Minecraft series games

Minecraft

— the famous game from the independent developer Mojang AB is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive graphic style: the entire world, including characters and living creatures, is made up of cubes. Because of this, the game initially appears primitive, but this "appearance" does not reflect its content at all. Minecraft is a full-fledged "sandbox" game, offering players complete freedom of action without setting any specific tasks—except perhaps for survival in the respective modes. Before starting the game, the world is regenerated based on general parameters set by the user; players can also create their own maps. The "blocks" that make up the game world have different compositions and uses: stone, ore, wood, earth, water, lava, etc. The core gameplay involves moving, collecting, or destroying these blocks; thus, players can change the landscape, build structures, gather resources, and more. Additionally, the game offers extensive possibilities for creating and modifying various items, from tools and weapons to rails for minecarts and converters for transforming resources. "Redstone" deserves special mention, as it allows players to power items and structures and create circuits similar to electrical ones, complete with various logical switches (some enthusiasts have created replicas of devices like hard drives and even 8-bit gaming consoles within the game world using redstone).

Minecraft has four traditional game modes:

— Survival: The character must gather various resources (including food) and fend off monsters.
— Adventure: Similar to Survival, but uses maps created by players themselves. These maps may include various additional conditions and restrictions.
— Creative: Designed for creating various objects within the game. Players have access to all possible resources in unlimited quantities and can enable the ability to fly if desired; monsters, as well as "health" and "hunger" parameters, are absent.
— Spectator: An exclusively multiplayer mode. Players cannot interact with the world but can freely fly through it (including through "blocks") and switch to the perspective of another player or creature.

The original Minecraft was released back in 2011 for Windows and was later ported to almost all major modern gaming platforms, including other computer operating systems (Linux, macOS), gaming consoles (including handheld ones), and mobile devices. The game became extremely popular, spawning a massive fan community worldwide—including independent developers creating various modifications (the number of Minecraft mods today is in the thousands). In addition to the main game, an official spin-off, Minecraft: Story Mode, was released in 2015, featuring a full storyline. As of 2019, two more spin-offs are expected: Minecraft Earth, based on augmented reality, and Minecraft Dungeons, a dungeon-crawler RPG with cooperative gameplay.