By Adam Sarsfield
Released in 2006, Minecraft has boomed in popularity multiple times throughout its lifetime. With 16 major updates and more to come, it has seen many changes in the gameplay available to players. In its alpha stage, it was a simple block breaking and placing game with minimal coding and not much media attention. Later on, there were some updates, resulting in more time and expansion in their development team’s numbers. There are many versions that are used by the community, but one of the most popular versions is 1.8.9 because it has the spam click combat system. The spam click combat is very popular as the action and fighting are at a constant high and there are hardly any breaks. However, many people in the community found that using cheats and combat bots was an easily achievable task. This is why in the 1.9 updates the combat system was changed from a no cooldown spam click type combat to different tools having different “perfect hit” cooldowns. This slowed down the number of bots and hacks for a while but soon people made updated clients. While a combat in Minecraft but seems to be attracting the most attention, there are survival aspects and building features as well. With the Creative mode, the player can use any block, item, or spawn egg in the game. Many mainstream builders use this feature to plan color schemes and textures for the builds they create. The ability to build whatever you can imagine in Minecraft gave it the initial launch of success. Eventually, the speedrunning community took a look at the game and liked it, so they adopted it.
Minecraft grew further in popularity when SMP or Survival Multiplayer began to grow. SMP is a server or group of people all playing together on the same realm or server. This brought in the idea of having a single world with a lot of Minecraft YouTubers or pros. SciCraft is one very successful group that has nearly beaten the game in its entirety. They have found every glitch that is helpful to them and used it to their advantage. They know almost everything there is to know about Minecraft and it’s coding.
Singleplayer survival also is a popular mode of play. In this mode, the main players are you, your pets if you achieve any, and the mobs you have to defeat to survive. Additionally, there are 4 game modes that are popular in Minecraft: creative, survival, hardcore, and adventure. Three of them are exclusively for actual gameplay use. I already talked about creative and survival modes, but haven’t touched on hardcore or adventure, so here we go. Hardcore mode is basically just survival with hard to fight mobs, different luck for certain things, and only one life. If you die in this mode you can spectate your world but once you leave that world it’s gone forever. The popular YouTuber Ph1LzA held one of the longest single-player hardcore worlds, spanning around 5 years. During this time he did a lot of things and I would highly recommend you to go watch his “My 5 Years of Minecraft Hardcore (Montage)” video where he shows all his achievements in that world. Interestingly, Adventure mode is not a traditional mode where you either have to survive or you are a godlike figure by having the player complete other player made world or quest.