HuoKnight 2y ago
It tells you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table, beyond that there isn't anything (bedrock edition may be different I haven't touched it in a while)
- wrkta 2y ago
  Even in Java there is a built in recipe book that tells you how to craft items that you have the resources for.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    The recipes are such a small amount of the secret knowledge now. There are so many quirks to the game to discover, even people playing 10+ years still find joy in discovering them (or being taught). Community is a huge aspect, shared learning, collaboration, cooperation Imagination also plays a big role. You have to create your own story and see things not as they are, but as what they are to the story. It's reminiscent of childhood and play. HermitCraft is the most notable example of this, but it's pervasive, especially among builders. (i.e. put a railroad on a smoker to make a grill, flower pot as a cup, extended piston as a table, or a fence post with a pressure plate as a table)

cedws 2y ago

Call me a hater but I think Microsoft ruined Minecraft. The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes. There are way too many blocks now so there's not as much need for creativity in building. Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.

amiantos 2y ago
It is interesting that despite the overwhelming success of Minecraft, Microsoft/the team building it still felt that it needed to have a full tutorial system and overarching story objectives tacked on it to further encourage players to get hooked on it if the open-ended aspect of it didn't appeal.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  After you've already attracted all of your primary audience, all you have left for growth are non-primary audiences. See also: bands pivoting from niche to mass market genres
vbezhenar 2y ago
I never understood the appeal of having game knowledge on a separate websites. I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company. But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.
- Auracle 2y ago
  You know, for younger kids I can see the appeal. They might not have a device they can easily use to go on the internet, so you’d be able to do things your friends can’t and vice versa. I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.

HuoKnight 2y ago

The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.

diggan 2y ago
I only remember Minecraft from when it had no built in tutorials what so ever. Seems that has changed now at least, for better or worse.
marcellus23 2y ago
> Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.
TheCleric 2y ago
If memory serves, those things were added shortly after this was written, sometime after Microsoft purchased Minecraft. Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”
phit_ 2y ago
well the recipe book was only added in 2017, almost 8 years after the game was released.. so you haven't been playing that long
- phit_ 2y ago
  hints like chopping wood were also added later in 2017
- 2y ago

opan 2y ago

For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time. I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates. Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time. While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.

ethbr1 2y ago
Not to ick anyone's yum, but when games begin to approach the same parts of my brain that I use for work, I question why I'm not just using them to make more money instead. But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.
- Carlseymanh 2y ago
  I cannot think of any game that could approximate a full-time job as much as EVE (I am currently obsessed with factorio, which I play after working for 8 hours on production line automation systems)

rootforce 2y ago

I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play. It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too. Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.

pizzafeelsright 2y ago
Never played. No idea. We're big lego fans. Where should I start? Anything to avoid?
- itronitron 2y ago
  If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc. If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode. Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.
- rootforce 2y ago
  Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored. Avoid mods at first. Family friendly streamers are: - [Jax and Wild](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw) - [Grian](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu60aJht1DQwh https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu6...) - [Mumbo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U) -[Stinarose](https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose)
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored. When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them. That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.

codeulike 2y ago

One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.

pphysch 2y ago
I don't know that it's an "innovation" as much as a lucky break. I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.
- preciousoo 2y ago
  I believe they solved (to a large degree) it in their C++ rendering engine that they use for Bedrock
  - astrobe_ 2y ago
    Yeah, Minetest which was C++ from the start manages well these days. It still offers distance fog, which I think is something you want anyway for aesthetic reasons - being able to see clearly 5 km away feels wrong, especially if your game does have a weather system. OP sounds a bit like "sour grapes" to me, especially in this case. Other games deal with the issue with level-of-detail (LoD) tricks, or make it a proper part of the game (e.g. the "popping" of objects like trees is animated).
  - codeulike 2y ago
    If you're playing over a network you still get chunks loaded infront of your eyes sometimes because it depends on the network/speed of the host
    - medstrom 2y ago

comprev 2y ago

I've never played Minecraft as such but have great memories of spending time with my nephews while they built things with this digital Lego. We also built loads of cool things with [my old] Lego too :-)

momojo 2y ago

> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world. This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta. Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more. They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into. My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.

xmprt 2y ago
It has a lot of parallels with Lego and not just the fact that they're both a bunch of boxes that you can attach together. I think the fundamental mechanics of Minecraft lends itself to a type of creativity that other games find it hard to recreate. By being so little, it manages to be so much more than the sum of its parts. Minecraft didn't have a proper ending for the first few years of its life.
Pannoniae 2y ago
> My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more. Yup, absolutely. It's very easy to get carried away with just adding more.... stuff, but more stuff isn't necessarily better if it doesn't improve the gameplay. The game doesn't become better by adding another type of tree or new random building blocks or whatever, only if they actually offer something unique and cool. Current Minecraft really suffers from this. Do we really need like 30 types of copper blocks?

nottorp 2y ago

The secret of Minecraft is that it's the Lego game without Lego corporate involvement. Or at least it was before MS bought it. These days you have to find servers that disable the chat censorship if you're an adult that plays with adults. And no, it's not kids only, as 90% of the other comments probably say.

infinitezest 2y ago

For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).

256_ 2y ago

I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011. To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them. For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.

lolinder 2y ago
See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  I'm the other way. I hosted a cracked 1.5.2b server for 4 years and it has a block shaped place in my soul.
- 256_ 2y ago
  Hmm. I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft. How do you feel about modern Minecraft?
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft. I'm old. But to be fair, I got into Minecraft by helping my kid set up a server - and then he moved on and it became my server. At least it wasn't a puppy.
  - lolinder 2y ago

kevinsync 2y ago

Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him. I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol

verdverm 2y ago
I believe they also changed their policy so that if you buy Minecraft, you can access both Java and Bedrock (I only play Java)
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  Can confirm that you can buy it from the Microsoft Store as a bundle, so for $30-$40 you get both Bedrock and Java edition.
nottorp 2y ago
> making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform Pray tell, where are the Mac and Linux versions of Bedrock? Have they removed the limitations on world and redstone updates in Bedrock yet, or is it still only updating right around you in the name of rendering distance?
- kevinsync 2y ago
  Both fair points / complaints. I guess my original thought was really that Bedrock is a great Trojan horse for kids who would otherwise not discover the game because it runs on Windows, iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch etc (and by extension, possibly get into computers, coding, game design, etc as a result) Mac / Linux really ought to be supported too, but the vast majority of kids are elsewhere.

ilaksh 2y ago

He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret. I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off. It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features! Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve. And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first. Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.

npunt 2y ago
Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring. re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for. However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play. The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked. My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.

ForOldHack 2y ago

I have used the chat function, to steer children with very serious problems, into therapy.

BSDobelix 2y ago

If you are looking for a more customisable and open source version of a "minecraft engine" there is https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/ with lots of mods, where the most Minecraft'ish is https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/ https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/.

lynndotpy 2y ago

Something else vital is that it ran on almost everything. Even before it expanded to every smartphone and console available, you could get it to run on a cheap and old laptop. Even 10fps was serviceable if you played on peaceful :) I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha. When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover. I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)

hot_gril 2y ago
My brother played on an iMac G5, while hosting a server on it too.
- lynndotpy 2y ago
  Fun fact, ever since 1.3.1 (twelve years ago!) Minecraft used client-server architecture, even in singleplayer mode :)
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Yeah, which is why playing on a separate server was less resource-intensive than singleplayer. But my brother's server was public and had multiple players, so I'm surprised it could handle it.

mrob 2y ago

The "secret" knowledge isn't necessary if you're persistent enough. Japanese Youtuber PiroPito has an ongoing series of videos (with English subtitles) of an almost entirely unspoilered playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFdz8decGs1kHg- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd... Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.

mmis1000 2y ago

I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment. There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map. Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation. And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game. To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.

voidUpdate 2y ago

> Where do you learn them? Not in Minecraft. As of 1.12, click the green book in the crafting screen to be shown a list of recipes, which you can filter by what you can actually craft

instagraham 2y ago

This secret knowledge is common to older competitive games like Counter Strike. The game does not explicitly tell you about recoil control, or economy, or any of the other aspects that are crucial to surviving even entry-level ranked play. I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game. Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.

hot_gril 2y ago
Competitive video games shouldn't have secret knowledge imo. Counter-Strike gets a pass because the game is simple enough to begin with. Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down. The "king" of knowledge-based gameplay is AoE2:DE (modern remake of Age of Empires 2). The old game was complex, but people learned it once. Now they keep adding or modifying civs to add in gimmicky mechanics.
- instagraham 2y ago
  > Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down. It seems more common behaviour today, but remember CS came out in the era of zero-recoil arena shooters. I once made my friends play UT after several rounds of CS and then they struggled to play CS again due to UT's friendlier recoil (complete lack thereof)
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Or some shooters have a random spray around a fixed aim point, so pulling down doesn't help. I get that it's different, but it doesn't take long to figure out the rules.

sewak123 2y ago

[flagged]

00_hum 2y ago

i remember when the first demo of minecraft was released on a forum thread. the handfull of people who tried it didnt think very highly of it. one would imagine they all would have been excited that the most popular game in history had been released… they were too stupid to see what was right in front of them.

hot_gril 2y ago

Besides the lack of an ingame manual, a few things about Minecraft that might seem bad actually made it successful since the alpha: - time-consuming resource collection - lack of objectives - low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res - one-click sword combat mechanics - no official multiplayer server - Java (not common for games at the time) - glitches that don't completely break the game The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.