Minecraft

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Let's go to a place where everything is made of blocks, where the only limit is your imagination."

—Official Minecraft Trailer

Minecraft is a 2011 cross-platform, block-based sandbox game focused on mining and crafting, along with building structures. It has three main modes: "Survival," "Creative" and "Hardcore," that can be played either single or multiplayer.

Survival features a crafting system, a day/night cycle and hostile monsters. Players are dropped into an empty world with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their back and a map. At night, zombies, skeleton archers, Giant Spiders, exploding Creepers, and teleporting Endermen roam the land (unless you're playing on Peaceful Mode [1]). The player is forced to scrounge for supplies, building up a base to protect from the nocturnal beasts while also mining deep underground for valuable materials. The landscape is also populated by more docile animals, like cows, that can be killed for their meat (which fills your food meter) and other useful items. Even after its official release, the game is constantly updated with many new features and tweaks, and players who have already paid for the game receive these for free. For more details about Survival mode, refer to the analysis section.

Creative is a simple sandbox mode. Players can place or destroy blocks as they see fit, and can switch between various kinds of blocks. For the most part, it's focused solely on building, and can be used to easily make very large structures or pixel art. Creative removes the health bar, gives the player infinite access to every item/block in the game, lets the player spawn nearly every kind of mob[2] and gives them the ability to fly.

Minecraft became a worldwide sensation, selling hundreds of millions of copies[3] and popularizing Let's Plays on YouTube (like those from Yogscast) along with attracting a dedicated modding community and launching a multimedia franchise. Countless creations have been made inside the game, from the Starship Enterprise to portions of Westeros. With its addicting gameplay, iconic imagery and intuitive mechanics, Minecraft is one of the defining games of The New Tens.

Notable for its frequent updates and famous creator Notch (now working on other projects, having turned Minecraft and Mojang over to Microsoft). It was originally intended as a Spiritual Successor of the free game Infiniminer and is inspired by Dwarf Fortress as well. The full game was released on November 18, 2011.[4] The game also exists as a mobile version for Android and iOS. Also available for most modern game consoles (Xbox 360, Play Station 3, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch).

Worth mentioning, one of the texts that can pop up at the title screen is "Less addictive than TVTropes!"

Tropes used in Minecraft include:
  • Abandoned Mine: As of the adventure update, you can now find these around the world.
  • Action Bomb: The Creeper.
  • All Deserts Have Cacti: Cacti can grow in any sandy area, but they're most common in the Desert biome.
  • All-Natural Gem Polish
  • The Aloner: You are this in single player mode. It's just you and a world (potentially) eight times the size of the planet Earth, populated with eerily abandoned structures and filled with hostile monsters. The few NPCs you meet serve only to emphasize how alone you are, as they are clearly not human.
  • Ambiguously Human:
    • In keeping with the theme of the game, the player character is a very blocky man named "Steve?" whose body is composed various shaped cubes and rectangles. Yes, that's "Steve?", with a question mark.
    • Averted with the "You are the Creeper" mod, in which you are a Creeper. Literally. It's not one of those 'Hurr-durr I changed mah skin' mods, either. Played straight with the 'enemies' you face, however.
    • Villagers look closer to Neanderthals than anything else.
  • Angels, Devils, and Squid: The extra dimensions. The (former) Sky Dimension, the Nether and the End.
  • April Fools' Day: The 2011 April Fool's Day featured a massive parody of Team Fortress 2 with the Steve Co. Supply Crates. They were found randomly in newly-generated territory and glowed at night. They were indestructible (except by TNT). When clicking on them, a sign pops up that says it requires a key to open, and had a link to the Store. In the store, after placing $10,000 worth of silly items in the cart, the site would start displaying flashing colors, and a velociraptor popped up and moved across the screen. After a warning, of course. On April 1, an "April Fools Day" sign moved across the store page, along with a rearrangement of "Never Gonna Give You Up." Sadly, the store page no longer exists.
  • Apocalyptic Log: You can find a broken, dusty record. If you play it, it details the final moments of someone being chased by an unknown mob and he cries out suddenly as the record ends. It only raises the question, who recorded it?
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Redstone. Putting dust on the end of a stick makes an infinite power source (unless you short it out). It's also magnetic, given that it's used to make the Compass, and, as of 1.0, can be used as an ingredient in brewing potions, extending the desired effect's duration.
  • Arrows on Fire: Bows can be enchanted so the arrows they fire will set mobs on fire if struck. A similar effect can be achieved by shooting an arrow through fire or lava.
  • Artificial Brilliance:
    • Creepers deliberately wait to ambush you by hiding in alcoves until you pass by.
    • Pigmen group into tribes. Just look at the research!
    • Tamed wolves will follow the player down stairs rather than leap off ledges. They're also smart enough to not attack creepers.
    • Peaceful mobs now have a chance of running from a source of damage, including wolves.
    • As of the full release:
      • Endermen, which get hurt by touching water, will teleport away as soon as they touch water.
      • Endermen teleport away from approaching arrows.
      • Endermen teleport away from approaching players, if they are in combat with them, to avoid melee attacks. However, if you wear a pumpkin on your head, you can engage them.
      • Mojang recently hired an AI specialist. This is the result. The fan base is divided on the zombies, but most people agree giving this pathfinding ability to wolves is a great idea, and giving this pathfinding ability to creepers is The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Enemies will only attack if there's a direct line of sight to the player. This results in awkward scenarios when groups of Creepers cluster atop a glass ceiling, unable to explode due to the completely transparent material blocking their view. At Minecraft Con 2010, Notch said he intentionally made them stupid.
      • This is acceptable to Minecraft players; if creepers could explode no matter what was between them and the player, it would be damn near impossible to construct a good shelter.
    • In prior versions of the game, Ghasts wouldn't aim their fireballs at the player character himself, but instead at the camera. Normally this wasn't an issue, since the game is played in first person view by default, but players are able to manually toggle into third person mode; thus, an easy way of dealing with Ghasts was to simply pop into third person mode whenever you saw one and laugh while their fireballs sailed harmless over your character. This has since been corrected, though.
    • If you are inside your house and a spider spots you, it will climb up the wall in an attempt to get on your roof and possibly get at you (if you have a gap in your roof). However, due to a quirk in the programming, the spider will drop off the wall if it climbs higher than your character. Thus, if your house is built high enough, the spider will repeatedly damage himself through fall damage each time it drops.
    • Tamed wolves like to play in water, but used to have trouble telling the difference between water and lava.
    • While them not being able to use ladders is in all ways logical, tamed wolves will just jump after you if you go down a ladder, no matter how long the descent is. Time to go looking for a new dog...
    • Wolves also have a hard time getting through open doors. It's usually a better idea to make them sit and then push them into the house through the doorway.
    • In the rare event in which there is an above-ground lava pool, neutral mobs (which spawn in light patches at night) can be seen almost ceremoniously throwing themselves into the lava.
    • There have been reported cases in which Endermen, which die if they touch water, have moved one of the walls away from a water source.
    • Most enemies have effectively no pathfinding - meaning they will gleefully jump into bottomless pits, walk through lava, and drown in order to reach the player. The pathfinding is basically only "run at player, jump when you reach a block in your way".
      • This has been since averted by the new pathfinding AI implemented by a new Mojang employee.
  • Artistic License: Biology: The trees that grow apples are referred to in-game as oak.
  • Ascended Meme: Endermen can be seen as this applied to Herobrine (see Urban Legend of Zelda below) - like Herobrine, they have glowing eyes, shuffle around blocks to make strange and unnatural formations, and aren't really aggressive by default but don't take kindly to being watched.
    • Every single patch since around Beta 1.7.3 except 1.1 has had "Removed Herobrine" in its patch notes.
  • Asteroids Monster: Slimes come in four sizes, which can withstand and dispense proportional amounts of damage. If you kill a larger slime, it will split into two to four slimes of the next size down. The smallest size slime will still chase you around but can't hurt you (unless it pushes you off a ledge or into lava).
  • Awesome but Impractical:
    • The note blocks. Do you know how big of a Redstone circuit even a SHORT song requires for those things?!
      • An example of this. Just how long do you think it took to make that? [5]
    • This. It looks awesome but it's both useless and noisy/annoying.
    • Iron, Diamond, (both mostly compact storage options) and Obsidian blocks are pretty cool looking (and in obsidian's case, really freaking tough), but the first two cost a whopping 9 ingots each, while the latter requires a lava source block (which there is a limited supply of), and can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe, even then needing several seconds per block to mine it - and the luck or preparation to avoid having it fall into said lava.
      • As an illustration: building a single layer of Iron Blocks as decorative trim for a 18x18 house requires mining 648 iron ore blocks. Now imagine mining that many diamonds...
    • Clay (and by proxy, brick) - While being very durable-looking, the production burns through coal like nothing else, and is extremely space-filling in the inventory- even if crafted into blocks for storage, they have to be mined again in order to smelt them. They made a comeback from being one of the rarest blocks in the game to being far more common, which used to be one of clay's impractical factors.
    • Cookies. They're pretty impractical with the ingredients being extremely rare, and a single cooked porkchop can do better than 8 of them.
      • While ingredients will be not as rare with the addition of Cocoa Beans dropping from Jungle Trees in 1.3[6], using them for healing remains a...poor choice.
    • Exploiting an oversight by sprint-jumping on a low ceiling can almost double your speed, but this drains your hunger meter extremely fast.
    • Cool, but Impractical piston trains.
    • Gold tools create the best enchantments of any material and mine even faster than diamond, but they're even less durable than wood and can't mine any ore except coal.
    • Golden apples used to be this, being extremely rare and requiring 72 gold ingots to craft a single one, but they healed all health. Now they're a more standard item.
    • The majority of contraptions involving excessive amounts of TNT. Endless fun for rigging up minefields, self-destruct systems, and even artillery cannons. Almost always requires great caution and planning to set up anything more complex than a basic pressure plate mine. In addition, restocking on TNT requires hunting down considerable numbers of creepers for the required gunpowder. And if that isn't enough, TNT remains one of the only artificial blocks endermen can still pick up and place.
  • Awesome Yet Practical:
    • Wood. Extremely plentiful, especially if you replant saplings. Essential for workbenches, chests, and tools, but also makes doors, pressure plates, boats, fence posts, stairs, bowls, signs, and even charcoal for torches once you construct a furnace.
    • The update which added dye to the game also added the ability to dye sheep. Not only is this endlessly amusing, but it is somewhat more efficient than manually dyeing wool blocks, as shearing sheep has the potential to give more than one block of wool.
      • You can also breed specific colors of sheep by giving them wheat. For instance, if you were to give two black colored sheep some wheat, they'll give birth to a black colored baby! Color specific breeding program, anyone?
        • Forget black sheep. How about breeding pink ones?
      • The best part is, the wool on the sheep keeps the same color after it regrows.
    • If you have access to the Nether, obsidian jumps from Awesome but Impractical to this. Dig around until you find a cave, and then vast seas of lava open up. Unfortunately, you can't convert it into obsidian while it's in the Nether; you'll have to carry the lava back to the normal world in buckets, so you'll need to carry a lot of buckets or make a lot of trips, and it'll still take a while to make usable obsidian even with a diamond pickaxe, but it's a small price to pay for building material that perfectly resists creeper explosions.
      • Obsidian can become even more practical if you pour lava into a hollow mold in the shape of whatever you're building. It's pretty easy to figure out, and lets you bypass the time-consuming task of building a diamond pickaxe and spending fifteen additional seconds on each obsidian block you want to mine.
    • If you have a bunch of paintings, a metal door, and a switch, you can get a very useful set up where the metal door is behind a painting and you can still walk through it when the door is open. It's possibly handy for Survival Multiplayer, if you want/need to hide the entrance to something important.
    • Trying to use a bed in the Nether or End makes it explode. Not only is this funny as all hell, it's great for mining and offense, due to the fact that's it's more powerful and less expensive than TNT. Expect a speedrunner to use these in lieu of actual weapons during the Ender Dragon fight.
    • With the addition of Enchanting tables in Beta 1.9, bookshelves have jumped to this -- having bookshelves nearby whilst enchanting will increase the level of some enchantments, and if the enchanter is lucky, give the item two (or even three) properties. More bookshelves means higher enchanting levels.
  • Badass Adorable: Wolves, when tamed. They follow you, sit when right-clicked, have cute little puppy-dog eyes, shake themselves dry when getting out of water, tilt their heads to the side and beg when you pull out food, and murder anything that you attack with melee. Except creepers.
  • Bandit Mook: Endermen have the ability to steal many kinds of blocks. As of 1.0, they can only steal dirt, sand, and similar loose materials, but if you built your walls out of those things.... You also cannot recover the block even if you kill the Enderman that stole it, unless you wait until he puts it down somewhere.
  • Beating a Dead Player: If you died but haven't respawned yet, monsters will keep trying to attack you. [1]
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Spiders and silverfish.
  • Bling of War: You can craft tools, swords, and armor out of gold. Gold tools and weapons are Awesome but Impractical (see above), but gold armor is the strongest armor made from a renewable resource and still has the highest enchantability..
  • Booby Trap: Desert pyramids have treasure rooms with a pressure plate in the middle of it. If the plate is stepped on, it triggers the TNT buried below and will blow you to hell, along with the loot. Jungle temples have tripwires that, when activated, makes dispensers nearby fire arrows at you.
    • However, the room beneath the desert pyramid is poorly lit, allowing mobs to spawn inside and set off the trap, destroying the loot long before you even get there.
    • The player can also create their own booby trap to use against other players or mobs, from simple to very elaborate.
  • Boring but Practical:
    • Cobblestone. As a building material, it's relatively durable. As a crafting material, it's abundant. Outside of massive super-projects, you'd be hard pressed to be at a loss as all the stone you mine turns into cobblestone. It's also one of the materials (all derived from wood, water, plants, and monsters) that can never run out as you can always create more through a combination of lava and water.
    • The fishing rod. Obviously used for fishing, but can also be used to yank mobs toward you (or off tall places), knock mobs back, reel in transports like boats and minecarts and (bizarrely) knock pictures off walls. In the player versus player scene, it's one of the most powerful items due to its ability to knock players back.
    • Bone Meal is extremely useful as a fertilizer when you want to make something grow instantly instead of waiting several in-game days. You can make saplings instantly grow into trees, have your wheat/melon/pumpkin farm become fully grown and ready to be harvested, turn ordinary grass into tall grass and flowers, and you can even grow a single regular mushroom into a huge mushroom that can be harvested for over a dozen more mushrooms. Best of all, you can get three bone meal (on average) from a single skeleton, so they're quite plentiful if you're a skilled fighter, and even if you're not, you can usually scavenge a bit at dawn when all the roaming skeletons burn up.
  • Bonsai Forest: This is variable as of the more recent updates. Pine trees in the cold biomes can grow quite large. The standard biomes other trees appear in can also grow to great size at random. It is not uncommon to see a grove of small trees around a much larger tree or two.
  • Bottomless Magazines: A bow with the "Infinity" enchantment doesn't actually use up any arrows in your inventory. The bow is limited by durability, but that's still the equivalent of six full stacks of arrows, or twenty-four if you use the "Unbreaking" enchantment. It can also be repaired indefinitely.
  • Bottomless Pit: If you manage to get past the indestructible bedrock at the bottom of the map, there is a never-ending pit called the void, which mysteriously saps your health, killing you very quickly and then destroying all your items.
    • Not to mention The End. God help you if you start off on a floating island there. The Enderdragon can knock you off, resulting in a very humiliating One-Hit Kill.
  • A Boy and His X: Thanks to the tameable wolves.
    • And, as of Minecraft 1.2, tameable ocelots (that become cats when tamed).
    • In the 1.17 update, there are even tameable axolotls.
  • Breakable Weapons: All weapons, tools and armor have a fixed number of uses before breaking. Bows are somewhat unique in that they lose durability when fired, but not when used to club things over the head; unfortunately, they are no more effective in this manner than fists.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: The ending directly addresses the player.
  • Bubblegloop Swamp: One of the ten biomes. It has flat terrain and shallow pools of water containing lily pads able to support your weight. Edible mushrooms are more common here, and trees are overgrown with vines hanging to the ground. The water was originally very dark, but this was changed after players complained that it was too ugly.
  • Canine Companion: Wolves can be tamed with bones, and will follow you around and fight for you.
  • Celebrity Endorsement:
    • House music producer Deadmau5 loves Minecraft; about 1/4 or so of his Youtube videos are Minecraft-related, and he's looking to do a remix project with the game's composer.
    • One of the game's most popular multiplayer servers is Deadmau5's own server, which includes several giant statues and effigies of the mouse-headed musician (including one made out of solid diamond blocks) and some pretty amazing architecture.
    • Seananners of Machinima Respawn also has many videos of Minecraft, some with Deadmau5.
    • Tobuscus has a long-running Let's Play of Minecraft and has two hit singles, "Safety Torch" and "I Can Swing My Sword", based on it.
  • Cobweb of Disuse: Poisonous spiders have webs in abandoned mine shafts. They can also be found in other structures, most notably in abandoned villages.
  • Charged Attack: A game mechanic for the bow, introduced in the Beta 1.8 update. The longer the bow is charged, the more damage the arrow does and it will fly faster and farther. Luckily, skeletons do not possess this ability for their bows.
  • Cherry Tapping: Someone has defeated the Enderdragon with chicken eggs.
  • Commonplace Rare: Saddles were like this for a long time when they could only be found in dungeon chests, although this is alleviated somewhat now that some NPC butchers will sell you as many saddles as you want. Apples and cocoa beans were also like this for a while, until they became renewable resources via trees.
    • Clay used to be very rare, making building structures of brick an exercise in determination. Clay is a lot more common than it used to be now.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Skeletons will spin and shoot you with pin-point accuracy and a reaction time no human could ever achieve. Particularly obvious with the Beta 1.8 update, which introduced bow pull-back. The longer you hold the bow back, the more powerful the shot. Unfortunately, skeletons seem to be immune to this.
  • Continuing Is Painful: Played straight. When you die, you'll drop all the items you're carrying, and all but six level's worth of your experience points are Lost Forever. This penalty can be softened by having fewer than six levels of EXP, causing you to lose only half of them, and if you died near your spawn point or remember where you were when you died, you can run back and retrieve all your stuff. If you happened to die by falling in lava though, kiss all your items goodbye!
  • Convection, Schmonvection:
    • Not only can you cross lava pools with nothing more than a bridge you made of gravel or sand, you can scoop it up with a bucket and carry it around with you.
    • You can stop the flow of lava with blocks of snow. It doesn't even melt!
    • Wood and other flammable blocks now catch fire up to three blocks away from lava. Players and enemies are still unaffected unless they touch the lava, however.
  • Cool but Inefficient:
    • Gold anything. As in real life, gold is treated as a soft malleable metal meaning that, at best, things made from gold were no better than the wood versions. Gold was really only useful for decoration and making watches, though presently they can mine through certain materials faster than even diamond...except they're just as fragile as they always were.
    • Golden booster tracks were introduced to defy this, but they didn't work until a glitch exploit that allowed for even faster boosting was removed.
    • Golden Apples used to be extremely impractical (see Awesome but Impractical) but now they are made with fewer resources. They still look cool and give a cool bonus effect of regeneration, but they don't do anything that isn't well outclassed by other items.
    • Throwable negative effect potions. There's nothing they can do to monsters that whacking them with a sword can't accomplish just as easily. Splash potions can, however, be more effective in multiplayer PvP.
  • Cool Gate. With Obsidian, you can make yourself your very own Portal Network.
  • Couch Gag: Every time you open Minecraft, a different phrase is across the title. Though between the first Beta release and Beta 1.2_01, all it said was "Finally Beta" as well as "Merry Xmas!" and "Happy New Year!" for those holidays. Some used to mention the game's creator, Notch, but have since been removed.
    • Sometimes the phrase will incorporate your own username now.
    • One such phrase features TV Tropes.
    • They can be edited in your minecraft.jar.
  • Media Research Failure: This Fox News article states that Infiniminer was made by Notch as a prototype to Minecraft. While Notch was inspired by it, Infiniminer was actually made by Zachtronics Industries.
  • The Croc Is Ticking: All the monsters make their own distinct noises that warn you when they're near. Of all monster noises, though, the most dreaded is the Creeper's hiss. This is because Creepers don't hiss (or make ANY noise, for that matter) until they're right next to you, and they only hiss for a second and a half before they explode. [7] So when you hear a Creeper's hiss, you usually only have time to think "Oh Crap" before the Creeper detonates and kills or severely injures you.

sssssssssssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS-*BOOM*

  • Cuteness Proximity: Many, many, MANY gamers, including most of the popular L Pers, are reduced to baby talking hysterics and "awwws" at the mere sight of a tamed wolf.
    • Taken even further here when Shawn sees the "wolves" at the end of the Mars Mission.
    • Ocelots. Cats. Kittens. That is all.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The default buttons for walking and 'toss whatever is in your hand' button are right next to each other. It is normally a simple inconvenience — until you accidentally throw your diamond pick into lava. It also happens to be the same button that is commonly "Previously selected weapon" in a great deal of PC first-person shooters. Fortunately, you can change the Drop button to something harder to reach, but most people don't bother until after it's already caused a big enough problem.
    • Just try going back and forth between Minecraft and any game that requires multiple presses of the attack button in order to perform multiple attacks. Neither will end well.
    • Going the other way, holding the shift key lets you sneak. This reduces your speed, makes enemies less likely to notice you, and most importantly, allows you to walk right up to the edge of a cliff without falling off. It's not uncommon for someone who plays a lot of Minecraft to eventually take this for granted and subsequently fall to their death in some other game where sneaking/crouching lacks that functionality.
    • Sprinting movement in other FPS games is completely swapped in Minecraft. The shift key, usually used for sprinting, is used for sneaking around in Minecraft.
  • Darkness Equals Death: Enemy mobs spawn at night or in the dark.
  • Dead Character Walking: Mobs have a glitch where if you kill them, and exit quickly and on return they will be alive and moving around in whatever position in dying animation they were in when you exited.
  • Debug Mode: Previously, by holding shift and changing the world type in the world create menu, you could create a "Debug World", which is empty void with every block in the game in every state in the game. It has since been removed.
    • In the 1.14 update, a "Debug Stick" was left in, only obtainable in creative mode, which could change the state of any block by interacting with it.
  • Dem Bones: There are arrow-shooting skeletons among the many enemies.
  • Defictionalization: Stone pickaxes are available for purchase.
    • LEGO Minecraft. That is all.
  • Difficult but Awesome: The bow, as of the Adventure Update. Charging it to full brings your movement to a crawl, making you a sitting duck unless you have superhuman reflexes, but it deals more damage than a diamond sword. It's also very accurate at 20 meters, but it's possible to kill monsters as much as 100 meters away if you compensate for gravity by aiming above your target.
  • Disadvantageous Disintegration: Traps that blow up, set fire to or bring cacti into uncomfortably close contact with enemies, while fun, will also generally destroy whatever items they drop.
  • Dronejam: Animals can, and often will, block narrow passages, and there rarely is another way to get through but killing them.
  • Dug Too Deep:
    • The bottom z level of every Classic mode map is nothing but lava. In the full game, every map has a rough layer of unbreakable bedrock (which can be revealed in Classic with water); if you somehow get past that, you'll find an endless void that quickly kills you.
    • In Beta 1.2.0, the rules changed so the deeper you dug, the more light you needed to prevent enemies from spawning, until eventually they could spawn even in direct sunlight. However, Notch reverted it back to the old light rules in 1.2.1, saying it was too annoying and he'd have to come up with a better way to carry out this trope.
    • There has been discussion about the addition of megabeasts, sea monsters, and prefix mobs which may make this trope a greater reality.
    • It has always been possible, using external editing tools to remove the bedrock layer of the map and literally fall out of the bottom of the world, but the Adventure Update made it both easier and significantly creepier. Easier in that Creative Mode allows you to destroy any block with a single hit, up to and including the otherwise-indestructible bedrock. Creepier in that The Void is now a pitch-black... well... void, glittering with the same particle effects used for the Endermen. And it kills you. (For comparison, the pre-1.8 void still killed you, but it was at least the color of the sky.)
    • As of Beta 1.8, the immediate area above bedrock level has a peculiar fog that precludes seeing much beyond twenty meters, so bedrock-level branchmines and caverns are rather difficult to navigate, with the reduced viewing radius, and the reduced viewing distance might hide hostile mobs. It has since been removed.
  • Dummied Out:
    • Inverted; some items appeared long before their function was decided (milk, eggs, fishing rod, slimeballs, bookshelves).
    • Played straight with sponge blocks, which used to be the means of removing the water in Classic and Indev. They have no more use since Infdev, although the player can still edit them into his inventory.
      • With the addition of Creative Mode in Beta 1.8, sponge blocks can now be obtained legitimately again... well, about as legitimate as a built-in inventory editor can get.
    • Chain armor was also going to be used at some point, but was dummied out as well. It was later added back in fully, and can be obtained by trading with villagers. You used to be able to craft the armor using the (since removed) fire item. While it looks cool, the chain armor has less protection and durability than iron armor, making it fairly pointless.
  • Easier Than Easy: Peaceful difficulty, which gets rid of hostile monsters and grants regenerating health. Falls and lava remain dangerous, though. Creative Mode removes your health bar altogether, making you invincible, but you can still die by falling into The Void.
  • Easter Egg:
    • If you look in the splashes.txt file, you'll see that the deja vu splash is listed twice.
    • "This message will never appear on the splash screen, isn't that weird?"
  • Elaborate Underground Base: You're only a few well wasted hours of digging away.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Ghasts, house-sized, floating tentacled creatures with an anguished-looking face and the ability to spit burning explosives with pinpoint accuracy. And they sound like little children -- traumatized little children in extreme pain.
  • Eldritch Location:
    • The Far Lands used to be an example of this. At very great distances from the origin point the game glitched out, distorting structures, preventing blocks from being placed or even staying put, generating immense lag, and all in all making the game unplayable. The game's creator said that he hadn't intended for this to happen, but left it in because he liked the idea of physics breaking down at the "edge" of an infinite map that was virtually impossible to reach without cheating. However, the terrain generator overhaul in Beta 1.8 accidentally Dummied Them Out.
    • The Nether. Not only do compasses spin around without direction inside of it, so do clocks. It can't even be mapped! Also, beds explode in the Nether. You have been warned.
      • Maps do work in the Nether, but only the ceiling will be mapped so it will look the same everywhere. They are still useful for finding your position relative to where the map was made.
    • And now thanks to a glitch in the Adventure update pre-release, we have abandoned mine systems. They are generated procedurally underground in small chunks, but because of a bug in their code, any new chunk created while leaving a mine shaft will be another mine shaft. This leads to endless, labyrinthine catacombs that may not have existed at all if you had tried to tunnel into them from above first.
    • The realm known as "The End." The sky is grey TV-static style, it has a dull green ambience to it, the world is nothing but floating islands in a black void, giant obsidian-like pillars dot the otherwise featureless landscape, and giant black dragons fly above. It's also home to Endermen. And once you enter The End, the only way out is killing the Enderdragon.
  • Elemental Crafting: Played straight, except see the entry below for Reality Ensues.
  • Emergency Weapon: Axes, picks, and (most) shovels deal more damage to mobs than bare hands. That said, they were not intended as weapons, and will break twice as fast as swords.
  • Endless Game: Before Minecraft 1.0 came out, there was no ending to the game.
  • Enemy Mine: Any mob hit by a skeleton's arrow will stop attacking you to deal with its aggressor unless you hit it again to focus it back towards you (and once that mob hits the skeleton, the skeleton will ignore you to attack them!).
  • Eternal Equinox: Day lasts ten minutes, night lasts seven minutes, and they're separated by an intermediate period 90 seconds long. Though the moon has different phases, the moon always rises as the sun sets and vice versa, behavior typically associated with a full moon.
  • Everything's Better with Cows
  • Everything's Better with Chickens
  • Everything Breaks: Oh, yes. Except when dealing with bedrock.
  • Everything Fades: Blocks and items mysteriously disappear when dropped and left on the ground for a few minutes.
    • All mobs (including players) follow this trope as well.
  • Built With Lego
  • Lava Adds Awesome: You can collect and use lava in constructions, either as an exotic light source, a trap for intruders, or an incinerator for junk. If you're not careful, it can easily kill you or ignite wood nearby.
  • Everything's Cuter With Kittens: The new jungle biome contains ocelots. Ocelots can be domesticated into cats. Cats can be bred to make kittens, which are the first kind of baby animal whose head doesn't look disproportionately large. Whereas tamed wolves will fight for you, cats are pretty much useless, which basically means they were added just because they're cute.
    • As of 12w05a, Creepers will run away from Cats if they are within a 6-7 block radius, thus making Cats useful Creeper deterrents.
  • Everything Is Messier With Pigs
  • Everything's Squishier with Cephalopods: Squids! They respawn far more frequently than other passive mobs (due to not being breedable) and drop ink sacs usable in dyeing.
  • Everything's Deader with Zombies
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: You Mine stuff and you Craft stuff. That's essentially the entire game, right there.
  • Eyes Always Shut: Ghasts open their eyes for one reason - to make your life as miserable as humanly freaking possible.
  • Expy: SLEnderman
  • Fast Forward Mechanic: The bed feature which can skip the night-time portion of a day cycle.
  • Fast Tunnelling: It helps that a player has a large amount of space in pockets to store all the blocks gathered by mining.
  • Filk Song:
  • Fireballs: Ghasts shoot devastating fireballs that can destroy most blocks. Blazes shoot fireballs that will set you on fire. You can make a harmless version by throwing snowballs through a lavafall. You can make a considerably more powerful version by combining blaze powder, gunpowder, and coal, and loading the result into a dispenser.
  • Flash of Pain: Along with a brief Mercy Invincibility, on both the player and mobs.
  • Flat World: The super flat option when creating a new world. You won't find any hills, caves, dungeons, or anything else. You get nothing but grass, two layers of dirt underneath it, and the bedrock layer after that. This feature was added in version 1.1 to help players that want to build something without having to clear away the landscape first.
  • Floating Continent: It's a setting, though not available since Infdev. In Indev, set the kind to "Deep" and the size to "Huge", and you get... awesomeness.
    • The End consists of these, floating in a black void.
    • Depending on the generation of the terrain, you may sometimes get small islands floating in the air. You can also create your own floating landmass, but it will take a lot of building and terraforming.
  • Floating Platforms: You can make some, too.
  • Floating Water: In past versions, water not only floated, but duplicated itself infinitely to occupy all space below the highest point of water. Nowadays, water still has very strange physical properties. You can use a bucket to pick up a water source block and place it somewhere else, where it will create an endless flow of water that travels a limited distance horizontally.
  • Follow the Leader:
    • FortressCraft. From the looks of the trailer and other videos, it looks like Minecraft for the Xbox 360 with upgraded graphics. made even more ridiculous and redundant after the announcement that Minecraft itself was coming to the 360. Naturally, Minecraft fans have already begun ragging on the game, calling it a "ripoff", to which a rep for the team responded with this.

"I'm really honestly bemused by all the vitriol about 'copying minecraft'. You *DO* all know that Minecraft (creative) is a DIRECT copy of [Infiniminer]? And that both of those games can clearly and directly trace their routes back to Roblox, Wurm Online, Voxlap, 3d Construction Kit."

    • Before that was Manic Digger, which went so far as to even allow itself to connect to Minecraft servers. Notch was not very impressed with this.
    • Terraria is usually described as "2D Minecraft". It's worth a mention that one of the title screen messages recommends that you play it.
    • Minecraft itself was a successful result of Infiniminer clone wave.
  • For Science!: Redstone dust + various mods = "Great Scott!"
  • Fungus Humongous: In a Roofed Forest biome, you can find plenty of these, as well as grown by the player via sprinkling bonemeal on a normal mushroom.
  • Gainax Ending: After beating the Enderdragon, you get an 8 minute long scroll of confusing text. It seems to be a pair of sentient cosmic forces discussing you, the player at the keyboard. The conversation implies, among other things, that Minecraft was All Just a Dream, life itself is a much longer dream, all the monsters you've been fighting are fragments of the darkness in your heart, and humanity is the universe's attempt at understanding itself. This is probably a Shout-Out to the Herobrine Mythos [2], a persistent Urban Legend of Zelda about a stealthy, undocumented NPC changing the environment (similar to the later-introduced Enderman mob), and one of whose propagators also posted a hidden message very similar to the ending scroll in content.
  • Game Breaking Bug: Mojang doesn't really do a lot (if any) internal beta testing before releasing new updates for Minecraft, leading to a ton of these every update. What usually galls players is how many of these game-breakers manifest after minutes of play. This leads to situations where some of the fanbase thinks that maybe someone should go over the releases internally before subjecting players to it, while others think that players paid Mojang to find and detail those bugs for the company. A prime example of one of these is this.
    • Fortunately, Mojang has since begun releasing "snapshots" of updates before they release. This has fixed this problem for the most part.
  • Game Mod: Minecraft has a large and enthusiastic modding community for everything from texture changes to full-blown gameplay overhauls. Go here for a comprehensive list.
  • Gaslighting: Endermen move blocks around at night.
  • Giant Spider: One of the mobs. It's about half as tall as you, but they're the fastest mobs in the game, can often be found in groups, and are able to climb walls.
    • Cave spiders are less than half the size of the other spiders, but at twenty inches tall, they're still giant by real-life standards.
    • Jeb recently posted a screenshot suggesting we may end up with bigger spiders, too.
  • Grave Robbing: Pyramids spawn in sand biomes, and have treasure inside them. And also rotten flesh and bones. And they're booby trapped with TNT.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom: Spiders have glowing eyes in the dark, as do Endermen.
  • Gravitational Cognizance: Sand and gravel sometimes forget to have fallen down in freshly-generated terrain. Until you disturb the underside. Purty! Also shown here.
  • G-Rated Sex: When breeding two animals, they simply smoosh their faces together, and out comes a baby.
  • Green Hill Zone: The default map theme.
  • Griefer: Almost a given in this game when playing on a server. Some servers, depending on who is maintaining them, will allow griefing against other players while other severs will forbid it. If you are running a server for the first time, using the whitelist feature can help cut down on griefing. TNT is also heavily forbidden in many servers since its explosions can easily wreck structures people built or cause lag if too much TNT goes off at once.
    • In the early days of Minecraft, the Flint and Steel item was heavily banned in most servers because the fires it created made other things catch on fire very quickly until a patch slowed down the speed of fire spreading.
  • Guide Dang It: Admit it, when players are dropped into a new world, punching a tree is not the first thing they think of. With the 1.12 update, this has been mostly resolved, due to the change to "advancements" rather than achievements, and the addition of a recipe book in the crafting menu.
    • Before that update, most crafting recipes were discovered by players hacking the game.
    • One game mod fixed this by showing you every recipe. Aptly named Recipe book (at bottom of OP).
    • Even mods are far from immune - IndustrialCraft2, which adds machine components and 3 more ore types, requires more trips to documentation (typically its own wiki) for experts than Vanilla Minecraft does for newbies. And that's not even getting to the Nuclear Reactors, which were redesigned from the ground up in IC 2 and will involve some trial and error - very painful trial and error - even when you do have a rough guide.
      • Nuclear Reactors require your constant attention - unlike every other set and forget power source, you have to replace exhausted cooling cells constantly, implement the perfect pattern of fuel cells and cooling cells for maximum power without overheat, and if you turn your back to it for even a moment, you will turn back around to find an enormous crater and a blast area the size of Hiroshima carved into your map, that is, if you survived the explosion. But what really tops it is that while Nuclear Reactors are awesome, their power output can be matched or exceeded by a very large solar power array, which won't meltdown and destroy a large area of the map in the process.
    • The Aether mod comes with a feature where all you have to do is hit a certain key and a book for the world you're in (Nether, Normal, or Aether) will pop into your inventory.
  • Hammerspace: The items in your inventory, and where items placed in an Enderchest go, or even a normal chest or barrel, considering that you can fit 1700 cubic meters of stone in them.
  • Hannibal Lecture: This speech by a creeper.
  • Harder Than Hard: Hardcore mode. It's locked on the hardest difficulty, and death means your save file gets deleted.
    • The 12w18a snapshot extends Hardcore mode to multiplayer. Should you die in a sever with Hardcore enabled, you'll get a Have a Nice Death message and are automatically banned from the server.
      • If you created a single player save file through use of seed generator, it's possible to revisit the world you died in. However, the world will spawn just as it did the very first time you played on it, as in, without all of your tools and buildings.
  • Have a Nice Death: Dying on a multiplayer server produces a humorous announcement on how you died, such as "[player] blew up" and "[player] fell out of the world".
  • Healing Potion: These can be made with some water, netherwart, gold, and watermelon. Another variety made with ghast tears will steadily regenerate your health.
  • Hearts Are Health: Very Zelda-esque. This (in combination with Hyperactive Metabolism) is made fun of with logos like "I [porkchop] Minecraft."
  • Heart Symbol: These can be seen after taming a wolf, or when farm animals breed.
  • Hell Gate: Thanks to the Halloween update, you can actually build them. It's a difficult task to gather the resources required, and if you aren't careful, the most dangerous flying monsters will be able to escape into the open air, where they'll be nearly unstoppable.
  • Hitbox Dissonance: Massive slimes spawned using cheats are extremely difficult to hit in survival mode.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: It is possible to harm yourself with your own arrows, either by firing them upwards, having them recoil off an enemy currently experiencing Mercy Invincibility, or simply outrunning your arrows, which got much easier when bows became hold-to-charge instead of instant-fire.
    • This can happen to the skeletons as well, if you have another hostile mob in the way, the skeleton will be attacked by it if its' own arrow hits the mob. Skeletons can even duel each other if one were to shoot another. It's also the only way you can get records.
    • The Beta 1.4 updates up the ante with tamed Wolves that attack anything that has attacked you (except Creepers). If you manage to shoot yourself, your own Wolves will attack you.
    • Ghasts love to fly out of range of your arrows and shoot fireballs at you that aren't affected by gravity. It's possible to kill them by hitting their fireballs back at them.
    • You can even exploit this, by using the "Punch" enchantment to boost yourself forward, and travel extremely quickly.
    • One Game Mod introduces the ability to use elemental arrows, such as Ice Arrows, Exploding Arrows, Fire Arrows, and Lightning Arrows. Lightning can supercharge Creepers. Do the math.
  • Humanoid Abomination: The Endermen are very much this.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Before the Beta 1.8 update, all consumable food instantly restored your health. Food now only fills up your hunger meter, which will slowly restore your health if the hunger meter is at least 90% full.
    • Sheep now eat grass to recover their wool nearly-instantaneously.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: It's possible to make a cube of 13x13x13 tiles (2197 cubic meters of material) from the blocks you can carry around and still have more than a hundred to spare.
  • Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Nether. If you enter through one Hell Gate and leave through another, you'll find yourself displaced eight times further than you traveled within The Nether. It's a very useful shortcut, if you don't mind the fact that the place is full of steep cliffs, lava lakes, and ghasts.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: If you're really desperate to restore your hunger bar, you can eat the rotting flesh of slain zombies. It'll give you food poisoning, but it could still save your life.
    • There's also an instance of indirect cannibalism when you use bone meal to grow your crops. That's human bone you're using.
  • Improbable Weapon User: See Improvised Weapon entry below.
  • Improvised Weapon:
    • If you're fighting a mob with anything other than a sword or bow, this is likely what you're using. You can beat zombies down with axes, mining picks, shovels, blocks of stone, blocks of dirt, blocks of sand, blocks of wool, flowers, hunks of grilled pork meat, fish, doors, ladders, furnaces, minecarts, glass, mushrooms, diamonds, eggs, paintings.... Some of these are surprisingly effective against certain mobs, such as snowballs against Blazes.
  • Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Some madmen have put them deep under ground with a mob spawner. Of course, it's one of the few games where the player can put chests containing things in the most unlikely places.
    • Chests can also naturally spawn in the hallways and libraries of a stronghold, which makes a bit more sense.
  • Insistent Terminology: Notch has said via his twitter that the Minecraft default player's name is "Steve?", not "Steve".
  • Instant A.I., Just Add Pumpkins: The player can build snow or iron golems that wander around, attacking monsters. How do you get a pile of snow or iron to come to life and move independently? Give it a pumpkin for a head. Sure, why not?
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: You can now build them yourself. They're the same height as a regular block, but you can't jump up on them without first using another block as a step. That's because they count as being 1½ blocks high in character collision checks (yes, that also means you're half a block above the fence if you're "standing" on it), and you jump just less than that.
  • An Interior Designer Is You
  • In-Universe Game Clock: One complete daily cycle, from sunrise to sunset to sunrise, lasts for 20 minutes. This means that time is compressed at a 72:1 ratio (72 Minecraft days equals one real-time day). The time of day has dramatic effects on gameplay: Nighttime is when the monsters come out. Daytime is when they burn. As you can imagine, being several miles away from your house at sunset is not a good idea.
    • Beta 1.8 added moon phases.
  • Invisible Anatomy: When you're not using your fists to punch something, the item you're holding is just floating to your side.
  • Item Crafting: With a mostly drag and drop inventory, and a 2x2 or 3x3 craft slot depending on how you're doing it, you spend pretty much 11% of the time doing this.
    • This has since been sped up by adding controls that make interfaces much easier to interact with.
  • Item Farming: The villager trading system. Villagers can sell better weapons and tools for you for Emeralds, you get Emeralds by trading items to them or mining. Wheat and paper are the easiest to farm emeralds from, as they are derived from renewable resources.
  • It's a Wonderful Failure: Death in Hardcore mode. The game doesn't automatically delete your world. It sits you at the game over screen until you manually activate the deletion process.

You cannot respawn in hardcore mode! (Delete world)

  • I Was Told There Would Be Cake: In an attempt to focus public support, it was announced that cake would be added to the game if Minecraft won Indie of the year. It did, and cake was added in the first update of 2011.
  • Jungle Japes: The Jungle Biome added as of the 1.2 snapshot updates.
  • Just Add Water: Crafting is a crude form of pixelated drawing with crafting materials. No actual labor required. Even complicated items like a clock can be made by merely putting the materials together in a vague clock-like shape. To put it simply, a clock and a compass can be made using the same configuration, except the clock requires gold whereas the compass requires iron.
    • And it also literally applies to making Obsidian instead of looking for it. Just add water to lava.
  • Just One More Level: Now with its own shirt!
  • Kaizo Trap: After defeating the Enderdragon, it's still possible to be killed by any nearby Endermen or falling off the edge of the dimension.
    • And in Creative Mode, you can destroy the portal leading back to the overworld. Whoops.
  • Kill It with Fire:
    • Flint and Steel can ignite enemies. If they were already damaged or not near water, they will more than likely die. If you want to kill non-hostile spiders without them retaliating, you can ignite the ground below them, and they'll take damage without recognizing you as the source.
    • Fire as a whole is more or less lethal, unless you conveniently dug into water and lava at the same time.
    • Inverted with the Ghast: It's immune to fire and will in turn kill you with exploding fireballs that you can reflect.
    • When a pig or a cow is killed in this fashion, the porkchops / steak it drops will already be cooked.
    • Blaze powder, gunpowder, and coal can be combined to make a fire charge. This item can be used like flint and steel to start a faster-spreading fire, or you can load it into a dispenser to launch fireballs.
  • Kill It with Water: Endermen are, in addition to fire and lava, weak to water. Leading them to a pool of water or exposing them to a rainstorm will damage them.
    • As of the full release, Endermen teleport away when they come in contact with Water.
    • This is the standard way to farm slime balls; since slimes can't swim, a drowner trap is very effective against them.
    • Also four doors arranged around a block of water suspended above a stone pressure plate, topped by any solid block. Mobs walking on the plate will cause the doors to lock them in. Trapping them with their head in the water, unable to get out. Once they die the pressure plate is released and the trap reopens to visitors.
  • Knockback: Enemies after getting hit. This is crucial with dealing with Creepers. Hitting them while sprinting produces a great deal more of it. It's also an enchantment too.
    • Iron Golems produce this in spades. Anything they hit is flung into the air high enough to take fall damage, in addition to the heavy damage the attack itself does.
  • Ladder Physics
  • Lamarck Was Right: When dyes were added, you could colour sheep and recieve more wool (see Awesome yet Practical above). Now that animal breeding has been added, sheep will pass on their (dyed) colour to their children and will even regrow dyed colours of wool. Since the colour passed on to the child is selected at random, you can use one lapis lazuli to create an entire flock of blue sheep, since Minecraft animals have no set gender and can reproduce with any other animal that isn't juvenile. Say goodbye to hoarding your lapis!
  • Lethal Joke Item: Continuing the proud tradition of fishing rods in this role is, well, the fishing rod. Normally, it's used for just that - casting out into a body of water and flinging in a fish when it bites. Most players wouldn't even bother using it for anything else. But suddenly, a whole new world of possibility opens up when the astute player realizes that it doesn't just reel in fish, it reels in ANY creature. With practice, a player atop a wall can heave up monsters into sword range and with a quick switch, slash the unfortunate on his way back down to fall-damage town. The cherry on top? Even Ghasts are affected, which can be used to pull the elusive flying buggers closer so they can't avoid your hail of arrows.
    • Snowballs can be thrown at mobs to knock them backward, but don't actually deal any damage, except against blazes and the enderdragon. Even then, they're much weaker than arrows, and the faster rate of fire is offset by the short range. Most people wouldn't even consider bringing snowballs into the final battle against the high-flying boss, whose immense health is daunting even to players with diamond swords. However, the snowball's knockback actually stuns the enderdragon for longer than it takes to throw another snowball. As a result, one of the easiest ways to defeat the enderdragon is to lure it into its normally unstoppable charge, then pelt it with a steady stream of hundreds of snowballs.
    • Fishing rods, snowballs, and eggs are heavily used in player versus player to set up "combos", which allow you to hit another player but stop them from hitting you, and to perform a glitch known as a "rod trick", a double damage bug.
  • Let's Play: If the autocomplete feature is any indication, this is the most popular game to LP on YouTube - and that's not counting tutorials, walkthroughs, demonstrations of building projects and servers, etc.
  • Level Map Display: There's a Map item which you can craft to keep track of the world you explore.
  • Lightning Can Do Anything: Lightning will turn pigs into Zombie Pigmen, and massively power up the explosion of a Creeper. It also ignites inactive portals. Forest fires can also be started if a thunderbolt hits a tree and even the player can be struck by lighting, but only for minor damage.
  • Lily Pad Platform: Relatively small lily pads can be walked on.
  • Literal Genie: The game's creator falls into this occasionally. Fans begged Notch for a way to ride animals, so he created saddles, which can only be found in dungeon chests. This saddle can be placed on a pig, allowing you to ride it. Unfortunately, due to Notch's sense of humor, the pig continues to wander around aimlessly, since most of the fans were asking for a way to ride animals, but didn't specifically say anything about being able to control them.
    • You can now control pigs using a carrot on a stick.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: Zig zagged. It takes less than 10 seconds (barring update downloading) to get to the main screen in the full game, but a map can take a while to fully load, particularly a well-explored map.
    • Since the Beta 1.3 Patch, the file format has reduced the total number of files used to store a single map magnitudes less than what it previously required, (Went from 1000+ files to double digit numbers) and has drastically improved this issue. Given that maps can be upwards of 100Mb large, though, this still frequently applies.
  • The Lost Woods:
  • Low Fantasy
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Averted in that there's no blood at all in the game - the texture for Zombie Pigmen was even changed from originally red-themed to green to maintain this. That said, however, PCs in Minecraft "spray" the items in their inventory when they die. And if your character happens to be carrying skeleton bones and redstone dust...
  • Mad Bomber:
    • Creepers. Pretty much all they do is silently sneak up on you, hiss for a second and a half, and explode. Even on easy, the explosion can kill you instantly if you can't get away in time. It also destroys most types of blocks, which can allow other monsters to invade your shelter.
    • Ghasts (found only in the Nether), which shoot fireballs at you, setting the terrain on fire.
    • If you have Mad Bomber tendencies yourself, you can blow stuff up with TNT. Incidentally, to make these explosives, you need to get gunpowder by killing Ghasts or Creepers, the other two Mad Bombers in the game.
  • Made of Explodium: Creepers. They even drop gunpowder when you kill them, which can be used to craft your own TNT.
    • Time is irrelevant in the Nether. Clocks malfunction. Beds? Well, beds just plain explode when you try to use them.
    • Outside the nether, the "respawn anchor", the nether version of a bed, also explodes, just like a bed.
  • Magic Tool: The Furnaces. Stove, smelter, kiln, and steam engine all-in-one combo pack!
  • Magnet Hands: It is possible to climb ladders with a block of sand in your hand. With your back to the ladder.
  • Mascot Mook: Creepers are the most well-known of all the mobs.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Multiplayer sessions can be this, due to how players can make skins resembling characters from other franchises.
  • Mechanical Monster: The Blaze mob in the Nether appear to be of this. There's nothing in between their rotating rods and their sounds, pain sounds, and death cries sound very mechanical instead of organic.
  • The Merch: There are now official T-shirts on sale and replica stone pickaxes incoming. Store here.
  • Metal Slime: Notch himself. Killing him in an SMP server drops an Apple item.
  • Mind Screw: The game's ending "poem". Seriously.
  • Minecart Madness: Players can ride minecarts.
  • The Mockbuster: FortressCraft, an unabashed knock-off released on Xbox Live Indie Games. Doesn't help that not long after, the actual Minecraft was announced for Xbox 360...
  • Moe Anthropomorphism: "Creeparka", is a Japanese meme combining the Creeper and a Parka (which is more typically called a "Hoodie" in English slang). Specifically, this meme involves a cute girl wearing a Creeper-themed hoodie (and often little else) and generally looking cute and frustrated.
  • Mook Maker: Monster spawners.
  • Narnia Time: In single player, while you're in the Nether, time doesn't pass in the overworld, and vice-versa.
    • This is because only parts of the world where some player is around are simulated, so in Multiplayer it still works when nobody is in the nether/overworld, the time there stops. This also applies to The End.
  • Nerf:
    • Swords were quite powerful for a time, but their damage output was slightly reduced by the 1.0 release. This was likely to encourage players to use the Enchantment Table to power up their swords with various effects to compensate for the reduced damage.
    • Cake used to be an extremely practical method of healing--just plonk it on the ground and right-click it whenever you need to heal, up to six iterations of 1.5 hearts. With the 1.8 update that turns food into stamina restoration rather than health restoration, it loses a lot of utility. They restore one food point up to six times, but don't restore much saturation, so you'll get hungry fairly soon. They're basically only good at topping off your hunger bar repeatedly so you can slowly regenerate health, but you need a lot of materials (iron, wheat, cow) to get started.
    • Golden Apples used to be extremely difficult to make, due to the fact the normal apple was effectively dummied out of the game until Strongholds were introduced (unless you play with the game's creator) and you needed 8 Gold Blocks (72 Gold Ingots!) to craft. The 1.1 update made crafting Golden Apples a lot cheaper where instead of 8 Gold Blocks, you just need 8 Gold Nuggets (8/9ths of an ingot), which are easy to find in the Nether, and normal apples can now be found in the leaves of a basic tree. At the same time, the effects of eating a Golden Apple have been severely reduced; they went from restoring all health to restoring 5 units of hunger and granting health regeneration for 30 seconds, and now they only restore 2 units of hunger and the health regeneration only lasts a meager 4 seconds.
      • Golden apples were then changed again, requiring 8 golden ingots to craft, but giving two temporary hearts and a few seconds of regeneration. It may seem weak, but it can be stacked, unlike potions, and still provides 4-5 hearts of healing. A secondary version was also added that is stronger with better effects, but requires the old recipe of one apple and 8 gold blocks. The new version, generally called "god apples", "enchanted golden apples, or "notch apples", by the community, gives 30 seconds of Regeneration IV, which basically gives you health regeneration so fast that you can fully recover in just a second or two! The item also gives 5 minutes of fire resistance (immunity to fire damage) and 5 minutes of resistance (reduced damage). The old Golden Apple made from gold ingots has its tooltip colored in blue to show the difference and the item doesn't shine.
        • Finally, in the 1.9 update, enchanted golden apples were nerfed once more. They now give 8 temporary hearts, 20 seconds of regeneration II, (the same level of regeneration that regular golden apples give), resistance, and fire resistances (5 minutes each). Their crafting recipe was also removed, making them only findable in naturally spawning chests.
  • Nintendo Hard: Beta, orginally. The /infdev/ update that first allowed the spawning of creatures would often create groups of 5 or 7 monsters right next to another group of 5 or 7... during all hours of the daylight! Simply going outside for wood was difficult. Fortunately it has been fixed.
  • Nitro Boost: Dash Pad variety is seen in powered minecart rails as the boost the mine cart when it rolls over the set of activated golden rails.
  • No Arc in Archery: Averted; arrows follow parabolic arcs. They also can be slowed by water and do damage according to how fast they're moving.
  • No Plot, No Problem: This can be averted if you download (or create) an adventure map.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: You're at bedrock level in a nearby mine. Near pitch black darkness, a narrow hallway, limited weapons. No music, no sounds (with the exception of when you mine). And you know that there are zombies, skeletons and spiders waiting randomly around to tear you to pieces, but you haven't found them yet. NOTHING IS SCARIER.
    • You just opened up a hole into a cave system. There are no telltale sounds of nearby enemies. (All of the above enemies have idle sounds.) That still doesn't mean you're safe; all it means is that there might be a creeper in there instead. Which would be worse.
    • The End. No sky, no sea, no exploding bush monsters, not even lava. Just you, the Endermen, and the occasional Enderdragon.
    • When you're exploring, say, a stronghold, and you place a torch that reveals a zombie right in front of you. Even in Creative Mode this will make you jump out of your seat.
    • Very situational, but say you're mining through a wall to a hallowed-out cave on the other side of it. As soon as you mine through, a Creeper pops out to say "hi"...
    • Did you make it past the bedrock level? Say hello to the void, which is a huge blank space of nothing. Fall down far enough in the void and you will be damaged quickly until you die. Before the 1.8 update, the void was the same color as the sky so it wasn't too scary. After the update, the void's color was changed to black, making it extremely creepy. The purpose of the void is to kill off players that somehow fall through the bedrock level so they wouldn't become stuck.
    • Peaceful mode removes the mobs, no ifs ands or buts, but unless you turn off the game's sound, ambient soundclips will still play in deep caves, making you question if you're really alone.
  • One-Gender Race: Practically every humanoid or animal species in the game. All NPC villagers are male, and their unusual noses have had them nicknamed "squidwards". The default provided player textures ("Steve") are also always male, however there is an alternate set of textures ("Alex) which appears female. All chickens are hens who lay eggs, and all cows give milk (there are no bulls). It is probable that all pigs, sheep and wolves are also female, but they haven't demonstrated any gender-specific behavior other than that any two of their species can be bred together, even separate combinations of A+B, A+C and B+C -- and they will all successfully give birth.
  • One of Us: Unsurprisingly, the game and its wide-open nature have garnered fans of all sorts, resulting in seemingly odd or quirky references to Minecraft in various places. For instance, in this seemingly-serious Flash animation about the scale of the universe - from atom to visible universe, there is a picture of the scale of a Minecraft world compared to everything.
  • One-Hit Kill: Since the 1.9 update buffed their explosion power, in close range creepers can do this even to players whose armour is in a decent state.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: The Enderdragon in The End. It's mostly black with bits of gray on the wings and sporting purple eyes, but it looks pretty much the same as any western type dragon. The Enderdragon doesn't have any attacks other than ramming into you to send you flying back several feet, but it has a TON of health (complete with its own Life Meter) and is healed by the nearby Ender Crystals. Killing it nets you 20,000 experience points and opens a portal to exit the realm. However, only one Enderdragon can spawn per The End world.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: The ones featured here have the classic arms-forward walk, greenish-gray skin, and burst into flames when exposed to sunlight. They used to drop feathers when killed, simply because something had to drop feathers and zombies were introduced before chickens. Nowadays, they drop rotten flesh, which you can eat in emergencies, and the most you have to worry about is food poisoning. You can feed it to pet wolves to heal them without any downsides.
  • Oxygen Meter: When you're fully submerged under water. If you run out of air, you'll start taking one heart of damage per second. Enchanted armor can reduce this rate.
  • Palette Swap: Many blocks and items are the same models with different colored textures.
  • Patchwork Map: Biomes are all over the place.
  • Planet Heck:
    • The Hell map setting.
    • The Nether, as well.
  • Player Versus Player
  • Point of No Return: Once you enter The End, you can no longer return until you kill the Enderdragon, or die.
  • Power Creep, Power Seep: The Endermen are going through a phase of this. Notch claims he nerfed them before the official Beta 1.8 release, and then complained that they're too easy, so the next major update gave their AI an overhaul, removed their vulnerability to sunlight, and doubled their health. It also limited the types of blocks they could move to the softer kinds. Time will tell how much of this stays permanent.
  • Powerup Mount: Pigs make great parachutes when you ride them via saddle.
  • Pre-Explosion Glow: Creepers flash before blowing up.
    • The Enderdragon goes out like this.
  • Pressure Plate: One of the three types of switches you can create. They can be used to open or close doors, toggle redstone torches, switch minecart tracks, or detonate TNT. Stone pressure plates can be triggered by players and mobs walking or riding over them, while wooden pressure plates can additionally be triggered by arrows, dropped items, and minecarts. There are also pressure-sensitive minecart tracks, useful for triggering boosters.
  • Rain of Arrows:
  • Real Is Brown: The biomes introduced grasses with more "realistic" hues. The bright green grass does still exist, however.
  • Reality Ensues:
    • When crafting was added to the closed alpha, everyone ran out and made gold swords and armor. As it turns out, gold is valuable because it's pretty, rare, and resistant to oxidative corrosion, but it's also one of the softest metals in existence. In-game, this translated to gold swords that are functionally identical to wood swords, and gold armor that is twice as good as leather but half as good as iron. It sure looks pretty, though.
    • While sand and gravel are affected by gravity when placed, unsupported blocks that were generated automatically will stay floating... as long as you don't make the game check the blocks again and find out that sand can't float.
    • Beta 1.8 introduced Hunger. Unlike most games that use a hunger meter, Minecraft's meter doesn't drain at a fixed rate. Instead, it uses a complicated system where different activities burn calories at a different rate. You become a little hungrier every time you receive damage, break a block, or move around. A running jump is equivalent to two regular jumps, or running four meters, or walking forty meters, or sneaking forty-five meters, or breaking sixteen blocks. When you're full, health regenerates at a rate of half a heart every four seconds. If the hunger meter drops below 30%, you can no longer run. If it reaches 0%, it adversely affects your health, to a different extent depending upon the difficulty.
  • Recursive Reality: This mod shows a game of Minecraft being displayed on a giant screen... inside a game of Minecraft. You can also use redstone circuits to create a computer inside your computer, though the clock speed leaves something to be desired.
    • Also, on a smaller scale, if you totally fill it up, you can fit 1,732 wooden chests inside one. Empty ones, mind.
      • Using shulker boxes, you can fit 46,656 (empty) chests inside one.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Spider eyes glow red. All six of them. Wolves also gain red eyes when they turn hostile.
  • Retcon: Bamboo(AKA reeds(AKA papyrus)) is now sugar cane. Why? Cake. This of course means all your books, paper, and bookcases are now made of sugar. Mm. Tasty, tasty literature. You can actually make paper from sugarcane though.
  • Revive Kills Zombie: Beta 1.9 introduced several kinds of potions with beneficial or harmful effects. For every type, you can use it on yourself, or turn it into a splash potion to throw at friends or enemies. Zombies and skeletons are healed by potions of Poison or Instant Harm, but can be damaged with potions of Regeneration and Instant Health.
  • A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside An Enigma: One of the title screen quips that appears after starting up the game is, "A riddle wrapped in a mystery!"
  • Right Behind Me: Creepers have a nasty habit of doing this. What makes this worse is that if you can hear their signature hiss, it means it's already too late to flee. Also, trying to run away from hostile Endermen is useless and will only result in this trope.
  • Rollercoaster Mine: Thanks to the various track pieces, this can result from deliberate player designs. Sometimes players will use this as part of an elaborate transportation system.
  • Running Gag: Notch for the past several patches, including the release of version 1.0, has stated he "removed Herobrine".
  • Savage Setpiece: The Zombie Pigman will even walk right up to you and look at you without attacking. When you attack him, not only does he attack full-on with his sword, but any other Zombie Pigmen in range come in swinging. It's worth noting that they deal the most damage per hit out of any monster (aside from creepers), and one blow can easily take off a quarter of your maximum health on easy. Wolves behave similarly to protect their own pack, but they can also be tamed, at which point they'll defend you from monsters. Endermen can be considered this as well, but they disarrange the environment and even consider looking directly at them a hostile act.
  • Scare Chord: The "ambience" noises in unlit caves could count as this.
  • Scenery Porn: The map generator cranks out breathtaking views by the dozen.
  • Scoring Points: On death, a score is displayed that is determined by the amount of experience points you accumulated before dying. However, the scores do nothing, although the experience points can be spent to enchant equipment. Its only value is in hardcore mode where death causes your world to be deleted.
  • Sentient Cosmic Force: Addresses you at the end of the game. Not just your character, but you.
  • Serial Escalation:
    • First, the map was large already. Then, generation of the level was made easier, so now we have an area 8 times larger than THE ENTIRE SURFACE AREA OF EARTH! Notch released a fly-over video demonstrating just how enormous a small portion of that can be. To top it off, he then released a flight covering even more area and this time with different biomes.
      • The height of the map used to be capped at just above the height of the clouds. This made it very easy to reach the top, as even a high hill can touch the top of the map. Then Jeb doubled the height of the world. And in effect, TRIPLED the amount of building space [3].
    • The whole game is this trope when you think about it. You begin by punching down a tree with your bare hands, swim backwards up waterfalls to get around and eventually turn hell itself into your own personal highway.
    • The Youtube user kurtjmac is attempting to walk to the Far Lands. He's been at it for quite a number of hours now (if you take a look at the "Far Lands Or Bust" playlist, he started walking to the Far Lands in the 11th video). Coming just before his 100th episode, he has walked 292202 meters from his spawn (blocks are 1 meter in all directions) ~180 miles, this is about 2.3% the way to one edge. He will not look at his data again for quite a while.
  • Sequence Breaking: Although the game has no preset sequence to break, it does have a tech tree that's fairly linear. Normally, making an obsidian portal to enter the Nether requires a diamond pickaxe with which to break obsidian. However, since obsidian is formed when water flows over a lava source block, it's possible (through clever use of buckets) to make a mold, fill it with lava, and solidify it into a portal with water, no diamonds needed. If you're really bloody-minded, you can even find a natural lava pool and destroy all the lava that's not in the portal shape by replacing it with dirt, then opening a hole to a pond/ocean above and let nature do its work, no iron (for buckets) needed either. Hope your stone tools are good enough to fend off Ghasts and Blazes!
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Enemies will switch targets if they are hit by another enemy, but will otherwise go for you. Handy if you happen to be chased by more than one enemy. Also, having a Skeleton kill a Creeper is how you get records. Easier said than done, since it won't count if the Creeper deliberately explodes.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Shown Their Work: This could be a just graphics bug, but when you look at lava flowing down through water you can see it surrounded by a hazy light-blue glow. This looks very much like steam that should be created by boiling water as lava is flowing through it.
  • Silliness Switch: Minecraft is available in a wide variety of languages: the default English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic... Elvish, Klingonese, Pirate...
  • Single Biome Planet: Averted thanks to the Halloween update.
  • Snowlems: You can build a golem out of snow with a jack-o-lantern for a head. It'll wander around, spreading snow on the ground. It also throws snowballs at nearby monsters. The snowballs don't deal any damage directly (except for some nether mobs), but they'll knock the monster back and distract it, which you can use to your advantage whether you're trying to fight, flee, or lure it into a trap.
  • Space Compression: Although the map is theoretically infinite, the biomes are unrealistically small.
  • Spiritual Successor: To Infiniminer
  • Soft Water: Falling damage is proportional to distance fallen, but landing in a pool of water a couple meters deep negates the damage, even if you fall from the top of the world to the bottom.
  • Some Dexterity Required: Many things require lots of clicks. Thankfully, you can hold a button down to mine.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The serene piano melodies that grace the game's audio only serve to make the tunnels to hell all the more horrifying. Even worse if your audio on the game happens to glitch horribly and distort.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: You used to have a chance of this each time you started a new world. Snow fell 24/7 and water froze to ice. Now there are biomes that look like this, with frozen lakes and snow-covered terrain, and instead of raining in those biomes it snows.
  • Standard Status Effects: With the introduction of potions, many status effects were put into the game, such as faster speed, slower speed, boosted attack strength, health regeneration, poison, etc.
  • Stock Femur Bone: Skeletons seem to drop the classic femur bones.
  • Tastes Like Friendship: You can tame wolves by feeding them bones, and Ocelots by feeding them fish.
  • Teleport Spam: Endermen are capable of this, as once they become aggressive, they can continually evade your attacks and teleport behind you. The ultimate example comes when it rains; as water damages them, they will teleport madly around until they either die or happen upon a sheltered location. On the good side, this also renders them harmless as they will not attack.
  • Tennis Boss: You can reflect Ghast fireballs with melee attacks, arrows, fishing rods, or even snowballs. Good thing, too, since they love to float out of range of your conventional weapons. Killing a ghast with its own fireball is the purpose of the achievement "Return to Sender".
  • Terrain Sculpting: You can pretty much change everything you can touch, from creating a mountain, destroying it, then rebuilding it in the middle of the ocean.
  • The Joys of Torturing Mooks: With enough creative planning, you can make traps with water, lava, cacti, or natural gravity to kill mobs of all kinds, friendly or hostile, as you watch them helplessly flail about to their deaths. With a bit of trial and error, you can make a trap that leaves them barely alive so you can kill them with your bare hands and gain experience.
  • Throw It In:
    • The Creeper is a result of a failed pig model. Oh how far he's come.
    • Also, cookies.
  • Too Awesome to Use:
    • Diamond equipment. They have extremely high durability, the Diamond Sword is the most powerful weapon you can get, and the Diamond Pick is the fastest tool with the widest range of blocks you can collect. The problem? Because you drop your items upon death and your items are destroyed should you fall into lava, many players may simply just hoard their diamonds in their storage chests and never forge anything. It also does not help that diamonds are extremely rare and are usually found very deep underground and/or near lava.
    • Golden Apples also fall into this trope. Since the requirements to craft them are crazy, your only way you're really going to get one is in a dungeon chest, with probability 1 in 125. Golden Apples only restore 5 points of hunger but also grant regenerating health for 30 seconds, regardless of your hunger meter.
      • This isn't the case anymore, since as of 1.1.0, Golden Apples are fairly easier to craft using renewable resources, but at the same time their effect has been downgraded to replenishing 2 of your Hunger Meter (same as red apples) and only giving regeneration for a measly 4 seconds. At this point, you're better off just brewing potions of regeneration (whose ingredients are also renewable resources), although there are worse things you can do with a handful of gold nuggets than turning a red apple gold.
    • Iron also has shades of this early into the game, mostly due to versatility. "Do I make minecart tracks to travel, or better armor? First I should probably make an iron pickaxe so I can mine redstone. Then maybe a compass, so I don't have to worry about getting lost the next time I go exploring? Or shears, so I can gather wool faster? Well, how about a bucket or two, so I can finally move the lava needed to make that portal? I'd also need flint and steel to activate it..." Fortunately, you'll find plenty of iron once you start looking for diamonds.
    • Enchanted tools and armor. You can get some nifty effects for your items, such as setting mobs on fire or increasing the diamond drop rate. However, the enchantments you receive are pretty unpredictable, and the experience cost increases exponentially with the enchantment level. You'd have to kill 77 hostile mobs for level 10, 651 hostile mobs for level 30, or 1785 hostile mobs for the maximum, level 50. Furthermore, enchanted items can't be repaired without stripping the enchantment.
  • Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction: Big enough to make a full suit of armor out of 24 diamonds.
  • Tunnel King: The player can certainly become this; many players begin this way to avoid monsters at night.
  • Unbreakable Weapons: As of the official release, bows break after 385 uses, but for a long time, bows were indestructible to offset the fact that arrows vanish whenever they do damage.
  • Unobtainium: Redstone is an unusual case, as it is only rare if you don't dig very deep. Once you get to the lower levels of the map, Redstone becomes about as plentiful as Coal, especially since each Redstone block yields about 4 units of placeable Redstone, compared to 1 for most other block types.
    • Played straight with Diamonds and Glowstone. In the former's case, you'll have to travel to the deeper parts of caves and usually they are guarded by pools of lava, and usually you won't find more than three or four Diamonds per deposit. For Glowstone, you have to build a portal to Hell, and then find a huge cavern with lava pools and cascades, and mine a formation of Glowstone from off the ceiling. All the while avoiding Ghast fireballs, which can set you on fire, knock you off whatever you're using as a platform, or just destroy the platform itself, in addition to the fact that a direct hit can take off 85% of your maximum health. Not only is glowstone hard to find, you need a tool with the Silk Touch enchantment to actually obtain the block. Otherwise, it needs to be broken, which yields 2-4 glowstone dust, four of which are necessary to reconstitute the block. Basically, without Silk Touch, every time you want to relocate a glowstone block, you'll lose a quarter of it on average.
    • Obsidian could count too. To get it, you have to use water on a Lava Source to cool it, then mine it with a Diamond Pickaxe. For one, it is already difficult to find Diamonds, and two, if you're not careful the Obsidian (or worse, yourself!) could fall into nearby lava. Clever players can construct a framework around the spot where they want their obsidian, and actually create the obsidian with buckets of lava and water, circumventing the need to mine it. This is most commonly used by players who want to get to the Nether early on, but the fact remains that lava is often difficult to come by until after you gain access to the Nether.
    • Even worse, in a way, is the case of Mossy Cobblestone, Cracked and Mossy Stone Bricks, and Circle Stone Bricks. All of these blocks spawn naturally...but only in dungeons (mossy cobble) or strongholds (stone bricks)...and, in the latter case, only in a very, very small percentage of the stone bricks are the special kinds. Oh, and none of them can be crafted, so have fun finding enough to make any significant use of them without having some hacked/spawned in...
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Skeletons use bows against you and Zombie Pigmen use gold swords on you. Both of these can be easily crafted by the player, but for a very long time the enemies that use these weapons never dropped them, even when killed. This was rectified in 1.2, when 'rare drops' were added. Skeletons can drop bows, Zombie Pigmen gold swords, Zombies helmets, and so forth; occasionally the items will even be enchanted.
  • Urban Legend of Zelda: The entity known as "HIM" or "Herobrine", a white-eyed version of the default player skin who would stalk the player from a distance, a la Slender Man.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: Tamed wolves. They'll kill for you. They'll die for you. It's in your best interest to keep their health up, especially since you can heal them with zombie meat (plentiful and mostly useless) but taming a new one requires bones (harder to come by and valuable as fertilizer and dye).
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • Using flint and steel to clear leaves can result in massive forest fires. Bad for the wildlife, but convenient if you want to eliminate hiding places for creepers. Also replaces leaves with wooden blocks, which is a net gain resource-wise.
    • Making mobs, enemy or friendly, suffocate to death by making a block of sand or gravel fall on their head and prevent them from breathing. Death by suffocation is treated at the same rate as drowning underwater, i.e. very slowly, but nothing can be more pleasurable than watching a Creeper suffocate to death while being helpless. The player can also suffocate the same way but would generally be smart enough to just get out from under it.
    • Beta 1.8 added Creative Mode, which allows you to spawn any item you want directly into your inventory, allows you to fly, and makes you invincible... except that hostile mobs can still spawn. Want revenge for all those times you've been killed? Now's your chance. Also added are NPC villages (with actual NPCs as of the 1.9 pre-release, who are just as passive as cows or pigs), complete with buildings made of flammable, flammable wood.
    • The Better than Wolves mod rewards the player with more dung, a resource in the mod, for locking their pet wolves in windowless cells, increasing the production rate.
    • That's just the tip of the iceberg; you can drop a kitten's parents into the void, then lock said kitten in a cell made entirely out of TNT and blow it to smithereens; you can place a chicken in a minecart, then proceed to push the minecart into a pit of lava; you can use piglets as target practice; anything to do with animals, especially babies, that doesn't fall under caring potential is usually this.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Originally, sheep dropped 1-3 wool when struck. Nowadays, you're supposed to use iron shears to harvest 2-4 wool without harming the sheep. You can still get wool by killing them, but only one piece, which is really impractical if you're collecting any color besides white.
  • Wall Master: Silverfish. They only appear in Strongholds and one by itself is not threatening, but they are dangerous in swarms. Why? Silverfish hide in the blocks of the Stronghold, and breaking that block, or injuring another Silverfish without instantly killing it, causes the Silverfish in other nearby blocks to awaken and swarm the player. You can't tell, visually, that a block contains a Silverfish unless you try to mine the block without a tool. The stone blocks that appear to break faster by hand than by a tool is the only sign that says that block contains a Silverfish.
  • Water Is Blue: Darker blue in this case. There are plans to implement a biome gradient similar to grass, so water will be a lighter shade of blue in areas with a higher temperature and/or higher rainfall. So far this has only taken the form of murky water in swamp biomes.
  • Weakened by the Light:
    • Skeletons and zombies are set on fire by direct sunlight, and torches can prevent monsters from spawning underground. Spiders and Endermen become neutral during the day.
    • Averted only for the Creepers, who are ready to party at all hours. They become more dangerous in the daytime, because the player gets complacent, and they can blend in with the sunlit vegetation (though not as much as they used to; see Real Is Brown above).
    • Averted when it rains. Not only can undead survive during the day, but they will even spawn as if it is still nighttime. Even in the desert, which is untouched by rain.
  • Weird Moon:
    • In the normal world, it's a square, it always comes up when the sun goes down and vice versa, and prior to Beta 1.9 it was always full. While moon phases occur, the Moon is still always on the opposite side of the Sun, rising at sunset and setting at sunrise, behavior typically associated with a full moon.
    • In The End, the moon is perfectly round, which looks bizarrely out of place given that everything else is square.
  • Weird Sun: Also a square.
  • When It Rains, It Pours: When the rainy weather comes, it rains intensely. Worse, if it rains during the daytime, monsters that would ordinarily die in sunlight don't, and can roam freely. The one good thing about it is that it renders Endermen harmless (if rather amusing), as they will Teleport Spam in an attempt to escape from the rain.
  • Wide Open Sandbox: A bit more literal of an example than most, which is half the appeal. Most sandbox games have some kind of goal, like killing monsters or scoring points, which guides the gameplay. For Minecraft, there's merely a handful of suggestions that hint at the different facets of the game. Everything is entirely optional, which means different people can do completely different things, and every style of play is equally valid. You can build huge castles or pixel art tapestries. You can explore near and far, by land or sea. You can grow wheat, melons, pumpkins, sugar cane, cacti, or various trees. You can mine for iron, gold, diamonds, redstone, or lapis lazuli. You can search for dungeons, either for the rare treasure contained therein or a chance to fight an endless stream of monsters. You can build machines with pistons and redstone circuitry. You can construct a sinister portal and invade hell itself, then turn it into your own personal network of roads so you can move quickly between each of your outposts. You can experiment with potions and equipment enchantments to give yourself an edge in battle or just make it easier to gather your favorite resources. There's even a dragon you can slay to get something resembling an ending, but you're free to keep playing afterward, and nothing really changes. You're invited to try your hand at all of it, and settle into whichever sort of gameplay personally appeals to you. And if that isn't enough, you can set up a server and play with your friends, whether you prefer to build cooperatively or wage war. And, of course, you can dig up an entire desert and make a literal sandbox stretching as far as the eye can see.
  • With This Herring: You're plonked down into the middle of nowhere in a world that's going to be crawling with giant spiders, skeletons, and creepers in ten minutes with nothing but your bare hands and expected to survive. In a rather more literal interpretation of the trope, you can actually chop down trees with fish. It's no harder than chopping a tree down with your bare hands, which is one of the first things you're expected to do when you start playing.
  • Who Forgot the Lights?:
    • Intentional example. The creator wants to make sure that you don't wander off too much in the night or in caves so there is no Hollywood Darkness for you. You'll need to make torches to light up an area so you can see, and to keep monsters from spawning.
    • As of Beta 1.8 nighttime light levels more closely resemble an actual moonlit night...caves and such are still dark, however. There's also a brightness slider that takes it from "Moonlit night" to "Night vision with less green" and makes caves bright enough to determine whether that bouncing shape is a creeper or a zombie without squinting at the screen.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: Starting with Beta 1.8, you have a food meter that gradually drains over time. If your food meter is at least 80% full, you regenerate health. If it drops to 30%, you become unable to sprint. If it reaches 0%, your health meter starts draining instead. With the difficulty set to easy, your maximum health is effectively cut in half. On normal, you become a One-Hit-Point Wonder. On hard, you'll starve to death.
  • The World Is Just Awesome:
    • The first thing most new players do is scale a mountain, and look around. At that moment, you realize just how tiny you are and how much space you have. According to the other wiki, the maximum limit of the game world generator can go to before it hits its technical limit is eight times the surface area of the Earth.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Creepers, perhaps the scariest enemies in the game, are afraid of cats.
  • X Meets Y:
  • Yet Another Stupid Death:
    • Deaths that can be easily avoided encompass half of the decisions with bad results (most of the other half is about trying to build fireplaces in wooden houses). Oftentimes lava, falling, or sand/gravel is involved. Sometimes it's a combination of the preceding.
    • Nevermind once multiplayer gets involved.

Mike: Hey Steve, this mine we're digging just popped us out the other side of the mountain!
Steve: Oh, let me see. *accidental bump*
Mike: FFFFFUUUUUUU*splat*
Or just hitting each other with your pickaxes while trying to mine.

    • A persistent bug due to out of date LWJGL involves randomly starting to walk in a different direction while walking while clicking. The way to fix it is by hitting that direction key. Which is the very most counter-intuitive thing to do. Cliffs and lava pools become an object of horror due to this bug.
    • Rule number one of Minecraft: don't dig straight down. Rule number two: don't dig straight up. If you ignore these rules, it's only a matter of time before you die stupidly. If you dig the ground out from under you, you can tunnel down faster, but you run the risk of hitting a hollow cave, which can lead to falling damage and/or finding yourself surrounded by monsters you can barely see. Even worse, you may fall into lava with no way to climb out, guaranteeing a swift death and the total destruction of everything in your inventory. Digging straight up has its own unique risks. You may strike water, which can drown you if you aren't prepared, or you may find yourself buried in falling sand or gravel, which suffocates you even faster.
      • Digging upwards can also release a lava pool to fall on your head if you don't stop to check the dripping lava in the block above you. Water also drips the same way. Before the 1.9 version of the game, there was no tell that lava or water was above you, which made digging upwards even more dangerous.
  • Zerg Rush: Silverfish, if not killed fast enough.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: As of 1.2, this happens every night in villages, with zombies being spawned into the game just for this purpose. Luckily for the villagers, they can now repopulate and have an iron golem protector to counter this.
  • Zombie Gait: Zombies show that in action. Skeletons do it too, but it's probably because they carry bows.
  1. ↑ prevents violent mobs from spawning; you don't get attacked, but on the other hand you can't get any of the neat items they drop
  2. ↑ Ender Dragons can't be spawned due to their ability to destroy virtually every block, which could ruin maps
  3. ↑ Over 1 million copies (GeForce), 8 million copies (Mojang), 54 million copies (Gamespot), Over 100 million copies (Minecraft Forum)
  4. ↑ Originally slated for November 11, but due to some other game launching that day, Notch pushed it back a week.
  5. ↑ According to the video poster, 5-6 hours, which is certainly too long to hold some people's attention, especially in this game.
  6. ↑ not to be confused with Beta 1.3
  7. ↑ The reason for this has to do with how a Creeper explodes. Creepers blow themselves up by burning gunpowder inside their bodies, and the hissing noise is actually the sound of the gunpowder igniting. The Creeper will only light the gunpowder on fire when it's right next to you, because that's the only way the explosion will do any damage.
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