The best sandbox you will ever have

By Emily Weinlick

PHS staff member

Minecraft is an amazing way for people to let their imagination run wild! It’s creative, engaging, challenging, and super fun! Minecraft is a sandbox independent video game originally created by the Swedish programmer Marcus “Notch” Persson and later developed and published by the Swedish company Mojang since 2009. The creative building aspects allow players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, gathering resources, crafting, and combat. There a multiple ways to play, including survival mode where the player must collect resources to build the world and maintain their health, creative mode where layers have unlimited resources to build and the ability to fly, and adventure mode where players can play custom game worlds built by other players.

“Minecraft is an amazing game, I love to invent, build, and explore so this was the perfect game for me,” said Charlie Weinlick.

Minecraft received five awards during the 2011 Game Developers Conference. It won the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award, Best Debut Game Award, Audience Award, and the Seamas McNally Grand Prize. As of June 25^th, 2014, over 12 million copies of the game on Xbox 360 and 15 million copies on PC have been sold; nearly 54 million copies have been sold across all platforms, making it one of the best-selling video games of all time.

Minecraft is an open world game that has no precise goals for the player to accomplish, allowing the players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. At the beginning of the game the player is placed on the face of a procedurally generated and virtually infinite game world. The world is divided into an endless amount of biomes ranging from deserts, to plains and swamps, to jungles and snowfields.

Throughout the course of the game, players encounter many non-player characters also known as mobs, including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Non-hostile animals-such as cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep-spawn during the daytime.

 The player may hunt them for food and crafting materials. By contrast, hostile mobs-such as large spiders, skeletons, and zombies-spawn during the night or in dark places, such as caves. Some unique creatures have been noted by reviewers, such as the Creeper, an exploding mob that sneaks up on the player; and the Enderman, a mob with the ability to teleport and pick up blocks.

“Minecraft is incredible, the creativity that I have drawn out of myself and the way people keep trying to make it better blows me away,” said Rebecca Foxercy, a homeschooler.