Minecraft

Here is Minecraft  in a pretty basic nutshell.

See that? Are you confused? Read on for some basic information from a safe space full of generalized knowledge. No, you’re not on Wikipedia. You’re at TandemShock.

Just the Facts

• It is a sandbox independent video game
• There is no real objective, other than building and destroying items as well as exploration
• As of June 2015, 70 million copies have been sold amongst all available platforms
• Originally created under Mojang, Microsoft bought the property for $2.5 billion in 2014

FernGully on Minecraft

The first time I saw this, I immediately screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?” Nothing about it made sense. All you did was get sent into a randomly created world, and you started punching trees and building cabins and exploring cave systems. I was thoroughly confused most of my first session. What joy could this possibly bring?

Apparently, a lot. Soon after, I found myselfplaying for what appeared to be hours. I would start around noon, after a light lunch of kale salad and diet coke (in reality it was probably three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and half a liter of peach tea #lunchofchampions). By the time I found a perfect stopping point, it was around 3 a.m. and I had been holding in urine for the last 7 hours. 7 HOURS! This type of dedication should only be reserved for Lord of the Rings marathons or watching Ancient Aliens documentaries.

This doesn’t even involve the fact that once you get three other people to play with you (I was playing on the PS3 system when I first started), it becomes a jumbled mess of who is trying to fuck up who and Plasma Captain building a massive tower made out of dirt (there was a lovely view at the top). I think it was called “The Tower of Fucks” or something like that. I’m not entirely sure as I’ve surely blocked it from my memory.

The point is, the game is an addictive piece of perfection. I have to actively set a timer when playing, just so I can actually be an adult and do things like make sure the dog is fed properly and hasn’t taken numerous shits around the house. I will neither confirm nor deny that this has happened.

Pop Culture

Social media played a huge role in making Minecraft popular. It has been referenced in many games, including: Borderlands 2, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Team Fortress 2. The game was referenced as well in Lady Gaga’s music video for G.U.Y.

There are approximately 45,512,584,221,123,622,157,664,579,151,273,724,313,427,876,822 different gameplay videos that you can find on YouTube. There are far too many to include in any type of post and a shit ton of people play this fucking game. But why? It’s nothing but building shit and breaking shit and then getting killed by other shit. People love it, I guess. Here, take a look at the bounty.

South Park

Season seventeen of South Park used Minecraft heavily as a plot point in their episode entitled “Informative Murder Porn.” This episode features the children of South Park using the phrase “How do you tame a horse in Minecraft” as a question to their parental lock software installed to keep their parents from watching Investigative Discovery Homicide TV Shows. This prompts the parents to learn about Minecraft, with Corey Lanskin, the child, helping the parents stating, “Minecraft, it don’t got no winner, it don’t got no objective. You’re just fuckin’ buildin’ shit!”

Gameplay

There are five types of gameplay involved in most Minecraft platforms. These include:

• Survival Mode

You must gather natural resources by punching trees to make tools and then making other things to make life a little less shitty in the world that you generated.

There are tons of monsters that live in these randomly created worlds. Some of them include:

Creepers: Hostile mobs that make a hissing sound when you get too close to them. This causes them to explode, with damage being taken if you are near their explosion point. They are green and they are douches.

• Endermen: (Pictured Left, looking like a douche) Fuck these guys. Seriously. Fuck them all. They scare the shit out of me. I have a huge love/hate relationship with Slender Man and he has inspired this Minecraft favorite. They are tall with thin legs and arms and only appear at night. They like to take blocks away from your buildings, I assume to allow their special brand of death to come creeping in. There is nothing scarier than an Enderman appearing when you lost track of time and are trying to get back to your cabin. I’ve screamed plenty of times dealing with these ass-hats.

• Wolves: They’re OK. They exist both during the day and at night and like to attack your sheep (go figure). You can actually tame one and make them guard your flock, which is pretty cool.
• Cave Spiders: A hostile mob that has blue skin and beady red eyes. They are small, but total assholes and will fuck you up if you aren’t prepared for them.

The world is randomly generated when starting a “new game.” Here, you can create the size of the world you want as well as provide any other texture packs you want to use. I’ve used several texture packs and they are pretty fun if you want something different.

Favorite Texture Pack: It’s the Sweet Texture Pack. It makes everything look like you’ve just been put into a diabetic coma and you are in a very lucid dream right before that sugar death. It’s awesome.

• Creative Mode

You have access to all the crap possible in this mode of the game. You can also fly around freely and do not take any damage from the environment or any monsters in the world. This mode is designed to help players focus on creating large projects without the effects of the world screwing you up.

• Adventure Mode

This version was added in patch 1.3 and designed for players who wanted to experience custom maps and adventures. This is designed to allow the creator of the map to put in restrictions and experience the world they created in a sequential order.

• Spectator Mode

This mode allows players to view the world, moving through blocks while flying without actually being interactive.

• Multiplayer Mode

Through player-hosted servers, players can have other players play with them in the same world. Within this mode, PVP (player versus player) mode is enacted at the world creator’s discretion and the players can all work together to create or destroy various items and parts of the map. On the console versions, there can be up to four people at a time on local multiplayer.

Minecraft features three different types of worlds. The main world is a massive bio-domes of various landscapes including desserts, amazon forests, snowy areas etc. There are two other worlds included: the Nether and The End.

• The Nether: A hell-like dimension accessed via a player’s built portal that contains a lot of interesting monsters and items that a player can use to further their explorations and creation goals. This place is fucking scary. Seriously. I watched a roommate playing and they were able to achieve access to this area and we all were screaming from sheer enjoyment only to be met with terror! The place is terrifying. You can piss off anything at any time and get fucked up. It’s hell. They were pretty smart though and prepared extensively to achieve the desired goals they had planned out for themselves.

• The End: This is a barren land where the Ender Dragon resides. Killing it will allow the player to teleport back to their original spawning point and receive “The End” achievement after sparking the ending credits to the game.
  • The Ender Dragon: considered to be the boss of the game. It has 200 hit points and can be healed by nearby Ender crystals.

Platforms

Minecraft is available on these platforms:

• Personal Computers

This was the original platform for Minecraft and can run on Microsoft (obviously, since they own it), OS X, and Linux.

There is a new Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition that just came out for the exclusive use of the Windows 10 operating system. This allows you to play with any one of your Xbox Live friends (but not anyone playing with the Xbox One version) and anyone playing the Pocket Edition version of Minecraft.

The Microsoft Windows 10 Edition is available here: Microsoft Store

• PS3/PS4

The PS3 version was released in December 2013 and the PS4 version was released Sept 2014. The PlayStation Vita was released in October 2014. They are identical to the Xbox versions.

The PS4 Version is available here: PlayStation Store

• Mobile Devices

The Pocket Edition of the game was released on the Android Market in October 2011, with an iOS version released in November 2011. This version does not contain all the features of the console or PC version, mainly focusing on creative building and primitive survival aspects of the game.

The Android Version is available here: Google Play

The iOS Version is available here: Apple Store

• Xbox360/Xbox One

The Xbox 360 version was released in May 2012. This version was different from the computer-based version because it had a newly designed crafting system, a different control interface, split-screen multiplayer modes, and the ability to play with anyone on Xbox Live. One major difference aesthetically was that the worlds were not really “infinite” and the players were stuck within invisible walls.

The Xbox One version of the game was released in September 2014. It is very much similar to the Xbox 360 version, but provides larger maps and other enhancements like expanded multiplayer features.

The Xbox 360 Version is available here: Xbox Store

Downloadable Content by User-Generations

The interesting thing about Minecraft. Most of this crap comes in the form of modifications to the base game, texture packs and custom maps.

Personally, I have experienced a lot of these different user-generated items. On the PS3 and PS4 console versions, you can easily find custom items online by entering the information into the console. This allows you to use the custom content.

A lot of texture packs include crap from Pokémon, The Hunger Games, and Portal. Mojang and Microsoft offer their own official texture packs called “resource packs” that allow different textures to exist in the world that is created.

Now enjoy a Let’s Play courtesy of the first video I clicked on on YouTube: