Gameplay

Survival mode

The Minecraft crafting screen, showing the crafting pattern of a stone axe In survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items.[26] Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter at night.[26] The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from monsters, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game, except in peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is depleted, automatic healing will stop and eventually health will deplete.[41] Health replenishes when players have a nearly full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful difficulty. Players can craft a wide variety of items in Minecraft.[42] Craftable items include armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords), which allows monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools, which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. Players can construct furnaces, which can cook food, process ores, and convert materials into other materials.[43] Players may also trade goods with villager NPCs through a bartering system, which involves trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa.[44][29] The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. Upon dying, items in the players' inventories are dropped, and players re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game, and can be reset by sleeping in a bed.[45] Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, breeding animals, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons.[40] Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects.[40] Hardcore mode is a survival mode variant that is locked to the hardest setting and has permadeath, which permanently deletes the world if the player dies.[46] If a player dies on a multiplayer server set to hardcore, they are put into spectator mode.[47]