Gameplay

Gameplay in most game modes of Minecraft consists mainly of adding and destroying a variety of different blocks in a randomly generated world.

With these blocks, players can manipulate the world around them, building and destroying structures. As gameplay in Minecraft is so open and unguided, players often set their own goals and play the game as they see fit. An example of this is the Minecraft minigame, Spleef.

Game modes

Minecraft has four basic game modes: Survival, Creative, Adventure, and Spectator. Both editions have one additional game mode, Hardcore, although it is a per-world flag instead of a true gamemode.

Survival

In this mode, players must gather all their materials to build, craft items and tools and gain experience points. There is a health, hunger, and armor bar, an inventory, and also a oxygen bar when underwater, suffocating,‌^{[BE only]} or in lava.‌^{[BE only]} If a player runs out of hearts (health), the player dies and returns to the spawn point.

Creative

This mode is for creating structures and experimenting. The player has access to an infinite amount of almost all blocks and items available and can destroy them instantly. Players cannot die (except when falling into the Void in Java Edition), health is not a concern, and players can fly. The player has access to items not available in Survival mode, such as spawn eggs.

Adventure

Players can interact with objects such as levers and buttons, and can interact with mobs. However, they can break blocks only with certain tools, and place only certain blocks, as determined by the designer. This mode is good for adventure maps.

Hardcore

In this mode, which plays in the same way as Survival mode, the difficulty level is permanently set to "Hard", and the player does not respawn after dying. After death, the player cannot interact with the world again and must either delete the map or permanently switch to Spectator mode. Hardcore is not technically a game mode as it cannot be enabled with the /gamemode command.

Spectator

When in Spectator mode, players can clip through blocks and fly freely. The player can't interact with blocks, entities or their inventory.

In Java Edition, the player can enter the perspective of other entities by left-clicking on them, and are invisible to all players and mobs except for other spectators. When in third-person mode, a player appears as a transparent floating head. The player can use the scroll wheel to adjust the flying speed, unlike flying in Creative mode.

Video

Note: This video is outdated, as Spectator mode was added after this video's release.