Overview of Minecraft for Beginners
Overview of Minecraft for Beginners
**This is intended to be a supplement to the Armor of God for Minecraft Lovers series for those who don’t know anything about Minecraft. It is NOT intended to be a Bible study.**
If you want to follow along with the Armor of God for Minecraft Lovers series (or host the Bible study for your kids, grandkids, etc.) but you don’t know anything about Minecraft, this overview will give you enough understanding to get by. Let the kids teach you the rest!
The Game
Minecraft is a “sandbox” game, which basically just means that the game has elements of interactivity and creativity. In Minecraft, you “mine” blocks and “craft” items. Pretty self-intuitive, right? You then use the blocks and items to build structures, from a simple house to a grand masterpiece.
When you start the game, you can select a game mode and difficulty level for your world. Each combination has specific characteristics. In general, difficulty ranges from peaceful (very few things will kill you) to easy to normal to hard (it’s pretty easy to die).
Design
When you enter a new world, you are dropped into an area with a certain biome. If you can think of a type of landscape on earth, they probably have it in Minecraft. Think grasslands, forests, ocean, desert, badlands, mountains. If you travel far enough, you will encounter every biome in every Minecraft world! Each biome has different characteristics and different resources.
Basic blocks include dirt, cobblestone, wood, sand, iron ore, and other basic earthy elements.
Crafted items include tools (shovel, pickaxe, axe, etc.), armor, a crafting table (to craft basically anything in the game), chests (to store things), and many (so many) others.
The game also has “mobs,” or mobile entities. These mobs can move around in the game on their own. Basic mobs include cows, sheep, cats, llamas, skeletons, zombies, and many more. You will learn more about these in Lesson 1.
Gameplay
You can interact with the resources in Minecraft by mining blocks (use a shovel to dig dirt and sand, an axe to chop down trees, or a pickaxe to mine different types of rocks). When you mine them, those resources go into your inventory, and you can either place them to build something or use them to craft other resources. (How you place blocks or craft items isn’t as important to understand for our purposes. It’s just important to know that you can do this.)
So basically, you enter a Minecraft world, explore your surroundings, mine the different types of blocks, and start building yourself a life. You can build a house, collect animals for food and other resources, start a garden, explore caves, build a railroad system, travel the oceans, go fishing, and so much more! The endless variety and constant surprises when you start to venture from your starting point make this especially exciting for kids. Some like the creativity. Some like exploring. Some like fighting monsters. Some like it all! If you have multiple computers and multiple accounts, you can even play together with others. It’s a great way to build cooperation and communication skills. And of course creativity.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below, and I will try to answer (although I don’t consider myself a Minecraft expert!).
This is not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang. This publication complies with Mojang’s commercial usage guidelines.