6 ms·

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,

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.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      Required South Park clip https://youtu.be/M7fduwvvV5g?t=59 https://youtu.be/M7fduwvvV5g?t=59
- hluska 2y ago
  A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft. I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows). My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in. As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like. There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works. But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.
- pjerem 2y ago
  You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can. I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine. That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode. Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house. And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles. Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    What were all of those survival hours for if you weren’t gathering resources for the eventual castle?
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      There is only hardcore. No other mode exists. Large biomes... sometimes it drops you in a desert where there is no wood, and the only obtainable block is sand. You can't build a roof with sand. There is no way to obtain coal or charcoal, so you can't make torches to light the night sky and keep monsters at bay. No trees for kilometers. You see the beach, do you dare try swimming for it? The drowned zombies come out of nowhere, you swim too slow to dodge tridents. Maybe wood out there in some sunken ship, but wooden blocks are difficult to discern from slabs or stairs down deep. Iron, if you can figure out the correct way to get to the chest. If that chest is even there in a broken ship. "Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.
- verdverm 2y ago
  Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game. https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays HermitCraft and Vault Hunters are some SMPs to check out https://hermitcraft.com https://hermitcraft.com | https://vaulthunters.gg https://vaulthunters.gg The Dream Manhunt series is pretty epic too
- guelo 2y ago
  I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.
ACow_Adonis 2y ago
I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more. Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere. Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode. Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25pcw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25... So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :) And my kid loves creative.
- the-smug-one 2y ago
  > No lava buckets But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.
- skerit 2y ago
  Villagers have been in the game since Beta 1.9, the last beta release before 1.0.0 in 2011... So maybe not the best example. Elytras have been around for a long time too, but they really are OP
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    I didn't see an Elytra until I'd been playing with various mods that give you creative flight or at least jet packs, so I was used to at least being able to fly†, and in many cases being able to move arbitrarily in 3D space at a whim. In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby. † I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.
ineptech 2y ago
It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
- herewulf 2y ago
  Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers. I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > Runs great on lower end hardware too. Our first server box was a late gen P4 running headless Ubuntu. The CPU had strong single thread performance and handled dozens of players.
  - dariosalvi78 2y ago
    Same here! Got a server on an old Rpi 2 and as client an old Samsung tablet. All works great and we have a lot of fun! The only thing is to setup the game as you like, with mods etc. it takes some trial and error, but it's also fun.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience. > Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way. Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.) > It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins. Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security. [0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/ https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/ [1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-How-to-Setup-a-Minecraft-Java-Edition-Server https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...
iforgotpassword 2y ago
Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.

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.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Required South Park clip https://youtu.be/M7fduwvvV5g?t=59 https://youtu.be/M7fduwvvV5g?t=59
hluska 2y ago
A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft. I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows). My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in. As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like. There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works. But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.
pjerem 2y ago
You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can. I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine. That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode. Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house. And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles. Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  What were all of those survival hours for if you weren’t gathering resources for the eventual castle?
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    There is only hardcore. No other mode exists. Large biomes... sometimes it drops you in a desert where there is no wood, and the only obtainable block is sand. You can't build a roof with sand. There is no way to obtain coal or charcoal, so you can't make torches to light the night sky and keep monsters at bay. No trees for kilometers. You see the beach, do you dare try swimming for it? The drowned zombies come out of nowhere, you swim too slow to dodge tridents. Maybe wood out there in some sunken ship, but wooden blocks are difficult to discern from slabs or stairs down deep. Iron, if you can figure out the correct way to get to the chest. If that chest is even there in a broken ship. "Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.
verdverm 2y ago
Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game. https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays HermitCraft and Vault Hunters are some SMPs to check out https://hermitcraft.com https://hermitcraft.com | https://vaulthunters.gg https://vaulthunters.gg The Dream Manhunt series is pretty epic too
guelo 2y ago
I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.

ACow_Adonis 2y ago

I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more. Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere. Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode. Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25pcw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25... So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :) And my kid loves creative.

the-smug-one 2y ago
> No lava buckets But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.
skerit 2y ago
Villagers have been in the game since Beta 1.9, the last beta release before 1.0.0 in 2011... So maybe not the best example. Elytras have been around for a long time too, but they really are OP
- tialaramex 2y ago
  I didn't see an Elytra until I'd been playing with various mods that give you creative flight or at least jet packs, so I was used to at least being able to fly†, and in many cases being able to move arbitrarily in 3D space at a whim. In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby. † I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.

ineptech 2y ago

It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

herewulf 2y ago
Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers. I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > Runs great on lower end hardware too. Our first server box was a late gen P4 running headless Ubuntu. The CPU had strong single thread performance and handled dozens of players.
- dariosalvi78 2y ago
  Same here! Got a server on an old Rpi 2 and as client an old Samsung tablet. All works great and we have a lot of fun! The only thing is to setup the game as you like, with mods etc. it takes some trial and error, but it's also fun.
lolinder 2y ago
This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience. > Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way. Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.) > It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins. Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security. [0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/ https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/ [1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-How-to-Setup-a-Minecraft-Java-Edition-Server https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...

iforgotpassword 2y ago

Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.