Minecraft is a originally created by Swedish programmer and later developed and published by the Swedish company . The creative and building aspects of Minecraft enable players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a world. Other activities in the game include exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat. Multiple gameplay modes are available, including where the player must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health, a where players have unlimited resources to build with and the ability to fly, and an where players play custom created by other players. The PC version of the game is renowned for its , which add various new items, characters and quests to the game.
The was publicly released for on May 17, 2009, and after gradual updates, the full version was released on November 18, 2011. A version for was released a month earlier on October 7, and an version was released on November 17, 2011. The game was released on the as an game on May 9, 2012; on the on December 17, 2013; on the on September 4, 2014; on the the next day; and on the on October 14, 2014. On December 10, 2014, a version was released. All versions of Minecraft receive periodic updates, with the console editions being co-developed by .
Minecraft received five awards during the 2011 . Of the , it won the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award, and Best Debut Game Award; from the , it won the Audience Award and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. In 2012, Minecraft was awarded a in the category Best Downloadable Game. As of June 2015, over 70 million copies have been sold, including 20 million between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One and 20 million on PC, making it the and the third best-selling video game of all time. On September 15, 2014, announced a deal to buy Mojang and the ownership of the Minecraft for 2.5 billion; the acquisition was completed on November 6, 2014.
Minecraft is an game that has no specific goals for the player to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game.However, there is an system. Gameplay by default is first person, but players have the option to play in third person mode. The core gameplay revolves around breaking and placing blocks. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes—arranged in a fixed grid pattern and representing different materials, such as dirt, stone, various ores, water, lava, tree trunks, etc. While players can move freely across the world, objects can only be placed at fixed locations on the grid. Players can gather these material blocks and place them elsewhere, thus allowing for various constructions.
At the start of the game, the player is placed on the surface of a and virtually infinite game world. The world is divided into ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields. Players can walk across the consisting of plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various water bodies. The in-game follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting 20 real-time minutes. Throughout the course of the game, players encounter various known as , including animals, villagers and hostile creatures. Non-hostile animals—such as cows, pigs, and chickens—can be hunted for food and crafting materials, and spawn in the daytime. By contrast, hostile mobs—such as large , , and —spawn during nighttime or in dark places, such as caves. Some Minecraft-unique creatures have been noted by reviewers, such as the Creeper, an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player; and the Enderman, a creature with the ability to and pick up blocks.
A few of the hostile mobs displayed in Minecraft from left to right: Zombie, Spider, Enderman, Creeper, Skeleton
The game world is procedurally generated as players explore it, using a which is obtained from the at the time of world creation unless manually specified by the player. Although there are limits on movement up and down, Minecraft allows for an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane, only running into technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached. The game achieves this by splitting the game world data into smaller sections called "chunks", which are only created or loaded into memory when players are nearby.
