User:Contributer637354/sandbox

Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios. Created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language and released as a public alpha for personal computers in 2009, the game was officially released in November 2011, with Jens Bergensten taking over development around then. Minecraft has since been ported to various platforms and become the best-selling video game of all time, with 200 million copies sold across all platforms and 126 million monthly active users as of 2020.[19]

In Minecraft, players explore a blocky, procedurally-generated 3D world with infinite terrain, and may discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures or earthworks. Depending on game mode, players can fight computer-controlled "mobs", as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. Game modes include a survival mode, in which players must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health, and a creative mode, where players have unlimited resources. Players can modify the game to create new gameplay mechanics, items, and assets.

The game world is virtually infinite and procedurally generated as players explore it, using a map seed that is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player).[32][33][34] There are limits on vertical movement, but Minecraft allows an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane. Due to technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached, however, there is a barrier preventing players from traversing to locations beyond 30,000,000 blocks from the center.[g] The game achieves this by splitting the world data into smaller sections called "chunks" that are only created or loaded when players are nearby.[32] The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields;[35][36] the terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various lava/water bodies.[34] The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, and one full cycle lasts 20 real-time minutes.

When starting a new world, players must choose one of five game modes, as well as one of four difficulties, ranging from peaceful to hard. Increasing the difficulty of the game causes the player to take more damage from mobs, as well as having other difficulty-specific effects. For example, the peaceful difficulty prevents hostile mobs from spawning, and the hard difficulty allows players to starve to death if their hunger bar is depleted.[37][38] Once selected, the difficulty can be changed, but the game mode is locked and can only be changed with cheats.