So you've seen people rave about this mysterious indie game and decided to take the $12 plunge. What is there to do and enjoy? Here are six things you'll eventually encounter that'll really get you to stick with the Minecraft experience.
1. Your first night
There are a lot of tutorials on Youtube that detail what you should do within your first few minutes of starting up and they're all right. Everything is relatively peaceful with farm animals prancing around during the day but at night, this game about mining and crafting suddenly becomes a zombie survival-horror game.
When you first spawn, it's often midday, so it's a mad sprint to punch as many tree logs as you can so you can have the wooden tools necessary to build a suitable shelter which will keep zombies, skeletons, spiders, and creepers at bay. And the lighting applied to this pixel world makes the darkness even more suffocating as you jump at the slightest grunt and snarl from monsters that can smell your flesh as they claw at your makeshift home.
2. Getting lost while exploring
It's very easy to get lost in Minecraft. You can only visually identify so many mountains and lakes as landmarks until you start mistaking other mountains for the one that leads to your home base. And when you get lost, there are any number of reactions you could have. If you didn't leave behind too much, you could carve out a new living in a new home.
But if you've left all sorts of great loot behind in your house like iron ore or gold, you'll be motivated to find your way back. It's then a desperate struggle as you seek out your home while racing the clock before desperately crafting together another makeshift shelter to hold the monsters at bay at night. After getting lost twice, I vowed to leave behind torches like bread crumbs to never get lost again.
3. The descent
Eventually you will mine deeper and deeper until you have yourself a bonafide mineshaft. Either you'll have one right inside your home or you may stumble across a natural cave system. Either way, it's an eerie experience suddenly breaking into a natural spring, dimly lit by the torches behind you. Could there be monsters here? And how much deeper can this go?
In your own shaft, you should have left a way to ascend such as stairs or a ladder, but I made the mistake of exploring a natural pit with no escape plan ready. All I could do was go deeper and deeper, watching as my supply of torches slowly dwindled as I wonder how much farther I can go. Then I hit the crescendo moment: the darkness ebbed away as lava lit the room with light and the prospect of a painful death.
And I did. And all 36 ignots of iron I had collected melted away along with my body.
(2)
