When you think sandbox, what games come to your mind? GTA? Fable? Assassin’s Creed? Fallout? Personally, up until recently, those few games would parade through my head like a gay pride march, but then I encountered Minecraft. Whilst GTA, Fable, etc are all open world, there’s a very distinctive difference between them and the wonder that is Minecraft. In GTA/etc, you are a specific character, and you do things the game gives you to do – whether they’re missions, side missions, finding and shooting delinquent gnomes, they’re all in-keeping with the character you’re playing.
Minecraft, however, is different. There are no real goals, except to survive. And since you’re not given a character or a mission, there’s no role to which to conform, which makes this a true sandbox. When you start the game, the world you’ll be playing in is generated randomly, then you’re dropped into it somewhere. It’s daytime, and when night arrives, monsters roam the world, so you need a shelter to take cover in, and maybe a sword. So you find some trees and ‘chop them down’ – an act that requires neither chopping nor tree-falling.
This is pretty much the beginning of any game of Minecraft; find trees, get wood, make planks, make sticks, make crafting table, make pickaxe, find mountain, find coal, make shelter, light shelter with torches. This isn’t because the game says you must, this is because if you don’t, you will not survive, and survival is generally a good thing. It’s quite refreshing to do something in a game not because it tells you that you must, but because you are driven by necessity.
You need trees to get the wood to make the planks of wood, which you make both sticks and the crafting table from. You need sticks, planks of wood and the crafting table to make the pickaxe (and other tools, such as a sword for fighting any monsters you encounter, a shovel for digging earth quicker or an axe for cutting trees quicker, amongst other tools) to mine for stone, which you can use to make stronger tools that finish tasks quicker and last longer, and you need to light your shelter partly because it’s dark at night, but mostly because monsters spawn in the darkness of caves and other such shelters, and torches will stop that happening.
Once you’ve got your shelter, you can do whatever you like. You can dig a mine and collect materials to craft more items (such as even better pickaxes, shovels, swords, or some armour, etc), or build a house, or a tower, or a castle, or anything you want to make.
On the other hand, if you don’t fancy building a house or a tower, you can just dig, and looks for dungeons (occupied by monsters and a monster spawner, which you need to nullify with torches, often guarding a chest with valuable  booty inside), or caverns, and caves. I spent my first game digging and creating a mine, just for the hell of it (I did an awful lot and, without my noticing, I played for 6 hours and had a rather large mine) when, mid-way through making an underground chamber, I found a cave.
Due to the random nature of Minecraft’s world creation, these things can be found just about anywhere. This particular cave was quite large and had a few caves leading off of it, and it was full of resources (iron, coal and some gold). Whilst following said cave (very quickly, and placing torches so monsters didn’t spawn and kill me), I discovered that it opened out into an underground waterfall that fell into the darkness below. Now, this game may be intentionally made from slightly pixelly textured blocks, but this underground waterfall was really quite beautiful as it fell into the immeasurable depths below.
There is a free version of Minecraft, but it’s a completely different game. It looks the same, but the free version removes the whole survival aspect (or, rather, the new Minecraft added it in, as the free version is an old version of the game), giving you a great many different kinds of blocks with which you can build whatever you like without having to worry about monsters, or mining your materials. Minecraft Alpha (so-called because it is in Alpha at the moment) costs about 10 euros, a price that will double once the the developer (Notch) adds proper multiplayer (the multiplayer is the reason it’s still in Alpha). It does have multiplayer support at the moment, but it’s not finished and, as such, is missing a lot of features of single player.
Honestly, when I first bought the game, I was a little bemused, as I’d originally bought it based on the free version and expected it to be about building things. When I discovered it was not about building things, I was slightly annoyed. However, I found a beginner’s tutorial (this one) to help me get to grips with the game and, once I had, I realised I had inadvertently discovered an absolute gem of a game, and it has since absorbed so much of my time I almost started seeing the real world in blocks and wanted to mind through the pavement in the middle of Dundee at one point.
Minecraft is, by far, the most absorbing, fascinating game I’ve played for a long time, and if you have Windows, Linux or OSX (which you do), you owe it to yourself to play around with it. It doesn’t require a powerful system, but may well end up requiring a lot of your time.
To go buy Minecraft or try the free version, visit Minecraft.net.
gideon1451
My brother was on about this yesterday, it sounds much fascinating now though.
Might delve in myself.
X_Yoshy_X
Yer iv been playing this for a while now the funnist part is the online but the only way to play online at the mo is for u or one of you friend to make there own server
UltimateBox
Just as soon as i stopped playing the game, you had to make an article about it!
Well, back to Minecraft i go.
fattonyxxl
This game has all of a sudden gotten more and more popular! And for those who want another world within minecraft just do a google search for “Buxville” it’s a server that has a currency, jobs and a vast user-base within Minecraft. Pretty neat so far.
Oh and this years “Character that most looks like a phallus” award has to go to the Creeper.
GhostViper
I love this game. Love making hallways inside the mountains.
moshi
I have been wondering what the hell this game is about for a while now I know and may just give it a free game a whirl
Aquastyle
Minecrafts survival mode is just way fun and addicting, I’ve spent hours on comprehensive underground tunnel systems and huge towers, not getting tired of it.
Quite the gem, yes, though a rather misshaped one to be honest. I always find it amusing that the first thing ya have to do when you start a new game, is punch a bunch o trees. Punch a bunch o trees.
hazelam
i some places it’s not considered a good night unless you’ve punched a bunch of trees. :)
btime
bought this a couple of weeks back after a friend spent the whole night in the pub banging on about it. it runs so badly on my laptop (which is not particularly underpowered) that i have given up on it.
Gamoc
Repeat from below:
Try turning the graphics down in the options? Press F (changes fog distance, less distance = less on screen = better performance.
hazelam
TSA, where bad puns go to die. :)
… anyway.
i’ve resisted trying that minecraft, i know could end up getting addicted.
and i’ve tried games where you create stuff and find them totally disheartening when the game points out just how little skill i have at anything visual, i do like to marvel at other people’s creations though, this one in particular is pretty impressive.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/09/30/working-16-bit-computer-built-inside-minecraft/
Aquastyle
…
That’s, impressive. Though I didn’t understand a thing he said.
hazelam
me either, but then what goes on inside a computer has always been totally out of my grasp.
i’ve read books and see videos explaining the basics, but i’ve never been able to get my head round it.
thankfully there are people who do get it and i can just enjoy the fruits of their labours.
Blayney
That… is so damn epic.
Gamoc
That IS amazing, but even more amazing is that he had to acquire all those materials and everything to do it.
Assuming he didn’t hack. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.
RedStarGlow
It reminds me when I first learned to redefine an ascii character in Basic to create my own custom character that when combined with other customer characters would allow me to make a larger custom graphic. I spent hours with graphic paper mapping out the 1s and 0s bits to make my characters. Hours more typing in the code and troubleshooting it.
In the end, almost everyone I showed my creation to failed to understand the real effort even though many were impressed.
As cool as this 16-bit ALU is, I am sure I don’t truly understand the effort that it took.
I am also sure that I don’t know what role the pigs played in the addition of 1 + 2!!!!
cc_star
Tried the free version (which is no longer under development), but after chopping down a few trees and tunneling a bit I couldn’t work out how to do anything else, also the 3 frames per second the game ran at on my PC made it not worth learning.
I’ve got a feeling Minecraft will pass me by, just like Facebook
Gamoc
Try turning the graphics down in the options? Press F (changes fog distance, less distance = less on screen = better performance.