Yearning for the Mines: A Minecraft Review

Let's finally talk about one of the most popular sandbox video games ever: Minecraft. Minecraft is many people’s childhood game—including ours. Plenty of people remember the rise of Minecraft YouTubers and how popular the game was in the early 2010’s. Now with the 2025 Minecraft movie the game is even more popular.

Minecraft was initially released in May 2009 and was developed by Mojang Studios. What makes Minecraft so special is the fact the player decides the game. There’s no storyline or set characters you have to play as, you just get to do what you want. You can free roam, build, farm, and so much more. 

To learn more on the history of Minecraft find our other article How a Game About Blocks Took Over the Internet: Minecraft.

You can play Minecraft anywhere and everywhere for countless hours and you’ll never get bored. Minecraft can be played single-player but is best enjoyed in multiplayer. In multiplayer everyone’s different play styles can shine: the builders, the farmers, the explorers, the miners, and so many other types. 

Minecraft is a vast and endless game that caters to any play style. Its four difficulties allow you to make the game fit your distinct play style. There’s creative, survival, hardcore, and peaceful. Creative caters to the builders and gives them unlimited building blocks and immunity to all mobs (enemies). Survival is the typical Minecraft, where everyone can shine. You’ll have to collect supplies, fight mobs, and most importantly survive. Hardcore takes survival to the extreme and gives you one life. If you die, it's game over and you lose everything. Peaceful makes survival easier. Mobs don’t spawn and hunger never depletes—making it virtually impossible for the player to die. 

With all that in mind, let's begin our descent into the mines and explore the gems that Minecraft has to offer.

Building Your Lovely World

This is where players really get to let their creativity shine. Building in Minecraft brings endless possibilities. There are over 1,000 different types of blocks, and each one can serve a different purpose. With varying colors, textures, and shapes, you can use anything and everything to build whatever you want.

Many players begin their world by building a dirt home with dirt blocks, the easiest block to get in the game. For most, that is the extent of their home decorating journey. For others, building is the main goal of the game. 

Interior design and exterior design are completely different playgrounds. At first glance, you might think that your options are limited for things like lighting, beds, and appliances. You would be wrong. Players have used candles to create makeshift chandeliers, glowstone (true to its name, it’s a block that glows!) behind a block of glass to create overhead lights, or fence posts and banners to create a canopy bed. 

If you decide to add a furry companion to your home, you can create a cozy corner for your pet too. Give your wolf pup a cute little house by your bed, or use some colorful rugs to create a special corner for your baby ocelot. You can even add a sign on the wall with their name to really make the space belong to your pet.  

Scenic lake houses, greenhouses, medieval castles, and modern mansions are considered child's play to some builders. Some people have taken building to a whole new level. 

A community of passionate builders have dedicated themselves to the “Build The Earth” project with the aim of, as the name suggests, building a replica of the Earth. 

In Minecraft, your creativity is your only limit. 

Swinging My Pickaxe From Side to Side

A core mechanic of Minecraft is mining. In the caves you can find many things, primarily ores you can use to create gear and advance further into the game. But that’s not all that lies in the depths of stone. In the darkness you can find skeletons, zombies, spiders, creepers—aw man—and much much more.

While you have your pickaxe swinging side to side, you can come across two rather peaceful locations under ground. The easiest to find is a lush cave, the only place you can find the adorable axolotl companions. The other is geodes, the only source of amethyst—one of the few blocks in Minecraft to create sound when you walk over it. 

You can also find mob spawners (zombie, skeleton, and spider) which contain two chests of rather mundane loot. These spawners are best utilized by turning them into farms to gather certain mob drops and experience to upgrade your gear. 

Mineshafts and Strongholds contain slightly better loot and both offer their own challenges. In mineshafts you’ll stumble across cave spider nests and often sudden drops that could very easily lead to a game over screen. Strongholds, while rather easy to navigate, lead to a new dimension (The End) where you can face off against one of the three bosses, The Ender Dragon. 

Equally as dangerous as The End, are Trial Chambers. A location where you must fight wave after wave of mobs—including Breeze and Strays—and survive. If you do, you reap the benefits and get all kinds of loot like the over powered weapon: the Mace. 

While Lush Caves bring vibrance to the caves, the Deep Darks drains away what little color there was. The Deep Dark alone doesn’t have much to offer besides sculk and the occasional sculk shrieker. It's that sculk shrieker you need to be afraid of. Make it shriek three times and you’ve officially landed yourself in hot water. On that third strike a Warden will spawn. While not officially considered a boss, the Warden is the strongest mob in the game and is an unkillable force that’s much better avoided than fought. 

If you’ve stumbled on a Deep Dark biome, you  may even be lucky enough to find an Ancient City. This lost underground city has some of the best loot in the game, making it one of the most dangerous places to go. Not only do you have to fight off your typical mobs, but you also have to navigate terrain that in one wrong move you could summon multiple Wardens. 

Out of all the underground structures and biomes you can find, none of those are the rarest. Believe it or not, there is one more structure yet to be mentioned. The fossil. This structure is small and made of bone blocks. There is no way to try and find one or secret to finding it. The fossils are the hardest thing in the game to find because the only way to find them is pure dumb luck. 

Take your time going down into caves, because you’ll never know what you’ll find. It could be a new aquatic friend, a fancy new helmet, or the scariest mob in the game. 

Flat Earthers Unite

There’s one thing that all Minecraft players can agree on. Finding the right place to build your house is the hardest part of the game. It’s a long and tedious process that usually involves running in a straight line until you find a big plot of flat land in your favorite biome to build that mansion you will likely never finish. 

Biomes are zones in the game that house completely different climates, blocks and materials, and sometimes even enemies. The most common biomes you will come across are the vibrant oak forests filled with flowers and short trees, snowy spruce forests with tall trees and wolves that you can tame, and deserts, where you can find abandoned desert temples filled with treasure and traps. 

When you stumble across the jungle biome, home to massive trees, vines, and moss, you can find many unique materials that might just convince you to stay. 

Similar to the desert biome, in the jungle, you can find abandoned temples that house hidden treasure. Just be careful not to set off the tripwire and blow your loot away. If you’re looking for a new friend to bring back home, you’re in luck. The jungle is home to ocelots and parrots. To tame an ocelot, you’ll need to feed them fish while slowly approaching them to not scare them away. If you’d rather tame a parrot, you’ll need to have seeds on hand to get them to trust you.

One of the most sought after ingredients can also be found in the jungle. Cocoa beans. With cocoa beans, you can craft chocolate chip cookies. Take a sweet treat with you while you’re down in the mines or out exploring more biomes. 

The cherry blossom biome is a forest filled with flowers, animals, and you guessed it, pink trees. Though most resources here can be found in other forest biomes, the cherry blossom forest has a much higher chance to spawn bee hives, sheep, and rabbits. This biome is a farmer’s paradise. 

A recent addition to the list of biomes is one that is extremely hard to come across, with a below 1% spawn rate. This would be the Pale Garden. 

Unlike the vibrance of biomes like the cherry blossom forest, the Pale Garden is a small chunk of pale, dead trees, hanging vines, and a new creature unique to this forest—a new creature called a Creaking. When you look at it, the Creaking will stay completely still in an attempt to blend in with the surrounding trees and vegetation. The moment you look away, it will begin approaching you like a weeping angel. 

Every biome has something different to offer. Some, more creepy than others. 

Technoblade Never Dies

Typical Minecraft worlds don’t contain a whole lot of combat. If you’re playing on normal survival mode you’ll fight the average skeleton, creeper, and sometimes one of the more advanced mobs like a Breeze. You might even get a chance to test your luck against the illusive spider jockey. However, as most Minecraft veterans have learned by now, if you see a baby zombie you run. 

But all of those mobs aren’t all that scary once you max out your armor and gear. So where does Minecraft’s combat shine the most?

Against other players in PvP (player versus player). 

PvP has been a part of Minecraft since the rise of Hunger Games maps and the more famous Bedwars. It’s in these PvP centric games that Minecraft’s combat shined and for the players that were just around to build cozy worlds they didn’t have to master the combat in the game. Not unless you wanted to test your luck in one of the many PvP minigames running on servers anyone can connect to.

Now lets say you didn’t want to test your combat skills against other human players and just wanted to stay in your usual Minecraft world, just with a little more of a challenge. That’s where Hardcore mode steps in. 

While not combat centric, Hardcore forces you to be good at every aspect of the game. More monsters spawn, hunger depletes faster, and you only get one life. That’s it, the second you die you lose the ability to play that world, making Totems of Undying your new best friends. Some people love that thrill and challenge, others don’t. 

Chicken Jockey

You’ve been down in the mines for who knows how long. Your inventory is full, your hunger is low, and worst of all you’re lost and have no clue how to get home. Thankfully, there’s a chicken right in front of you. But he’s too cute to kill, now you’re gonna starve to death and lose all of your loot.

This is the dilemma many players have faced before. The animals in Minecraft are just too darn cute to use as a food source, so this is where farming has become popular.

There are dozens of different crops that you can plant and foods that you can make that don’t require hurting the animals. Starting out with eating from your farm only, can be rough. Since wheat and seeds take a while to grow, and your hunger can drop before your crops are ready to harvest. If you’re able to kill a skeleton and it drops a bone, you can speed up your crop’s growth by using bonemeal on it.

Bonemeal can be used on any plant. Wheat seeds, melon or pumpkin seeds, or even a tree that you’ve planted. Speaking of trees, while you wait for your crops to grow, try cutting down some trees. An apple has a high chance of dropping from it. 

Farming isn’t just about crops, animals still have a big part to play. If you can lure sheep into a pen and craft a pair of shears, you can get wool from them. Combining wool with any color dye will change the color of the block. Congratulations, you just made a new rug for your home. 

Sugar cane is also a very integral item in Minecraft as a whole. With it, you can make paper. Paper is then used to make books, and you guessed it, into bookcases. Not only are bookcases a great decorative item, it’s also used to enchant your tools with an enchanting table. 

Even if you aren’t going the pacifist route with your animals, farming is still required to get more powerful gear.  

—

Minecraft is one of the most diverse, well-rounded games out there that people are still more than happy to come back to 15 years later. The love for this game doesn’t seem like it will die down anytime soon either. In fact, it has only gotten stronger with the recent publicity gained from the Minecraft movie. 

With all of the multiplayer games out there to play with friends, nothing will ever quite beat some classic Minecraft. 

And so we leave you with the final words of the End Poem, a poem you get to read when you beat the Ender Dragon:

“and the universe said I love you because you are love.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

You are the player.

Wake up.” 

Our Rating