The in-depth tutorial mode is like a game itself, and it is here that you learn everything that Minecraft is about. You learn that throwing blocks of sand into a furnace will result in glass or that nether quartz, found in Minecraft's hellish nether, can be crafted into blocks of marble. Enabled by default, tooltips inform you of the uses of the many blocks that surround you. It's not expected that you will raise a castle or stretch railways across the land overnight, but Minecraft: Xbox One Edition does well in easing you into the basics as you move along. That is, unless they fall into lava, in which case it's time to start over (I hate those archers so, so much). The loss is always a bitter pill, but you can always respawn and try to recover any lost items. I have been knocked into a river of lava by a skeleton archer just out of range more often than I care for, once even during the course of this review. Cave spelunking is often quickly ended by an undetected creeper, its blood-curdling hiss the last thing you hear before the inevitable explosion.
But even the most seasoned Minecraft veterans can fall prey to the many enemies that haunt the land. You can protect yourself with armor and weapons, crafted from materials ranging from leather from slaughtered cows or iron discovered embedded in stone. At night, vicious creatures roam, threatening you with poisoned fangs and sharp arrows. There are dangers in Minecraft that stalk every dark corner and winding tunnel. Some familiar Xbox franchises get the Minecraft treatment.
In that same desert, you could stumble upon a half-buried temple, where beneath its floor lies secret treasure-as well as an untimely end for brazen travelers who ignore the hidden trap. Your adventures often carry a similar tone to those found in Fallout or Elder Scrolls games, where a trip through the desert on a hunt for crafting materials is stopped short as a village materializes in your peripheral vision, luring you with villager trade, books to steal, and crops to harvest. There are many sights to see, from the aforementioned sprawling oak forests covered in snow to mucky swamplands with vines and water flecked with green lily pads. Minecraft doesn't include a story to follow or missions to complete your quests are set by you, but the journey can be just as rewarding as those found in other games. Or it could become something else, anything else, as your hand is guided by your imagination, your only limit on what you can accomplish.
As you learn the odds and ends of creation in Minecraft, that motley shack will be traded in for a cabin deep in the woods or a castle high on a mountaintop where you can survey the land through its windows. It's small, it's ugly, and there's a good chance the floor is made of dirt, but it's yours. A small hut awkwardly cobbled together from blocks of wood and stone is a strange thing to take pride in, and yet it's hard not to feel some accomplishment in its creation. Undead!Īs your knowledge grows, so does the complexity of your projects and the scope of your adventures. The process is more streamlined, and it prevents you from constantly rubbing several things together in hopes of creating something useful, as well as from looking up crafting recipes online, so you can get to building your blocky empire more quickly. On console, you need only have the necessary material in your inventory to craft items.
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On the PC, however, crafting requires a method of trial and error, where you place materials such as wooden planks and sticks on a nine-by-nine board to create new items. If you have the material to construct a certain item, it will be fully colored in otherwise, it remains slightly opaque. Here, all items, from tools to decorations, are available for you to investigate. The crafting table in Minecraft's console versions hasn't changed since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, for which the options are vastly different compared to the game on PC. With the crafting menu, you turn wood into planks and then create a crafting table, the backbone of your Minecraft experience. Killing animals such as cows or pigs yields food, which staves off hunger, at least for a short while. From wooden tools and weapons, you soon move to stone, then iron, and then, if you're fortunate enough to find it deep in the earth, diamond-not unlike rising through the tiers of the ages of man. The humorous term "punching trees" was popularized by Minecraft, as your earliest task involves hammering away at the nearest oak or spruce tree for blocks of wood.
Spawning a procedurally generated world in Minecraft's default survival mode for the first time places you at the bottom rung, where your goal is to seek tools, shelter, and food. As if climbing a ladder, you start at the bottom and work your way through technology.