[6] The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems.

[9] Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or axes), which allows monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly.

They may also freely construct helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores,[10] and torches that produce light—or exchange items with a villager (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa.

[14] The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields;[18][19] the terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves, and bodies of water or lava.

[16] Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night.

[46][47] In creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of nearly all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly.

Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms.

[67] Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play.

Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation.

[88] Among the features in "RubyDung" he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper but at the time, felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode.

[93] As years passed, Persson regularly released test builds which included more features, such as tools, mobs, and even entirely separate dimensions.

[94] On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, developer of the Windows operating system and the Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion deal to buy Mojang, along with the ownership of the Minecraft intellectual property.

Early updates frequently introduced gameplay-altering mechanics and new concepts while the more recent ones tend to include quality-of-life changes and adjustments to existing features.

[150] The game differs from the home computer versions in a number of ways, including a newly designed crafting system, the control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and the ability to play with friends via Xbox Live.

According to the Lego Group's Ronny Scherer, the company was not yet sure of the potential success of Minecraft at this point and backed off from acquisition after Microsoft brought this offer to Mojang.

"[226] Early versions of Minecraft received critical acclaim, praising the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay.

Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly.

[271][272] At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth,[273] and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic.

[290] By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version.

The community responded with intense backlash against this announcement, particularly taking issue to the various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers.

[336] Microsoft and Mojang Studios received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones.

[353] Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development.

[355] Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos.

[360] Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube.

[357] The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance.

Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016."

[380] Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft has become a popular game for speedrunning, where players time themselves from being dropped into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss.

[384] A wide variety of educational activities involving the game have been developed to teach students various subjects, including history, language arts and science.

[400] A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system.

Every in-game element is completely AI generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before.