Alpha (paid) and Classic (free) are completely different.

Classic is just a big sandbox where you can run around placing and destroying blocks. You are invincible, have infinite blocks of all types, so you don't need to gather resources or build tools or worry about survival. It's always day and there are no monsters. The point in this mode is just to build what ever you want. People can get pretty creative since it's a fully deformable environment. There's even a multiplayer mode where people can collectively work on building massive and amazing structures. The map in this mode is a limited size.

Alpha is a single-player "survival" mode that has a lot more features. You start with nothing and have limited abilities and health. You need to gather resources, build/craft tools and objects, mine for rarer but more valuable resources, and create shelter to survive the night. There is a day/night cycle and at night, monsters come out and try to kill you. In this mode, the map is "infinite", dynamically generating land as you explore. There are a lot interesting features to explore, like mountain ranges/valleys, underground cave systems. The ability to craft all sorts of interesting objects is also a big feature.

Here is a pretty neat fan-made trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMTedT6P0I

TLDR: In short, Free (classic) is a pretty fun sandbox to just run around and build stuff, but Paid (alpha) is the main survival game mode with a lot of awesome features.

Oh, I may check out alpha then. I tried classic and it was kinda cool, but not good enough for me to want to risk spending any money on alpha.

It is interesting and fun. It is somewhat limited in what you can craft, but still fun. Now that I've figured out how to make a compass (that points towards your starting location) I can feel a bit safer exploring.

But then I also made a huge pillar near my starting spot and poured a bucket of lava on top of it to make a huge glowing spire so I can easily find home from long distances at night.

HOLLLY SHIT I"M NOT THE ONLY ONE.

I ONLY SAW THIS CAUSE I"M TAKING A BREAK

lol... no i actually posted a link to minecraft.net a few weeks ago when i first go into it.

lol alderian


Yeah I pretty much can't get lost, I walled off and torched an entire region, so the whole countryside is safe. I also built extensive tunnels to all my bases so I never have to go outside except maybe for wood.

Of course I *do* go outside but... yeah.

I was kind of sad that they added the compass. To me part of the fun was the sense of dread you get when you're lost: since the world is infinite, you may never find your way home.

hahah.

Or you die and poof you are home, but without whatever you were carrying.

Of course you can also just use Cartograph to get a map of your world.

i play the natural way - self-preservation at any cost, even if it means never finding home.

and i would never use the cartographer that's basically cheating imo

I guess it depends on what you are looking to get out of the game. By the way, my four kids (ages 5-16) also all play. The younger two play on peaceful mode, and I've switched to it as well as having the monsters doesn't make it more fun for me. With emphasis on "for me".

Besides, once you've exhausted the basic fun you get out of playing a game, a few "cheats" can add to the enjoyment. For example, after beating GTA:Vice City, it was a lot of fun to turn on flying cars and summon a tank and then use the tank's cannon pointed backwards constantly firing to fly around the islands. (Cheating in a multi-player game such as diplomacy or first person shooters is of course bad, and cheating to beat a one person game is lame.)

God, I just spent like four hours straight playing this. I've got a pretty sweet two story beach house now though. My biggest fear is getting lost, and to that end I've devised an elaborate scheme of torches to communicate the whereabouts of my home... just to discover now from the wiki that you can build signs. lol.

How are you guys setting stuff on fire?

abgemacht: Here are two basic methods for light and fire
Stick+Coal creates torches
Flint+Iron creates flint and steel, which can be used to ignite combustibles
(both of these recipes is just one of each. I'll leave figuring out the arrangement to you)

http://minecraftwiki.net/
has a list of crafting recipes, however the page is sometimes down and just redirects to the forums.

Thanks!

I prefer to play on hard. It's more exciting when there's a sense of danger. Even on hard, avoiding the monsters can be pretty easy. Once you're established, a well-built base will easily keep you safe. Even clearing out the creepers (exploding green guys) in the morning gets pretty trivial with some well-placed pits. You can hit them with a sword when they are stuck in depth-2 pit, without having to get close enough to cause them to explode. The only real danger is recklessly exploring random caves.

I wish there was an option to turn on a "nightmare mode" (after you've built up some decent defenses), where the monsters really come at you hard and smartly, i.e. a few green guys explode strategically in an attempt to breach your defenses for others.

lol nightmare mode. fuck that. i would have to implement TNT traps, which atm are totally unecessary... all you need is a fence.


but yeah i have a large "safe" region which is the size of several chunks... so I don't *really* ever need to leave, though I'm sure exploration fever will overtake me soon.

i also built a landbridge across an ocean and minecarted the whole thing. now i go to the other side and strip mine the islands and put the raw materials on the carts.

that way i dont have to fuck up the pristine landscape of my homeland. and of course i've torched all those islands too so that i'm totally safe.

i haven't played minecraft yet, but : "that way i dont have to fuck up the pristine landscape of my homeland. and of course i've torched all those islands too so that i'm totally safe." - that totally makes me want to playz it.. or maybe i'm horribly sleep deprived.

wow... the way you guys describe this game makes me want to play... but the graphics from the trailer were horrid!!!

I think they're cool. It's like a blast from the past.

Yeah, the graphics are nothing compared to most games these days, but good graphics aren't everything.

Babak, the fact that the game stands so firmly despite its "horrid" graphics must really mean a lot then. The gameplay is just that compelling. I think the game is just going for that type of style, which is quite awesome (a blast from the past, as abge said). I love how the sun is just a big square.

As of this post:
843345 registered users, of which 237957 (28.21%) have bought the game.
http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp

Yeah, that many people find the gameplay compelling despite graphics.

Is the world infinate?

The only complaint I have is that my computer really complains when I play it. I'd like to play it on my laptop, but I'm afraid it could explode.

In the version you have to buy the world is infinite. The more you explore, the bigger the save file(s).

abge, have you turned down the clipping plane under the options? And have you changed to the simpler textures? Those should help the performance.

I have lowered some things in the options, but I don't see either of those options.

Sorry, didn't have it up and running when I posted that so used general terms rather than the specific labels in this particular game...

clipping plane = render distance of far, normal, short, tiny
textures = graphics of fancy or fast

Of course it isn't as much fun when you have to have the render distance down to short or tiny.

I do wish that survival were a little harder. After my first few mishaps, I haven't come close to dying. The night baddies aren't aggressive enough. If they could destroy materials... well then... maybe we'd take lessons from the three little pigs.

Try setting your graphics to fast and your render distance to tiny. It's a great game, but it seems like it's not very optimized code as despite the simplistic graphics, it can still be hugely taxing on a computer. Check out the processing it uses in your task manager, it's huge! It's like more than Starcraft 2. Anyway, I still have fun playing on tiny, but I amp it up to far for short periods to get my bearings or to help find my way back home.

It makes me wonder if it isn't utilizing 3 video card hardware whachamacallits and instead is just doing everything in the software.

it runs in java, right? i assume java is about 10 times as processor intensive as a real programming language, though i don't know anything about the graphics card usage.

Also massive processor usage may be down to something other than graphics, like things in the world interacting with each other; i guess.

It clearly isn't GPU intensive, but it is CPU intensive. If you think about it, each block is a discrete unit with properties. That's a lot of information for a processor. As has been said, this is an example of a very poor choice of programming language. Java should not be used for this.

Obviously, Java isn't ideal and the graphics processing could certainly be better optimized. However, I think the development choices have been mainly due to the fact that it's completely a ONE-man project and he probably just went with what he was most familiar with. It's also definitely in the prototype stage. The current "mode" is called "Alpha" since it is just an alpha version.

@orathic: Java IS a Real programming language. "10 times" is a wild misconception.

@orathic, abgemacht: Simulating the world is Not the bottleneck. The game model is actually relatively simple compared to most others. The performance issues is mainly due to the rendering the world.

I'm not an experienced programmer by any means, but performance is significantly enhanced by reducing view distance, so it strikes me that rendering the world does have a lot to with it. Either way, I'm quite sure that the code is not very well optimized, whether that has anything to do with the language of choice, I don't know. It's a great game, but the sheer amount of CPU it gobbles up suggests some brute force tactics or major redundancy.

@"Java IS a Real programming language" - but there must be some loss since you're depending on the java runtime enviroment? unless they are getting really good.... i may not be up to speed on such things.

@yebellz,

you're probably right about the rendering being more difficult.

@yebellz,

Java is a real programming language, but that doesn't mean it's good for everything. JRE is notoriously slow and inefficient


I should say, I'm not knocking this guy. He's done a great job. Just saying...

im so addicted to minecraft lol

@orathaic - .Net is a runtime as well. Visual Basic has always had a runtime. Any more, very few systems you develop applications in are purely compiled. The all compile into some form of bit code that goes through a runtime.

maybe it's just me, and all the programming i did was for physics, so it didn't need to look good or have a front end, it just needed to run fast... never wrote anyhting except in C, (well apart from all the php i've been writing of late, but that's completely different...)

Been there done that on an Iris Indigo back around 1992. C applications to model groundwater, worst case wind event analysis using gausian theory, and soil cleaning speeds based on numerous factors. All part of the Fernald Superfund project.