By Max Eddy Minecraft is your blocky, beautiful sandbox, to build in and play with as you please. The core of the game is exploring and surviving in a hostile world made from building-blocks that you can build with as you please. But as you play, you'll quickly see that this game has so much more to offer than just architecture.
The Minecraft Way
As a player, your only advantage over a hostile landscape is the ability to build, so if you don't want to die, you need shelter (and a food source). If you want shelter, you need to gather materials. If you want to gather materials faster, you need to craft tools. If you don't want to cower in a dark hole all night (eight minutes of real time) then you better build a nicer house.
The underlying rule of Minecraft is that you have to work for everything. Even figuring out the specific crafting recipes will require some effort. You can try to figure these out on your own, but the Minecraft Wiki is an invaluable source that will connect you to everything that can be done in the game along with the huge, active community of players.
The real fun of Minecraft is that it's flexible enough for players to enjoy on their own terms. You can focus on monster slaying, farming and animal husbandry, magic and enchantments, or astounding electro-mechanical contraptions using redstone—the in-game surrogate for electricity. A normal game is usually a mix of everything.
Minecraft even offers two modes of play. Survival Mode more is geared towards dodging enemies and building while exploring the surprisingly beautiful landscape while Creative Mode offers a pallet of every block and item in the game so you can easily construc enormous architectural triumphs or massive redstone computers.
Minecraft is also flexible in its hardware requirements. The developers say it requires at minimum 1GB of RAM, a dedicated video card (preferably nVidia GeForce 6xxx Series or ATI Radeon 9xxx Series), a 1.8GHZ CPU, and the latest 64-bit installation of Java. The game runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with updates released simultaneously for all three. I used a Windows 8 machine and a Mac Mini in my testing. There are also versions of the game for Android, iOS, and XBox 360. The game looks excellent on high-end machines, but will perform adequately on even modestly powered laptops.
An Ever Changing, Infinite Game
Swedish developer Mojang avoided the bloated, years-long development cycle and sky-high prices of major game releases by selling copies of Minecraft long before it was "finished." New features continue to come out at a fairly regular pace. The game was recently updated to 1.6, bringing with it an exciting new feature: horses.
Players can now find and tame blocky horses (and donkeys) for riding and use as pack animals. The increased mobility is quite welcome in Minecraft, as the monsters will become more difficult the longer you spend in a particular area. Horses can be ridden with the addition of a saddle, and can also be protected with specially-crafted horse armor. Donkeys can be outfitted with chests for an additional 15 inventory slots, opening the door for in-game caravans of goods. Watch out when crossing water with these steeds, however; you'll automatically dismount in deep oceans or lakes.
Along with horses are "leads," which let you snag any animal from a distance and secure it to a fence post—a feature in-game farmers are sure to love. Also for animal lovers are nametags, which let you assign a specific name to an animal. Interestingly, these require experience points to create, increasing the places for players to spend their hard-earned XP.
The new update was not without its quirks, however. Boats now use the same controls as horses, which makes the already awkward watercraft all the more ungainly.
1.6 also introduced a new game launcher, with which you can assign different versions of the game to different profiles. This means you can enjoy all the latest features, but still easily move back a version if your favorite multiplayer server requires it. The new launcher will someday make modding the game much easier, but for now adding mods is still too complicated for all but the most dedicated player.
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