Follow TV Tropes

Following

Minecraft / Tropes S to Z

Go To

Minecraft tropes: A to F || G to L || M to R || S to Z


    open/close all folders 

    S 
  • Sandbox Mode: "Creative Mode", where players have infinite resources to create anything they wish. In addition, the usual survival aspects of health and hunger are stripped away (preventing death), and you can now fly in order to traverse the map. You're unable to unlock Bedrock achievements when playing in this mode, however.
  • Savage Setpiece:
    • Zombified piglins randomly wander around the Nether, even walking right up to and look at you without attacking. When you attack one of them, every zombified piglin in range come in swinging. It's worth noting that it's only the zombified piglins will act this way: their living counterparts will immediately attack you without warning unless you're wearing gold armor. They deal some of the most damage per hit out of any monster; on par with wither skeletons and surpassed only by vindicators, piglin brutes, and creepers (although they can only deal damage once due to being Action Bombs). One blow can easily take off a quarter of your maximum health on Easy.
    • Some of the Overworld mobs act this way as well. Polar bears, bees, and even dolphins go on the offensive if you hit them or do anything else to provoke them (polar bears get angry if you go near their cubs, and bees will attack you if you try to harvest their nests). Wolves behave similarly to protect their own pack, but they can also be tamed, at which point they'll defend you from monsters.
    • Endermen can be considered this as well, but they disarrange the environment and even consider looking directly at them a hostile act.
  • Savage Wolves: Wolves normally mind their own business and can even be tamed and used as guard animals, but if you attack a wolf, it and its whole pack go berserk and try to kill you. They will also go after any sheep or skeletons they see.
  • Save Scumming: The only way to have incremental savegames - quit the game, alt-tab out, copy save folder, reenter game, reload save.
  • Scare Chord: The "ambience" noises in unlit caves could count as this.
  • Scary Stinging Swarm: Bees are normally passive, but if one is attacked, the entire swarm will retaliate and sting the attacker, injecting them with Poison. After attacking once, bees lose their stinger and die within the next minute. Bees will also attack if the player harvests from or destroys a bee hive, though putting a campfire directly underneath the hive will keep them passive.
  • Scenery Porn: Minecraft is unique in that despite its famous pixelated blocky graphics, it can still create some truly breathtaking scenery via its map generator. And the nature of the game basically makes it a do-it-yourself scenery porn generator. Just type "minecraft scenery" or "minecraft creations" into a Google Image search and see what you get.
  • Scolded for Not Buying: Villagers announce their displeasure rather loudly when you just flip through their offers.
  • Scoring Points: On death, a score is displayed that is determined by the amount of experience points you accumulated before dying. However, the scores themselves do nothing, although the experience points can be spent to enchant equipment. Its only value is in hardcore mode where death causes your world to be unplayable.
  • The Scream: The faces embedded in the soul sand texture found in the Nether. They don't really look like they're enjoying themselves.
  • Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The promotional image for version 1.8 shows Alex aiming her bow at the camera.
  • Sea of Sand: The desert biome consist chiefly of sand blocks, with the only vegetation being cacti and dead bushes — the only edible things here (that won't harm you if you eat them) are rabbits, but good luck catching them. There are desert villages and some mobs that spawn in the desert, but the overall effect is a sea of sand.
  • Secret Room: Woodland mansions often generate with hidden rooms that can be found by paying close attention to the room sizes and walls to see if there are any suspicious stretches being filled by a hidden room, or by looking through the windows if a secret room has generated attached to one. Secret rooms of all kinds can also be constructed by the player with redstone mechanisms, with pistons allowing for hidden retracting doors and myriad options for locking such a room at different levels of cryptic, down to being able to use the rotation of items in frames to create a combination lock or being able to hook up a lectern so a passage will be revealed when the book on it is turned to a specific page.
  • See Water: Water isn't too difficult to see through when submerged, the only problems being a translucent overlay and it being really dark underwater.
  • Selective Gravity: Only certain types of blocks (sand, gravel, concrete powder, Anvils; partially, fluid blocks) are affected by gravity. All other block types are not, allowing them to float in midair. Sometimes the blocks that aren't supposed to float might still do so if they were generated that way. Such floating blocks typically fall as soon as you do something affecting them, though.
  • Self-Destructing Security:
    • Desert Temples contain a room with four treasure chests, each containing rare and valuable loot. At the center of the room, however, is a pressure plate linked to nine blocks of TNT hidden beneath the floor. One must tread carefully, because if exploded, the TNT will destroy the chests and everything inside, and probably kill the player as well.
    • TNT traps set to blow up entire bases are also popular on some servers. If invaders are going to steal all of your stuff, might as well give them one last "Screw You" and not let anyone enjoy your equipment, right?
  • Sequence Breaking:
    • Although the game has no preset sequence to break, it does have a tech tree that's fairly linear. Normally, making an obsidian portal to enter the Nether requires a diamond pickaxe with which to break obsidian. However, since obsidian is formed when water flows over a lava source block, it's possible (through clever use of buckets) to make a mold, fill it with lava, and solidify it into a portal with water, no diamonds needed. If you're really bloody-minded, you can even find a natural lava pool and destroy all the lava that's not in the portal shape by replacing it with dirt, then opening a hole to a pond/ocean above and let nature do its work, no iron (for buckets) needed either. Hope your stone tools are good enough to fend off ghasts and blazes! Even better, the chests in blacksmith houses in villages have a chance to contain obsidian, and you can use the "Skyblock" method with the blacksmith's lava tank to light the portal. note  This method could theoretically allow you to enter the Nether within minutes of starting if you get lucky with villages, and you could be facing the Nether with no gear on hand whatsoever!
    • To a lesser extent, trading with villagers will get you offers for all sorts of different types of gear; if you're lucky (or just damn persistent) you can get access to quality equipment you normally shouldn't have at that point in the game, especially if you start near a village and get your hands on diamond tools before you even encounter iron! You can also get other valuable stuff like enchanted books and gear, saddles, eyes of ender, etc. without having to raid a dungeon or enter the Nether for them, though you'll have to grind for resources in order to get the requisite emeralds. Finally, the village itself will probably have carrots and potatoes to save you the trouble of waiting for a zombie to drop one, as well as anything else like chests you feel like stealing from them because you don't have one yourself.
    • This used to be discouraged by the fact that the achievements tree required certain achievements to be unlocked before subsequent ones could be — if you didn't have the achievement for crafting a furnace, you couldn't get the achievement for smelting iron ingots. This had the big problem that it was quite easy to skip achievements even if that wasn't the purpose: one could skip the first achievement, which involved merely opening the inventory — a player could head straight for the nearest tree to get some wood, then open the inventory (thus getting the achievement) to craft the crafting table, thus preventing the player from getting the second achievement (getting wood) until much later. Now, however, both Java advancements and Bedrock achievements don't care about the order you get them in, removing any consequence for sequence-breaking.
  • Serial Escalation:
  • Series Mascot: The creeper.
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Enemies will switch targets if they are hit by another enemy, but will otherwise go for you. Handy if you happen to be chased by more than one enemy. Also, having a skeleton kill a creeper is how you get records. Easier said than done, since it won't count if the creeper detonates or gets killed by anything else: it must be killed by a skeleton's arrow to drop a Music Disc.
  • Share Ware: The game is this now — unpaid users can play "demo mode", where a single map only lets you play for 5 in-game days before asking you to pay. After that, the map is locked until you pay.
  • Shifting Sand Land: Deserts. That "shifting" bit is taken more literally than some cases, as sand blocks, like gravel blocks, actually obey gravity (barring those created at world generation, which will float until disturbed).
  • Shipwreck Start: Beta versions of the game had the player character spawn on sand after creating a new world, possibly implying that you washed up on shore after a shipwreck.
  • Shoot the Medic First: In the battle against the Ender Dragon in the End, it's more like Kill The Crystals That Are Healing The Dragon First... which is made harder by their annoying tendency to explode when destroyed. Oh, and did we mention that the Dragon is effectively unbeatable unless every crystal is gone? And the fact that they're atop ~40-block-high obsidian towers? And the fact that some of them have iron bars surrounding them that you'll have to get rid of to destroy them?
  • Shop Fodder:
    • Sugar cane can quickly become this if you have even a modest farm for it. For example, a 17 x 17 farm, using as much growth area as possible, produces nearly 7 full stacks of sugar cane (assuming you leave a one-block layer for regrowth). Once you'd made enough paper to get 15 bookshelves and an enchantment table (a bit more than two stacks), the only other use it had was to make sugar and enchanted books, and you would still have a massive surplus. Excess paper, however, can be traded to a Librarian villager for a decent sum once you've finished using it to make maps or written books (if you feel so inclined). However, after you've gone to the End, paper does have a invaluable use in the firework rockets, which are used to propel elytra.
    • The only real buyers and sellers are villagers, who'll buy some materials that you yourself can make practical use of, making this by and large averted, though some of them are abundant enough so that they can be worth more to you traded for emeralds (wheat and sticks being good examples). It's also worth noting that no enemy drop is totally useless, no matter what it looks like at first. Bones? Make them into beneficial bonemeal or tame wolves with them. Spider eyes? Save them up and you'll thank yourself when you start brewing. Hell, rotten flesh can be fed to dogs safely once you have one and failing that, it could still be eaten in emergencies...
  • Shout-Out: More than enough to justify its own page.
  • Shovel Strike: In a pinch, you can use your shovel as a weapon, though it doesn't do as much damage as a sword, or even other tools like the axe or pickaxe.
  • Shown Their Work: Contrary to popular misconception, "beehive" technically means a man-made bee enclosure, which is more often called a "bee box" by laypeople; what most people think of when they read "beehive" is actually a "bee nest". Minecraft uses the correct terminology.
  • Sickening "Crunch!": The game's release replaced the long-standing "OOGH" damage sound with an absolutely spine-chilling set of crunching, cracking, and gibbing sounds. Some of these are even given titles such as "Hurt Flesh.wav". Which also play for burning, drowning, poison, and other forms of damage...
  • Sigil Spam:
    • End cities tend to be dotted full of banners whose designs resemble black hourglasses on magenta backdrops.
    • Illagers have banners of their face that they proudly wear in illager patrols and pillager outposts as hats (along with additional banners on the outpost tower for good measure). Killing the lead illager will cause him to drop it.
  • Downplayed in the ancient cities, where there are a few small shrines around the city that resemble the giant portal in the center.
  • Signature Device: Pickaxes and crafting tables, given what the game is all about: mining and crafting.
  • Silliness Switch:
    • Minecraft is available in a wide variety of languages: the default English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic... Elvish, Klingon, Pirate...
    • There's a one in ten thousand chance the title screen logo will say "Minceraft" instead of "Minecraft."
    • If you use a Name Tag to rename a mob to "Dinnerbone" or "Grumm", their model will render upside down. If you rename a sheep to "jeb_", its wool will cycle through all of its possible colours to create a rainbow effect (all three are case-sensitive).
    • The options menu had, during 1.7 and 1.8, the option "Super Secret Settings". Clicking it played a random sound effect run through a filter and cycles through several built-in shader effects, such as flipping the screen upside down, applying a CRT television filter, pixelating the screen in a limited palette reminiscent of 8-bit consoles, or making the screen wave while every colour on-screen cycle through the hue range constantly. Sadly, the button was removed in 1.9, although the shaders themselves are still in the game.
  • The Simple Life is Simple: Farming is much easier than in Real Life — for instance, you can make your crops grow on demand by adding bonemeal, and you can create healthy livestock out of mere two mobs. Somewhat enforced in this as in other video games, since games are intended to be, what was that word again, fun.
  • Simple, yet Awesome:
    • The fishing rod. Obviously used for fishing, but can also be used to yank mobs toward you (or off tall places), knock mobs back, reel in transports like boats and minecarts and (bizarrely) knock pictures off walls.
    • Bonemeal, when applied any plant, will grow it to full size after a few tries. This allows you to create full grown trees, harvest them, then re-grow and re-harvest a new tree from the saplings of the tree you just harvested. Wheat farms (to feed livestock) can be fast-tracked for a large surplus (this is the least efficient use of bonemeal, however). Melon/pumpkin stalks can be grown to full size quickly, and once grown as such will grow new melons/pumpkins extremely quickly (this part can't be affected by bone meal, though). Grass can be spread quickly to gather wheat seeds and flowers. Finally, you can even grow a single regular mushroom into a huge mushroom that can be harvested for over a dozen more mushrooms. Best of all, skeletons will almost always drop a bone, and one bone is three bonemeal, meaning one night of hunting can net you enough bone meal to last a good long while.
    • Torches. They are an absolute must-have when you go mining, and they're very easy to make. Not only does they help you see in the dark, they also decrease the rate at which mobs spawn. Falling sand and gravel can be broken by putting down a torch underneath them, thus preventing you from being suffocated, and therefore averting the Minecraft Safety Rule Number Twonote  completely. Torches also melt nearby snow and ice, making them useful to keep skylights from being snowed over and lakes from freezing in snow biomes (only for a radius of two blocks, though). Placing a torch underwater helps to regain air while underwater, so you do not have to resurface for air and may even save you from drowning (the torch itself is destroyed upon being placed, though).
    • Donkeys and mules are a golden example. Sure, they might not be able to fit that snazzy diamond horse armor you plundered from the Dungeon/Temple/Stronghold/whatever, but they're just as fast and durable as horses and you can easily fit them with chests for extra inventory space. Besides, the only thing you'd really need to protect your mount from is other players in PvP servers - you can easily run past creepers before they even hiss, dodging skeleton arrows and leaving zombies and spiders in the dust.
    • Ladders. Require nothing more than 7 sticks arranged in an H and are used for climbing up and down walls. It may seem faster to just jump and build below you for climbing up, and they're tricky to place climbing down (since you have to make sure you don't fall off the edge before you place it), but using them right can allow you to disregard the first two unwritten rules of Minecraft: Don't dig straight up or down. Digging up? They block sand and gravel, and if you're clinging onto them as you're digging up they may give you a few seconds to block off lava or water, and in both cases you can easily climb back down if things turn sour(if you have to dig away a pillar that could take time you might not have). Digging down? Cling onto the ladder until you can't dig down anymore, drop down if no lava was hit, place more ladders, hold onto them, repeat.
  • Single-Biome Planet:
    • The game normally averts this: there are several biomes available, with varying degrees of probability. If you start in an arctic biome and don't like it, just keeping walking until you find a biome you do like (note: may take a very long walk). However, the Buffet world type creates a world where a single biome is generated.
    • Subverted with the Nether. When it was added in 2010, as part of Alpha 1.2.0, it was entirely a huge cavern of red rock and lava, and it stayed this way for nearly 10 years. Mid-2020 introduced four new distinct biomes to the Nether, adding new inhabitants and resources on top of varying the scenery.
    • Played Straight in the End, as the land is almost completly barren, being made almost entirely out of endstone. Justified by the fact that the End is just some islands floating in what seems like the middle of nowhere, without daylight or weather. Somewhat downplayed by the End's outer islands, however. These islands technically have different biomes, but they are all variants of the main one, with the only real differences between them being the shape of the land, and what structures can generate on top of them.
  • Situational Sword:
    • You can end up with a rather specialized armor piece or tool depending on which enchantments you get on it, literally if enchanting a sword. For instance, a netherite sword with smite and looting will be exceptionally useful for slaying undead and farming their gold nuggets and wither skulls, though average against everything else (then again, a netherite sword is still a netherite sword). A sword with Looting for farming ender pearls is better without Fire Aspect, since endermen will run away as soon as they catch fire, making them more difficult to kill; similarly, it's the only way you can get lots of raw meat to trade to butcher villagers.
    • While enchanting armor, you can get protection against specific types of damagenote  rather than an overall damage reduction; you cannot have two or more of these damage reduction types on the same armor piece. Each of the specific protection classes offer twice as much mitigation compared to the generic Protection enchantment. It's not unreasonable to carry different armors for different environments (for instance, Fire and Blast Protection are very useful in the Nether).
    • Trident enchantments are heavily situational, usually favoring aquatic or rainy environments to achieve full effect. Even with Loyalty and Mending turning it into a melee-ranged hybrid weapon with unlimited ammo, you're better off with a sword for melee or a bow for ranged, since those weapons can receive enchantments that give universal damage bonuses. However, when you're raiding an ocean monument, the trident stands out as your one viable ranged weapon for underwater combat. A trident with Impaling V and Loyalty III can easily shoot down Guardians from a distance, and Elder Guardians become less tedious to defeat (although once you start farming Guardians, swords become better again because of Looting).
  • Slash Command: The game has these. For single-player, they are enabled by default in creative mode, enabled or disabled at world creation in survival mode, and force-disabled in hardcore. Servers have them enabled for all gamemodes, and server plugins can take them up to eleven with commands that remove all entities, spawn things like spheres, or make new worlds.
  • Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: The game itself is free-form; even with the addition of the Ender Dragon, the player still has a lot of liberty on how to play the game. Most custom Adventure maps tend towards purely or roughly linear if they have an actual plot. Wool collection maps usually have minor or major interconnectivity. There's a lot of Survival maps made which follow the basic rules of Minecraft, but add some theme or twist, like being stranded on an island, or being stuck in the sky, or something along those lines. These maps tend to be anywhere from minorly interconnected to free-roam.
  • Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: The Zombies, Skeletons, Phantoms, and their variants don't heal, but don't rot either, while the Wither doesn't rot and gradually regenerates.
  • Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale: The game handles this by using individual blocks to make structures and using procedural generation to create a near-infinite world. The world is 60,000km across, making it 1.5 times the size of the Earth.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Snowy biomes or frozen oceans are biomes that provide these environments. Frozen lakes, icebergs, and snow-covered terrain is everywhere, it snows instead of rains, and a special variant of Skeletons appears.
  • Slow Electricity: Quite a few contraptions end up working this way, but that's justified because it's difficult not to use a lot of repeaters in the not even electrical but "redstone" circuits as the power gets further away from the input. Repeaters can recharge a signal to full power, but impose a delay on it in exchange.
  • Smashed Eggs Hatching: Thrown eggs sometimes hatch into a young chicken that is feathered and capable of walking immediately.
  • The Snack Is More Interesting: If combat goes on long enough, it behooves the player to eat something to boost their Healing Factor, whether it be a slice of melon, some bread, or an entire cooked chicken.
  • Sniper Duel: One of the achievements is called "Sniper Duel", and is awarded for shooting a skeleton from 50 blocks of distance. It's actually easier than it sounds, since most monsters can't detect players beyond 16 blocks of distance.
  • Snowlems: You can build a golem out of snow with a jack-o-lantern for a head (you can also remove the pumpkin with shears after it's built for a more traditional, if very goofy-faced, snowman). It'll wander around, spreading snow on the ground. It also throws snowballs at nearby monsters. The snowballs don't deal any damage directly (except to some Nether mobs), but they'll knock the monster back and distract it, which you can use to your advantage whether you're trying to fight, flee, or lure it into a trap.
  • Socialization Bonus: There's a Bedrock achievement gained by tossing a diamond towards another player. Thankfully, this can be done in single-player mode as well, since tossing a diamond at any mob that can hold items also counts.
  • Soft Water: Exaggerated. An inch-deep puddle will completely negate all falling damage.
  • Some Dexterity Required: Many things require lots of clicks. Thankfully, you can hold a button down to mine.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography: Starts off with the Overworld, then the underground caves, then the Nether, and finally the aptly titled End. On the other hand, the deep dark is potentially as dangerous as the End (albeit with less danger of losing your items), but can be found in the Overworld from the offset.
  • Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: Nearly every enemy makes its own distinct idle sounds. Zombies groan, skeletons clunk, spiders skitter and hiss, witches laugh, ghasts... uh, impersonate the sound designer's cat, and so on. The only exception is creepers, who, as their name suggests, are stealth-based and do not make any sound at all. Flowing water and lava also make sounds indicating that they are near.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The serene piano melodies that grace the game's audio only serve to make the tunnels to hell all the more horrifying. Even worse if your audio on the game happens to glitch horribly and distort.
  • So What Do We Do Now?: The bizarre ending sequence has two entities speaking directly to the player, praising their accomplishments in the game and suggesting that maybe their next adventure will be to do great things in the real world, too.
  • Space Compression: Although the map is theoretically infinite the biomes are unrealistically small, though the Large Biomes worldgen option changes this. Furthermore, while the world is large horizontally it's extremely compressed vertically - mountains rarely rise more than a hundred metres above sea level, while most seas are shallow enough that you can see all the way to the bottom.
  • Spam Attack:
    • All of the game's older weapons used to be capable of this on Java before bow drawback and attack cooldowns were introduced. On Bedrock, melee weapons can still be spammed without consequence (although mobs and players do receive brief Mercy Invincibility).
    • It still has its niche when dealing with the vindicators; if you have a sword with the Knockback enchantment, spam clicking can keep the vindicator too far away to actually be able to attack you.
  • Spikes of Doom: The Dripstone Caves deep underground are full of stalactites and stalagmites, which are harmful whether they're falling on you or if you're falling on them. Falling stalactites deal between three and twenty hearts of damage depending on how far they fall, and falling onto a stalagmite doubles Falling Damage.
  • Sprint Meter: Done somewhat differently. Your Hunger Meter (which can be refilled by eating) is made of ten muttonchops. If the top one isn't empty, you'll slowly heal. If three or less are full, there's no way to sprint. If it's empty, you take gradual damage which ends differently depending on difficulty — half health in Easy, one HP in Normal, death by starvation in Hard or Hardcore.
  • Sprint Shoes: You can enchant your boots with Depth Strider or Soul Speed. The former lets you walk across underwater floors faster, while the latter does the same for soul sand and soul soil.
  • Status Effects: A Status Buff potion can be converted into one of these instead by adding a fermented spider eye to them during brewing, a few mobs also give you these when they attack you.
    • Poison: Reduces your health until the effect runs out or you have one health left.
    • Slowness: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • Weakness: Damage output is reduced.
    • Wither: Similar to poison except it can kill you.
    • Blindness: Obscures vision in black fog, and prevents sprinting and critical hits.
    • Darkness: Obscures vision, and causes the apparent brightness everywhere to fluctuate.
    • Hunger: Depletes your food bar.
    • Mining Fatigue: Mines blocks and attacks slower.
    • Nausea: Causes Interface Screw by making the camera view wobble.
    • Bad Luck (only obtainable by commands): Reduces chance of getting rare loot.
    • Glowing (Java exclusive): Entities affected are visible even through opaque blocks.
    • Levitation: Affected entities float in the air.
  • Status Buff: The game has several status buffs that are obtained from potions and using beacons. The stronger the buff, the more potent it is and they can be used on friends and foes alike:
    • Regeneration: Restores health over time.
    • Speed: Walk and run faster.
    • Jump Boost: Jump higher.
    • Strength: Damage output is boosted.
    • Resistance: Increased defense.
    • Fire Resistance: Immunity to fire and lava.
    • Night Vision: All dark areas are lit up, though they are not actually filled with light, thus monsters can still spawn.
    • Water Breathing: Super Not-Drowning Skills.
    • Invisibility: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, except for items carried and armor pieces worn.
    • Saturation: Replenishes your food bar.
    • Haste: Mines blocks and attacks faster.
    • Health Boost (only obtainable by commands): Temporarily increases your maximum health.
    • Absorption: Same as above, except the extra health can't be regained through regeneration even if the buff is still active.
    • Luck (only obtainable by commands): Increases chance of getting rare loot.
    • Slow Falling: Decreases falling speed and negates fall damage.
    • Conduit Power: Increases underwater visibility and mining speed, and prevents drowning.
    • Dolphin's Grace (Java exclusivenote ): Increases swimming speed.
  • Stealth Pun:
    • Creepers have an irritating habit of hiding behind corners, under ledges, and outside doorways to ambush the player.
    • Creepers have a mottled green texture that, at a distance, can cause one to mistake them for cacti or the tops of trees. The word "creeper" can also refer to various plants.
  • Stealthy Mook: Creepers in emit next to no noises other than the infamous hissing sound when they are about to explode (or when they are hurt), allowing them to easily catch the players off-guard, and the fact that they are active at night only makes it worse.
  • Stock Animal Diet:
    • Cats and ocelots are tamed and bred by feeding them raw fish. And in line with the "cats eat birds" rule, they will go after chickens.
    • You feed cows and sheep sheaves of wheat to get them to breed.
    • Dogs are tamed by feeding them bones, although after that, they only eat meat. And tamed or not, they'll gleefully chase after skeletons without waiting for an excuse.
    • The only livestock wolves will go after is sheep. On the other hand, they'll only try to kill humans if you attack them first, and if you stand near them holding a bone or meat, they will stare at it hopefully.
    • Bees collect pollen from flowers, which they carry back to their hives and transform into honey. Real bees make honey from flower nectar, though this may be deliberate simplification.
    • Chickens and parrots can be fed and bred with seeds.
  • Stock Beehive: The naturally generated bee nests look like the usual golden-colored wasp nests seen in fiction.
  • Stock Femur Bone: Skeletons drop the classic femur bones.
  • Stock Food Depictions:
    • All cookies are chocolate chip, which is why feeding them to parrots will kill the parrot, since chocolate is poisonous to real-life parrots.
    • Apples are bright red, while carrots are orange with a tuft of green leaves.
  • Stone Wall: What anything under the effects of a potion of the Turtle Master becomes. Obtained by brewing Awkward potions with a turtle shell, these potions give you Slowness IV (-60% speed) and Resistance III (-60% damage taken) for 20 seconds, leaving you highly resistant to damage, but also unable to close in and attack in melee as effectively. A second-level Turtle Master potion Exaggerates this, giving you Resistance IV (-80% damage taken) in exchange for Slowness VI (-90% speed).
  • Stuff Blowing Up:
    • The famous creeper, an enemy best described as a suicide-bombing leaf monster. On the players' side of things, it also features TNT blocks, which when placed in close proximity with one another (or any other explosion) can create chain reactions. Sufficiently large explosions have been known to crash the game and break the current world's save file.
    • Beds violently explode in a fiery ball when used in the two alternate dimensions. Same applies to respawn anchors used in the Overworld and End.
  • Subliminal Seduction: The noises made by calm Endermen consist of "here", "hiya", "what's up?", "this way!", "forever!" and "uh oh!" played backwards, sometimes with the pitch changed.
  • Suicide Attack: The creepers are a race of hostile green creatures whose main battle tactic is to run up into your face and blow themselves up. Or to run up behind you, silently, and blow themselves up.
  • Summon to Hand: Tridents normally have to be manually retrieved by the player after being thrown. The Loyalty enchantment allows them to fly back to the player's hand after they hit something.
  • Superboss: To fight the Wither, you will have to gather up four blocks of soul sand and three wither skeleton skulls to construct it, both of which are found in the Nether. One of the paintings even shows you how to put it together. Once constructed, it proves to be one of the most powerful mobs in the entire game, with 150 hearts of health and the ability to spew powerful exploding skulls in three directions at once.
  • Super Drowning Skills: In older versions of the game, slimes could spawn at night in swamp biomes. However, they couldn't swim, so it was quite likely that they would jump in deep water and eventually drown. This does not happen in the current version of the game, however.
  • Superweapon Surprise: Villagers are incapable of defending themselves. The iron golems that patrol their villages aren't. Attack a villager and have a several ton golem bearing down on you like an enraged bear made of metal defending her cubs.
  • Super Wool Growth: Sheep take about 2 minutes to regrow wool after shearing, provided there is grass around to eat.
  • Survival Horror: In a world with plenty of hostile mobs and you have to build up supplies from scratch, Minecraft can reach into this trope depending on the environment you end up in. It's especially evident in Hardcore mode, where you only have one shot; if you die, you can't respawn.
  • Survival Sandbox: A Trope Maker, introducing the Resources Management Gameplay, destructible environment and Item Crafting elements that would come to define the genre.
  • Swamps Are Evil: Witch huts are only found in swamps, and swamps are the only places where slimes can spawn on the surface.

    T 
  • Tactical Door Use: The game zigzags this one. Wooden doors cannot be locked, while iron ones have one built in because they need power to open or close. Villagers can go through wooden doors at their leisure, sometimes making them Too Dumb to Live. Zombies and vindicators alone of the hostile mobs can use doors... as in, they'll break down wooden doors given enough time (and only on the higher difficulties at that).
  • Tagline: Tons; the page image's caption is one of a set of many, from which one is randomly pulled every time the game's title screen pops up.
  • Take That!:
    • One of the splash messages used to be "SOPA is LOSER in Swedish" as a Take That to the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, which was a hot button topic at the time. note 
    • One of the new features introduced in the April Fools' "Vote Update" in 2023 is "dream mode", which increases the probability of various in-game events. One of these is receiving ender pearls from bartering with piglins, in reference to the Dream speedrunning controversy where he was caught using a modified version of the game to improve his luck.
  • Taking You with Me: The creepers, which explode if you get too close. Though experienced players can get around them with bows and arrows, the strength of their explosions drive beginners insane and make miners paranoid.
  • Talk Like a Pirate: The game has an option to change your language. Naturally, Pirate Speak is one of the options.
  • Tastes Like Friendship: You can tame wolves by feeding them bones, and stray cats by feeding them fish.
  • Technicolor Death: While normally mobs simply fall over and vanish in a puff of smoke when killed, the Ender Dragon starts to explode and disintergrate pixel by pixel while shooting out beams of light.
  • Technicolor Fire: Soul fire, created when soul soil is ignited, has blue-coloured flames (and so do soul fire torches, lanterns, and campfires, which are created using soul soil). Outside of the aesthetic difference from regular fire, it's also dimmer (having just a light level of 10 versus 14) and burns you more painfully if you step in it (by two hit-points per second versus one).
  • Technicolor Toxin: Being poisoned turns your health bar a sickly green, and contracting food poisoning makes your hunger bar green. During both kinds of poisoning you also have green swirls appear around you.
  • Telefrag:
    • A possible method of death comes through ender pearl usage. Instead of landing on flat ground, the pearl hits the side of a block, teleporting you inside the block and suffocating you if you don't dig out quickly enough. Also possible (though mostly restricted to mods or mini-games that spawn in blocks) is blocks spawning where you are standing.
    • Can also happen with the /tp (teleport) command. Players tend to give only the X and Z coordinates to teleport, leaving the vertical Y coordinate unaltered. This can result in them either falling from the sky or being buried underground, depending on where they were before.
  • Teleportation Sickness: The player can throw an ender pearl (dropped by the Teleport Spaming endermen) in order to be teleported to where it lands - but it does 2 1/2 hearts worth of damage in the process.
  • Teleport Spam: Endermen are capable of this, as once they become aggressive, they can continually evade your attacks and jump behind you. The ultimate example comes when it rains; as water damages them, they will run madly around until they either die or happen upon a sheltered location. On the good side, this also renders them harmless as they will not attack.
  • Temple of Doom: Of both desert and jungle varieties.
  • Temporary Platform: Dripleaf plants have leaves that will quickly bend downwards when a player stands on them, causing them to fall through after standing on it for a few seconds. These can be made to stay upright when a player stands on them via powering the leaf with a redstone signal.
  • Tennis Boss: You can reflect ghast fireballs with melee attacks, arrows, fishing rods, or even snowballs. Good thing, too, since they love to float out of range of your conventional weapons. Killing a ghast with its own fireball is the purpose of the achievement "Return to Sender".
  • Terraform: Sort of— planting lots of trees to ensure a healthy wood supply is an important part of the game, and if you're in a desert or a tundra it can come off as turning the wastelands into a forest. However, the weather patterns won't change, and creatures specific to your intended biome still won't spawn.
  • Terrain Sculpting: You can pretty much change everything you can touch, from creating a mountain, destroying it, then rebuilding it in the middle of the ocean. It's almost certain you'll end up flattening large portions of land to hold farms and such.
  • There Are No Bedsheets: Your character always lays on-top of the blanket when on a bed.
  • There Was a Door:
    • Nothing's stopping a player from tunneling into a dungeon or a building through a wall, even if a proper entrance is aleady provided.
    • Thankfully averted with creepers, who won't explode if they don't have a direct line of sight to the player, otherwise staying safe at night would be impossible without tons of obsidian.
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Hostile mobs will spawn outside at night, or in any area which sufficient shade to emulate nighttime light levels. You can mitigate this somewhat by lighting up your surroundings, but the only truly safe place is a well-lit and illuminated safehouse.
  • 30-Day Free Trial: Playing Minecraft on an account that hasn't bought the game yet will limit the player to 100 minutes (5 in-game days) of gameplay on a preset world, after which their only options are to reset the world or buy the game.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
    • Snowballs in the Nether. Snowballs are usually a Joke Weapon that deal no damage and only light knockback, but the Nether's blazes are hurt by them, making them an effective ranged weapon. Unfortunately, the heat of their home dimension swiftly kills any player-made snow golems that don't have Fire Resistance.
    • Shears are probably the most useless tool, usually being kept in a chest at the player's base until they decide they'd like a wool monument or a nice overgrown garden and go out to start harvesting wool or ferns, grass, and vines. The only time shears will be remotely useful when spelunking is when you're going into an abandoned mineshaft and trying to clear out hundreds of cobwebs without wasting durability from your precious sword, or when you're exploring a jungle temple and have to cut the tripwires that activate the traps.
  • Thriving Ghost Town: A typical village generated in a world generally consists of a few buildings and a dozen NPCs. Not that this stops players from expanding them, or building their own.
  • To Hell and Back: When the player enters the Nether and leaves alive, more so after fighting their way through many Nether mobs.
  • Too Awesome to Use:
    • Enchanted golden apples. The give 8 extra hearts of health and a lot of other buffs, but they are only obtainable rarely inside chests within specific structures.
    • For a brief while, it was possible for a bow to have both the Infinity and Mending enchantments. Currently it is no longer possible to combine them, but existing bows with both enchantments continued to exist... but are now irreplaceable, and thus are largely relegated to killing livestock (especially if they also have the Flame enchantment).
    • Netherite ingots can be used to upgrade your diamond equipment into netherite ones, enhancing their efficiency, durability, and making them indestructible by fire and lava. The problem is ancient debris, the material used to make netherite ingots, is incredibly rare — you can mine for a long time before even finding one, and you need four to make a single ingot. Then, you need a netherite upgrade template, which can only be found in the dangerous bastion remnants, and it gets consumed on use, so you'll need to spend 7 diamonds to duplicate it each time you use one, or go out exploring — in the Nether — for more bastions. Netherite equipment is strong but not invincible and the risk of losing one can make a player reluctant to regularly use it, preferring to stick to their diamond or iron gear.
    • Totems of undying will Auto-Revive the player if they take lethal damage, giving them Regeneration and Fire Resistance to boot. The catch? They only drop from evokers, which spawn either in limited numbers in rare woodland mansions, or as part of dangerous Illager Raids. With how rare evokers are, totems are thus in very limited supply.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • Digging straight down is not a good idea; you could fall into a pit of mobs, a deep ravine (possibly with dripstone at the bottom), or a pit of lava.
    • Same applies to digging straight up; you could well uncover some sand or gravel which can bury you and cause you to suffocate , or get lava falling on your head.
  • In older versions of the game, enemy AI often consisted of nothing but walking in a straight line towards the player, ignoring all hazards.
  • Piglins rush towards any gold ingots you throw down, before tossing you an item in exchange. In their rush they can sometimes slip off ledges and fall to their doom.
  • Took a Level in Badass:
    • Wolves fall under this once you tame them. A wild wolf has 4 hearts of health and low attack power. When you tame one to your side, its health is boosted to 10 hearts and gains a boost in attack power. It will also attack anyone you attack or attack anyone that strikes you first.
    • Zombies and skeletons received several upgrades that make them more dangerous to fight directly. Originally, zombies and skeletons had simple AI where they would walk straight at you no matter what pitfalls that stood in their way. A patch upgraded their AI to walk around pitfalls when chasing the player and skeletons will flank the player should the player try to hide behind a wall. Zombies and skeletons also had their AI upgraded where they will seek shade under a tree or jump in a pool of water should they catch fire from sunlight. On top of this, there's also a rare chance that skeletons and zombies will wear armor (from leather to even diamond material and also a chance those will be enchanted) and zombies may spawn in with iron shovels or iron swords to cause extra damage to you. Skeletons may also spawn with their bows enchanted for even more lethal power. These mobs have come a long way from being simple monsters to ones that can cause serious trouble on par with a creeper.
  • Toyline-Exclusive Character: The collectable mini-figures include animals or creatures that never appear in the game, like hydras, harpies, minotaurs, dryads, and Greek gods.
  • Training the Peaceful Villagers: Well, more like Fortifying the Peaceful Village to prevent the zombie hordes from ravaging the place, as villagers are completely incapable of defending themselves from anything.
  • Trap Door: The game lets the player construct trapdoors out of either wood or iron. Wooden versions can be opened or closed manually like any door, but iron trapdoors mandate a redstone signal to operate.
  • Travel to Projectile: When thrown, ender pearls cause the player to teleport to the spot where they land.
  • Treacherous Checkpoint: Beds could be considered checkpoints, as they allow you to reset your spawn point and bypass dangerous events. Trying to use one in the Nether or the End, though, makes it instantly explode. Respawn anchors, when used outside the Nether, are similarly explosive.
  • Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction: Big enough to make a full suit of armor out of twenty-four diamonds.
  • Trick Arrow: On Java Edition, arrows can be combined with glowstone dust to craft spectral arrows that make targets glow, or with lingering potions to craft tipped arrows that inflict status effects to targets. On Bedrock, tipped arrows are created by dipping them in cauldrons of potions, while the Glowing status effect, and thus tipped arrows, don't exist.
  • Trophy Room: The addition of item frames allows you to build trophy rooms into your constructions.
  • Turning Back Human: For a given definition of "human", you can turn zombie villagers back to their human selves via dousing them with a splash potion of Weakness followed by feeding them a golden apple, before waiting for a good period of time.
  • Tutorial Failure: During its initial beta run, the wildly popular game featured no tutorial and simply dumped your character into a randomized block world with absolutely no gear. It didn't tell you anything of what to do, how to play, or even how to craft, or what the crafting recipes were. For the months before the dev actually developed enough of a tutorial system to help players survive their first day, player advice for newbies was generally "go read the wiki" or "watch paulsoaresjr's videos".
  • 20 Bear Asses:
    • One of the trades offered by cleric villagers has shades of this: they'll give you an emerald for a certain quantity of rotten flesh, proving that you killed enough zombies.
    • Both boss fights have elements of this. The Ender Dragon can only be reached by looting enough ender pearls from slain endermen or piglin bartering to craft into eyes of ender with which to locate the stronghold containing the End portals (which the eyes then activate). The Wither is even worse, requiring three wither skeleton skulls, which said skeletons only have a 2.5% chance of dropping (4% with maximum looting enchantments), not to mention the fact that you have to enter the Nether to find them and find a Nether fortress where you also have blazes and regular skeletons to deal with.
  • 24-Hour Armor: There is no reason to not wear armor if you can.
  • T-Word Euphemism: One splash is "Doesn't use the U-word!" The consensus among fans is that the U-word in question is Unity, a common 3D game engine (Minecraft uses Java or C++, depending on version). As such, this trope is Played for Laughs here.

    U 
  • Unbreakable Weapons: As of the official release, bows break after 385 uses (more with the Unbreaking enchantment), but for a long time, bows were indestructible to offset the fact that arrows vanish whenever they do damage. Setting any tool or weapon's NBT Tag of Unbreakable to 1 via commands or an NBT editor restores this effect on it.
  • Unconventional Food Usage: Pumpkins can be worn on the head to ward off endermen.
  • Undead Child: Baby zombies. They are just like regular zombies, except that they are smaller, faster, and make higher pitched sounds.
  • Undeath Is Cheap: Zigzagged. You can cure zombie villagers but not regular zombies.
  • Underground Level: Miles upon miles of underground caverns, as well as structures such as abandoned mineshafts and dungeons.
  • Underground Monkey: The game includes several location-specific variants on their basic monsters:
    • Cave spiders are smaller (able to crawl through a 1×1 hole), bluer spiders that spawn in abandoned mineshafts and whose bites can poison a player.
    • Wither skeletons spawn in Nether fortresses, wield swords instead of bows, and can cause the "Wither" effect (which is similar to poison but more severe, obscures the player's health meter, and can be fatal), while strays are skeletons that spawn in icy climates and fire potion-tipped arrows that slow their targets.
    • Husks are zombies that spawn in deserts (where there are no trees to hide under) and don't burn up in the sun, and drowned are zombies that spawn in water and can wield tridents.
    • Zombified piglins are zombified forms of piglins, who are less aggressive than regular piglins, and can't use crossbows. They can be found in Nether fortresses, and more commonly in the Nether wastes biome than their alive counterparts.
  • Underwater Ruins:
    • Due to the way strongholds are created on a map, it's quite possible you'll end up with one or more in the middle of the ocean, buried a few blocks below the sea bed.
    • Ocean monuments. The things are filled to the brim with water and protected by guardians. There's also treasure in the temple: 8 blocks of gold, and the only way to get sponges legitimately.
    • There are also literal underwater ruins, which consist of small collections of ruined huts.
  • Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
    • Want a horse that runs faster, or donkeys and llamas that can carry more? Be prepared to have to selectively breed the together the animals that have the most desirable traits, while fighting against random mutation in the process.
      • Pandas have an even more complex genetics system, with dominant and recessive genes determining the personality and appearance of each one.
    • In defiance of fantasy genre conventions, gold tools and armor, while effective, have extremely low durability and as such are almost useless except for looking cool. Gold is one of the softest metals in the world; just like in real-life, gold weapons are only good for decorative purposes. However, gold is also used in conjunction with redstone in a number of craftable items that are considerably more useful, such as powered track. This is because it is well known as an integral component in precision electronic devices, for its electrical conductivity
    • You actually can drop an anvil on someone's head. It's just going to damage them. A lot. And it might damage the anvil, too.
    • Feeding cookies to parrots will instantly kill them, and the parrot will emit poison particles as it dies. You used to have to feed parrots cookies to tame them, but this caused an uproar as chocolate is poisonous to real life parrots and the cookies are chocolate chip, something they tried to address with the addition of the "Don't feed chocolate to parrots!" splash message. Now, you tame them by feeding them seeds.
    • Supply and demand do exist here. For example, if you trade in too many sticks for emeralds, the fletcher will start demanding more sticks per emerald. Villagers also don't have infinite items and money, which means you have to wait until they restock before you can sell or buy from them again.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable:
    • In order to reach the End dimension, you need to activate the End portal, found in strongholds, which used to only spawn 3 times per world. Generation bugs can cause the portals to be incomplete, and if all 3 portals were incomplete, you were screwed. At least, this was the case before an update made it so that there are 128 Strongholds, so now it's extremely unlikely you won't find one that is complete.
    • Before the hunger bar was introduced, there was a possibility of getting stuck in a 2 block deep hole in bedrock. Normally, if you have a supply of blocks this wouldn't be a real problem since you could create a platform under you to escape. However, if you for some reason fell into this hole without any blocks, you better hope there's an enemy mob nearby that can kill you because there's no way you can respawn without death and bedrock is indestructible. After the hunger meter was added, it became possible to starve to death note , taking this out of Unwinnable territory... but 1.0 added Hardcore Mode, which puts it right back in.
    • At times, it's possible to start a new world... inside a hill (or, in Minecraft 360's case, underwater). Should this happen on Hardcore...
    • You can also make a pool of lava in your original spawn point (the one not set with beds) and die; you will respawn on the lava, and die again, ad infinitum. Or build a hollow cube of obsidian around it, then turn "Keep Inventory" off and/or throw away your diamond pick. note 
  • Unobtainium:
    • Many precious resources fall into this category:
      • Diamonds. You have to go near the bottom of the map, and even then they're terribly rare. They usually only appear in groups of four or so (up to eight, if you're lucky). If you can manage to get a Fortune-enchanted pickaxe, you can get more per block, but it's still not that much.
      • Emeralds are even worse. Emeralds spawn only in mountain biomes, in around one block per 16x16x16 chunk (if that, although they do get more common at very high Y-levels) and drop exactly one emerald per block (more with the Fortune enchantment, as above). Their only use is as currency when trading with villagers, but then doing anything else with them would be extremely impractical.
    • Netherite requires you to go to the Nether (with all the dangers this hellish dimension involves), dig down to the bottom layers to find ancient debris (as they only generate up to two veins per chunk, one of which is always between levels 8 and 22, while the other can be found at any altitude, but since they can't be found in the open air, it's almost impossible to come across other than by random chance), mine them with a diamond (or already-existing netherite) pickaxe (and since they're full blocks, you can't get more than three blocks a vein, even with the Fortune enchantment), smelt them into netherite scrap, and finally combine four of those scraps with four gold ingots to craft a single netherite ingot (fortunately, you only need one per piece of diamond gear to upgrade, instead of using multiple ones to craft netherite gear from scratch).
      • D All three of these can be found as treasure in various loot chests, making them a little easier to get. Just a little.
    • Glowstone. Just to reach it you have to get enough diamonds to make a diamond pickaxe, then convert lava to obsidian so you can mine it, and finally form that obsidian into a Nether portal. Once you're there, you have to find a glowstone deposit hanging from the ceiling, build a platform so you can reach it, possibly build another platform to capture the dust if it's over lava (which is everywhere), and then mine it while hoping that some ghast doesn't show up and blow you up (along with your platform). Furthermore, without a Fortune or Silk Touch enchantment to increase the yield or just take the whole block, you'll only get an average of three blocks for every four mined. There are other ways to acquire it (witches have a chance to drop it, and cleric villagers might sell it), but they're much slower than the aforementioned method.
    • Obsidian, as mentioned above, takes quite some effort to obtain. You need a diamond pickaxe just to start. Obsidian is created when water flows over a lava source block (not to be confused with flowing lava, which creates cobblestone). While the properties of water let you infinitely reuse a single bucket to make as much obsidian as there is lava, lava is finite unless you go to the effort of slowly farming it with dripstone. Using it on a lava fall creates a single block. If you happen upon a lava lake, you can get a lot more, but lakes are several layers deep and you need to mine carefully to avoid losing the obsidian as you mine it, not to mention being careful not to accidentally kill yourself. You might find a few blocks of obsidian in village chests, but don't get your expectations high.
    • Somewhat ridiculously, melons used to be this. Melons didn't grow naturally, and their seeds were only obtainable from chests in abandoned mineshafts (or by buying one from a villager). While this doesn't sound like too big a deal, melon slices are a required component of healing potions. Currently, melons grow in jungle biomes, alleviating this problem (although not much, since jungles are among the rarest biomes), as well as in savannah villages (which fortunately are rather more common).
  • Un Sound Effect: The 2014 April Fools Day joke was to add either these or onomatopeias (in a "durrrrr" tone) to every single action taken. Even ambient noise became repeated ad naseum, with bubbling sound of lava being replaced with "LAVA!" or the sound of stepping on stone being replaced with "STONE!".
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Downplayed with illager banners. While the player can obtain them by killing a captain or breaking them at pillager outposts, they are unable to wear them like pillagers and vindicators can.

    V 
  • Vader Breath: Blazes are recognizable by their heavy mechanical breathing.
  • Vague Age: The player. They are clearly adults, or else they wouldn't be left alone or, in Steve's case, have a goatee (often mistaken for a smile). In fact, it's also hard to estimate their age ranges as well, given that everything in the game is pixelated. They do all look fairly young, but then again, their faces are pixelated, along with the rest of their bodies, meaning they are very hard to tell.
  • Vancian Magic: The game uses a system similar to this with its potions. All potions must be meticulously crafted to achieve very specific effects, and there is a limit to how many can be carried at once.
  • Vent Physics: Placing soul sand in water gives a makeshift version of this, creating a bubble column that will push players, mobs and items upwards.
  • Verber Creature: The creeper.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The game "ends" rather aptly, in the End, an Eldritch Location filled with nothing but endless expanses of air, a background that looks like TV static making it very hard to see, tons of endermen, massive obsidian towers, and the Ender Dragon. There are lots of floating islands that can be accessed after killing the Dragon, but it's still where the final fight takes place.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • Tamed wolves. They'll kill for you. They'll die for you. It's in your best interest to keep their health up, especially since you can heal them with zombie meat (which serves no other purpose and is poisonous to the player).
    • The same goes for cats. They're adorable, and also serve as a handy creeper and phantom repellent. You can get quite attached to them, as long as they don't drive you mad by holding sit-ins on your bed, crafting table, or chests.
    • Befriending horses will gain you a very useful companion that'll let you traverse the overworld and scale hills and mountains far faster than on foot. Breeding them takes more resources than normal (you need almost 2 gold ingots' worth of nuggets for golden carrots just to get them in "love mode") but the resulting offspring can potentially be even better than their parents (i.e. more health, higher top speed, better at jumping, etc.)
    • Horses near a large ravine have a tendency to fall in. While nothing's stopping you from just ignoring them, there's a certain satisfaction in rescuing them, especially if you tame them to do so.
    • You can go out of your way to fortify a village against zombie attacks and build more houses for them so they'll happily reproduce, something can be worth the effort as you get more villagers to trade with.
    • To cure a zombie villager, you need a potion of weakness and a golden apple (one of the best foods in the game) on top of having to fend off numerous other zombies without accidentally killing the zombie villager. Not to mention the fact that you use up both items for a single zombie (unless you're very good at aiming the potion, but the apple is mandatorily one-per-zombie), and it takes forever for the cure to kick in. You also run the risk of the zombie villager burning up should day break while they're being cured, so you have to set up a temporary shelter for them. Top it all off with the fact that the cure isn't even hinted at in-game (except inside a hidden room in the rarely found igloos, which don't even always generate), and it's basically ensured that the only players who'll pull off curing a zombified villager will be the ones who really want to. While you end up with a meaningless-looking reward of a normal villager, if you go on to give them a home and a job block, the villager you cured will offer far better trading deals than you would with other trading villagers, and it's a big deal when you have extremely cheap enchanted books from a librarian.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • The game has a lot of cruelty potential for the imaginative. Want to run around punching chickens, cows and pigs? You can. It's also very possible to build complicated traps to use against the mobs that come after you with enough time and resources, and once you've got the right materials, it's entirely possible, depending on the environment you're in, to start a forest fire that engulfs an area the size of a large city in flames. Assuming you can bear to destroy your own constructions, there's even more cruel fun to be had creating, and then setting off a self-destructing base.
    • Animals killed while on fire drop cooked meat. There are multiple ways to set animals on fire intentionally.
    • Exaggerated with villagers. They live in villages and are completely passive mobs which cannot attack the player.
      • There are iron golems to defend the villagers, but with enough firepower...
      • You can also confine all the villagers inside a tiny space, then build a special trap within the Iron Golems' spawning radius that kills them and allows you to harvest the iron they leave behind.
      • Villagers can also be trapped in minecarts and shuttled to wherever you want to imprison them for their trading potential. Groups of them can be herded together like animals and "bred" to produce more villagers for trading.
      • You can sic a zombie on a group of villagers to zombify them, then cure them all (provided you have the resources) so that you get great trading deals with them. You can zombify a trader a few times in a row to greatly improve the trading deals he offers you. It's a great way to twist a Video Game Caring Potential mechanic to your own needs.
    • Using flint and steel to clear leaves can result in massive forest fires. Bad for the wildlife and wastes saplings, but convenient if you want to clear space.
    • Making mobs, enemy or friendly, suffocate to death by trapping them and making a block of sand or gravel fall on their head to prevent them from breathing. Death by suffocation is treated the same as drowning underwater, i.e. very slow, but nothing can be more pleasurable than watching a creeper suffocate to death while being helpless. The player can also suffocate the same way.
    • Though it's more pragmatic than cruel, one of the most effective ways to get a steady supply of material that can only be taken from farm animals is to herd them into a pen, breed them, slaughter most of them, then repeat. This is especially true of cows, which can be a lot harder to find in the wild and provide vital resources for enchanting in addition to the best cooked meat available. There's also no need to give them a reasonable amount of space; packing them together like compressed sardines makes breeding and harvesting easier, and saves space and materials. Some players may also keep a flock of chickens in a 1x1 hole in the ground.
    • Creative Mode, which allows you to spawn any item you want directly into your inventory, allows you to fly, and makes you invincible... except that hostile mobs can still spawn. Want revenge for all those times you've been killed? Now's your chance.
      • With spawn eggs, the player can spawn hundreds upon hundreds of mobs (or villagers, for extra cruelty) into a small area and kill them in any way they can think of.
    • There is an achievement for pulling a ghast through a portal into the overworld and then killing it. Chances are by getting it into the overworld you're also prompting it to spit fireballs all across the surroundings too, including your (or your friends') settlements.
    • That's just the tip of the iceberg; you can drop a kitten's parents into the void, then lock said kitten in a cell made entirely out of TNT and blow it to smithereens; you can place a chicken in a minecart, then proceed to push the minecart into a pit of lava; you can use piglets as target practice; anything to do with animals, especially babies, that doesn't fall under caring potential is usually this.
    • Are you desperately hungry, but out of food? Are there edible mobs around? But do you not have access to cobblestone, cobbled deepslate, or blackstone to make a furnace with (or else is there no room in your inventory for raw meat anyway)? You could light a fire under one of them (as often as necessary) or strike them with a Fire Aspect sword.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
    • Neutral mobs, like wolves, piglins, bees, dolphins and polar bears, will leave you alone if you leave them alone, but attacking them will cause all members of that mob's species in the area to turn on you in retaliation.
    • Naturally-spawned iron golems will attack you if you harm them or a villager in their presence. This is generally a bad idea, because iron golems have tons of HP and do a lot of damage. Unless you make your own iron golems. Those will never attack you.
  • Video Game Flight: In survival the player has access to the elytra, a powerful though in-the-end limited form of "flight": essentially, it's a hang glider. Creative Mode subverts this and allows the player to fly around freely by double tapping the jump button. Interestingly, vertical movement is mapped to the jump (fly upwards) and sneak (fly downwards) buttons.
  • Video Game Time: A full day is 20 minutes. (10 of day, 1 of sundown, 8 of night (seems a lot longer...) and 1 of sunrise.) If you have two of one type of animal together, you can bop them each with a stalk of wheat, they breed and pop out a baby version in half an (in-game) day.
  • Video Game Tools: The player character must craft a wide variety of tools in order to obtain materials and, in turn, craft equipment and weapons. This feature is a central part of the game and gets increasingly complex in two ways. First, the materials that can be mined from the environment are only obtainable if the tools used for it are made of the right materials. And second, materials get rarer and are located in places only accessible with the right tools. For instance, an enchanting table needs a book, two diamonds, and four blocks of obsidian. You get a book by crafting together leather, obtained by killing cows (which you'll need a good weapon for, and you'll probably want to start a cow farm so they don't run out), and paper, obtained from sugarcane, which can be hard to find if you're unlucky. Alternatively, you could destroy a bookshelf, if you find one naturally generating in a village, woodland mansion, or stronghold. Diamond ores are found in the lowest layers of the Overworld dimension and can only be mined with a pickaxe made of iron, diamond, or netherite. Obsidian can be produced by dropping water onto a lava pool (or vice versa), for which you need an iron bucket, and can only be mined by diamond or netherite. And so on, and so forth.
  • Violation of Common Sense:
    • Some aspects of Minecraft physics can create some of these moments for newer players. One example is fluid physics: you cannot scoop up lava/water from anywhere on the lava/waterfall, you need to remove a source block (i.e. a whole square of it, not just an incomplete one in flowing motion).
    • Creepers can be forced to explode prematurely by using a flint and steel on them. Naturally, you can't get away fast enough to escape the explosion, but forcing a creeper to explode can be handy to blow holes into the ground/walls without wasting your own explosives or tools.
    • You can beat a pig to death with a chicken's egg in this game. That is all.
  • Virtual Paper Doll:
    • The game allows you to dye your leather armor to any color you want, which can result in mismatched armor pieces or just something extremely tacky.
    • Players on the Java Edition or the Windows 10, iOS, and Android versions of Bedrock Edition can customize their skin any way they wish within the bounds of a blocky humanoid. Some unofficial skin editors include assets to assist in creating skins.
    • Bedrock Edition has a character creator to allow users in the console versions to create custom skins using premade assets. Some of these items can be earned by unlocking achievements while others can be bought.
  • Virtuous Bees: Bees can provide the player with honey (which can be eaten or transformed into sugar) and honeycombs (which can be used to craft bee hives for more bees), and when they carry pollen they can pollinate crops and sweet berry bushes to accelerate their growth. They only attack the player if the player attacks them, or harvests from or destroys their hive, but that can be prevented by putting a campfire directly underneath the hive, and bees lose their stinger after attacking once and die within the next minute.
  • The Virus: Villagers attacked by zombies can become infected; if a village is close enough to the player, they may see them milling about with other zombies.
  • Visual Pun: Crafting a set of Leather Horse Armor involves drawing a letter 'H' for 'Horse' with Leather on the Crafting Grid.
  • The Voice: The beings that make the cave ambience (assuming that they're actually made by beings and not by natural causes or even the player character's hallucinations) are never seen. In addition, some of the underwater ambience is likely made by living beings; two sounds are labeled "basswhale", implying that actual whales exist in the oceans of Minecraft; however, they are never seen. Same goes for whatever makes the creepy whispering and moaning heard in Nether ambience.
  • Void Between the Worlds: Anywhere above and below the spaces you can place blocks on the map is called the Void. Normally you can't get to the Void below the map because of "unbreakable" bedrock, but if you manage to find (or glitchily create) a gap in the bedrock, you'll find that the void is rather plain-looking, and that if you jump into it, you'll die within seconds. And once you go in, there's no way to leave.
  • Vulnerable Civilians: Villagers are utterly incapable of self-defense and are as good as dead if zombies come, moreso in Hard Mode where they can't even cower behind wooden doors since the zombies will just break those down.

    W 
  • Walk, Don't Swim: Players may choose to do this when crossing shallow water, only coming up to breathe when their air runs out, as a way to save the hunger cost of swimming. Works even better with a Respiration-enchanted helmet. Inverted at the same time with non-aquatic, non-undead mobs who constantly swim up when in water, even enemies like pillagers and creepers that would benefit from sinking to reach a diving player.
  • Waterfall into the Abyss: May appear on floating islands and can be intentionally created by the player using a water or lava "source block". However, both water and lava stop flowing when they reach the lowest layer of the created world, therefore it is advisable to build floating islands quite high for the best flowing effect.
  • Water Is Blue: Water used to be uniformly dark blue. An update implemented a biome gradient similar to grass, but outside of murky green water in swamps and greyish in Bedrock Edition mushroom islands, other biomes all use shades of blue.
  • Weakened by the Light:
    • Skeletons and zombies are set on fire by direct sunlight, and torches can prevent monsters from spawning underground. Spiders become neutral during the day. Note that this is all determined by light, not time of day, so thunderstorms, even at high noon, will be full of monsters ready to eat your face. To clarify: Spawning and spiders being neutral depends on light level. Undead burning up depends on sunlight. Sunlight requires both time of day and exposure to the sky.
    • Averted only for the creepers and endermen, who are ready to party at all hours, but only spawn in low light like other monsters. They become more dangerous in the daytime, because the player gets complacent when there's not supposed to be anything roaming around, and creepers can blend in with the sunlit vegetation (though not as much as they used to; see Real Is Brown above). Thankfully, in the case of endermen, they are typically neutral unless the player looks at them directly (i.e. with the crosshairs), and do prefer to stay underground during the day.
  • Weaksauce Weakness:
    • Endermen and water don't mix. Not only does it hurt them but they instantly run away from it and it used to make them forget what they were just doing. This means that if the player is about to be killed by one, they only need to dunk a bucket of water on it to make it unable to approach.
    • Creepers and phantoms are afraid of cats, and skeletons of wolves.
    • Blazes take a large chunk of damage from snowballs. Since you can throw snowballs like a machinegun, killing blazes becomes fantastically easy if you have a pile of snowballs in your inventory at all times.
    • The ominous Bad Omen you get when you kill a Pillager Captain can easily be nulled with a nice bucket of milk since it's a status effect.
  • Weapon of X-Slaying: The "Smite", "Bane of Arthropods" and "Impaling" enchantments make weapons more effective against The Undead, Big Creepy-Crawlies and Aquatic Mooks respectively.
  • Weird Moon: In the normal world, it's a square, it always comes up when the sun goes down and vice versa. While moon phases occur, which show round sections of shadow moving across it (the one exception is the new moon, where only the outermost edge is visible - and about half as bright as on a full moon), the Moon is still always on the opposite side of the Sun, rising at sunset and setting at sunrise, behavior typically associated with a full moon.
  • Weird Sun: Also a square.
  • Whale Egg: In creative mode, any and all of the mobs can be spawned with eggs, even zombified piglins and ghasts and villagers.
  • Whammy: Dying by falling into lava or the void obliterates everything you have on you (in the case of lava, netherite is exempt).
  • When It Rains, It Pours: When the rainy weather comes, it rains intensely. Worse, if it rains during the daytime, monsters that would ordinarily die in sunlight don't, and can roam freely. Even worse, if it becomes a thunderstorm, it gets dark enough that monsters will spawn. The two good things about it are that it renders endermen harmless (if rather amusingnote ), as they will Teleport Spam in an attempt to escape from the rain, and that tridents with the Riptide enchantment will become usable outside the water. It also makes fish bite more frequently, though either fish in an artificial lake in a safe spot or watch your back if you're fishing out in the open.
  • When Trees Attack: The creepers are mottled green, have multiple legs but no arms, and the devs have said that, were they real, their texture would be "crunchy, like dried leaves", basically meaning they're supposed to be concussive walking topiaries. This makes them strongly resemble mobile, explosive plants.
  • Who Forgot The Lights?: The game does this intentionally. As monsters spawn at lower light levels, the creator wanted to encourage players not to simply blindly wander through the night or through dark tunnels, and to place torches as often as possible. A side effect of this is a generally scary atmosphere, especially outside Peaceful Mode.
    • Though there are instances where the lighting for various covered blocks fail to take full effect and make the space within at a light level of 0. This can be fixed by placing or removing a block next to the affected area, causing a chunk update.
    • The brightness setting, which was added sometime later, can avert the trope. With the brightness turned up to the max, you can still see in caves with zero light, but it's still dark enough to partially cover up whatever dangers are lurking. You can also avert the trope completely by drinking a potion of Night Vision, which makes everything almost as bright as if the sun was up.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
    • Creepers, perhaps the scariest enemies in the game, are afraid of cats, and will run away the moment they see them.
    • A later update made it that skeletons are afraid of wolves, but it's more justified for them than for creepers because wolves can actually attack them.
    • Just like creepers, phantoms are absolutely terrified of cats, and will abruptly stop mid-swoop if one hisses at them.
  • Why Isn't It Attacking?: Zombified piglins. Normal zombies, skeletons, spiders, creepers, just about anything else will attack you for no reason at all, but for some reason zombified piglins are passive unless provoked. They fight in droves and have powerful attacks, so it's likely done to prevent rage quits.
  • Wicked Witch: Witches are one of the game's ranged hostile mobs. They attack by throwing negative status effect splash potions (Slowness, Poison, Harming, & Weakness) at the player and use positive status effect potions (Healing, Fire Resistance, & Swiftness) to heal and protect themselves. They will also buff illagers with thrown potions if they spawn in Raids.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: A bit more literal of an example than most, which is half the appeal, and the Trope Codifier. Most sandbox games have some kind of goal, like killing monsters or scoring points, which guides the gameplay. For Minecraft, there's merely a handful of suggestions that hint at the different facets of the game. Everything is entirely optional, including the primary survival mode, which means different people can do completely different things, and every style of play is equally valid. You can build huge castles or pixel art tapestries, easiest in the total freedom of Creative Mode. You can explore near and far, by land or sea. You can grow wheat, melons, pumpkins, sugar cane, cacti, or various trees. You can mine for iron, gold, diamonds, redstone, or lapis lazuli. You can search for dungeons, either for the rare treasure contained therein or a chance to fight an endless stream of monsters. You can build machines with pistons and redstone circuitry. You can construct a sinister portal and invade hell itself, then turn it into your own personal network of roads so you can move quickly between each of your outposts. You can experiment with potions and equipment enchantments to give yourself an edge in battle or just make it easier to gather your favorite resources. There's even a dragon you can slay to get something resembling an ending, but you're free to keep playing afterward, and nothing really changes. You're invited to try your hand at all of it, and settle into whichever sort of gameplay personally appeals to you. And if that isn't enough, you can set up a server and play with your friends, whether you prefer to build cooperatively or wage war. And, of course, you can dig up an entire desert and make a literal sandbox stretching as far as the eye can see.
  • Wild Wilderness: Almost the entire map, the only big exception being the NPC villages.
  • A Winner Is You: For a long time, the game had no ending or sign of progression at all, living up to the true wide open sandbox name. When the game was released, players could go on a lengthy quest to gather materials needed to eventually reach the End realm and fight the Ender Dragon. Beating the dragon gets you 20,000 experience points and the player is left with a really long and pretty slow scrolling text with two unseen beings talking about the player, having a very surrealist dialogue on existence and reality, followed by the credits.
  • With This Herring: You're plonked down into the middle of nowhere in a world that's going to be crawling with giant spiders, skeletons, and creepers in ten minutes with nothing but your bare hands and expected to survive. In a rather more literal interpretation of the trope, you can actually chop down trees with fish. It's no harder than chopping a tree down with your bare hands, which is one of the first things you're expected to do when you start playing.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: On difficulties other than Peaceful, you have a food meter that gradually drains over time. If your food meter is at least 90% full, you regenerate health. If it drops to 30%, you become unable to sprint. If it reaches 0%, your health meter starts draining instead. With the difficulty set to Easy, you lose half your health. On Normal, starvation reduces your HP to One. On Hard, you'll starve to death.
  • Wolfpack Boss: The Illager Raids operate like this, with a wave being marked by a shared health bar. You need to kill every member of the Raid to progress, at which point the bar refills to signal the next wave. However, the bar does not equal the same amount of health each wave, as they get progressively larger and more difficult. On easy there are three waves, on normal five waves, and on hard mode there are seven waves. Raid waves include various illager types — while each individual illager may be simple to dispatch alone, their numbers and varied abilities will make defeating the wave more difficult.
  • World in the Sky:
    • The "Floating" map type in Indev generated the world as a cluster of islands floating in empty space. Other world settings would turn this floating archipelago into either a flat square cluster, a long line, or a vertical "stack" of islands where the bottom ones would be cast in perpetual shadow by the upper ones. Waterfalls and lavafalls pouring into the void were common features.
    • The End consists of floating islands of pale stone floating through an infinite void.
  • World Limited to the Plot: Enforced in a meta sense. While the world is predefined by the seed it's given at the game's start, only those sections of the map that the player has already visited are actively generated and saved.
  • World of Chaos:
    • Endermen, given enough time, will inevitably turn the world into something along these lines with their block moving abilities.
    • The randomized dimensions you can visit in the 2020 April Fools' Day update can get downright surrealistic, often featuring an Alien Sky and bizarre terrain that would never appear in standard worlds.
    • Name one other game that lets you beat a zombie to death with an egg. Or lets them beat you to death with an egg.
  • World of Weirdness: Common gameplay elements include zombies and skeletons, giant spiders, (sl)endermen, magic, ancient ruins, and interdimensional travel.
  • Worthless Yellow Rocks: Zig-Zagged across different uses of gold.
    • Gold is more of a crafting material rather than a form of currency. It can make a number of useful redstone-based devices and upgrade some of your food items, but gold tools and armor are very brittle and get consumed very quickly.
    • The villagers' currency system uses emeralds rather than gold, which is a lot rarer to find in the wild. You can exchange some of your gold for emeralds, but various other villager types will offer emeralds for more mundane items like stone or sticks.
    • In the Nether, gold can be exchanged with piglins to barter for various items, including potions and enchanted books. Equipping even one piece of gold armor or holding any gold item will cause piglins to behave peacefully around you (until angered by attacking them, mining gold, or opening chests).
  • Whispering Ghosts: The soul sand valley’s ambient sounds are punctuated by the screams of the damned and unseen spirits whispering right into your ear as you’re busy foraging.

    X 
  • X on a Stick: Crafting. A torch is coal on a stick, a redstone torch is a pile of crushed redstone on a stick, an iron sword is two ingots on a stick, and a diamond pickaxe is three diamonds on two sticks. And of course, a fishing rod (two strings on three sticks) can be made into a carrot on a stick by crafting it with a carrot, or a warped fungus on a stick for piloting striders.
  • Xylophones for Walking Bones: A bone block placed beneath a note block will cause the note block to produce a xylophone sound.

    Y 
  • You Are Already Dead: Did you just step on the pressure plate in the desert temple's hidden vault? And you have no means of flight? BOOM!
  • You Are Better Than You Think You Are: In the ending, the two Entities tell the player "Everything you need is already within you. You Are Not Alone. You are never alone. You are stronger than you know"
  • You Are Not Alone: Minecraft's ending basically exists to say that the "true creators" are existent, you can see their thoughts, and they tell you that you did well and they love you.
  • Your Soul Is Mine!: You can collect an item called soul sand, which is made up of screaming faces. The Soul Speed enchantment causes blue versions of these faces to arise from soul sand and soul soil when the enchantment takes effect.
  • You Will Not Evade Me: The fishing rod can be used to reel in mobs. It's especially useful against ghasts, which love to shoot fireballs at you while flying out of your attack range. (The fishing rod doesn't hurt mobs, but you can pull them in close and slash them with your sword before running. You can also get creative with them, pulling them into damaging obstacles like cacti or lava.)

    Z 
  • Zerg Rush:
    • Silverfish, if not killed fast enough.
    • If you have any tamed wolves following you, they will rush any mob that you attack or get attacked by. Normally one wolf is enough to make quick work of a zombie or skeleton, but against a very strong enemy (like an enderman or an iron golem) they will keep swarming it and suffer some casualties if it doesn't go down fast enough.
    • The basic mechanic of the Illager Raids is this. They overwhelm the player in sheer numbers, murdering villagers and destroying crops as they go along, getting worse with each wave that happens.
    • Zombified piglins. If a zombified piglin is attacked, all of its nearby brethren will attack the player or any other mob that ends up damaging one, whether deliberately or on accident.
  • Zip Mode: The game has railroads, teleporting ender pearls, and Nether portals. It's worth noting however that the railroads have to be set-up manually, ender pearls need to be thrown and have a habit of teleporting you far above your intended destination causing fall damage, and Nether portals mean you have to navigate through the Nether, a hell-like dimension. This can be utilised by setting two portals in the real world first, and then trekking through the Nether, which is often more dangerous than just trekking through the regular world. This is also possible through use of command blocks and an attached trigger.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: This happens every night in villages, with zombies being spawned into the game just for this purpose. Luckily for the villagers, they can repopulate and have an iron golem protector to counter this. Zombies are also infectious, and can create zombie villagers which are mostly functionally identical to regular ones. Zombie villagers can be cured, though.
    • Every time you hit a zombie, there's a chance of another zombie spawning nearby. This chance is higher for armored zombies, who require more hits to kill. Combine this with the zombie's extended eyesight (they can see you long before you see them) and you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly.
    • A village may occasionally spawn as a zombie village; no torches or doors, cobwebs are littered all over the place, and the inhabitants are all zombie villagers (if there are any at all). Presumably, this village type is the aftermath of one of these.
    • Zombie sieges can happen randomly at midnight on Java Edition within a well-populated village that a player happens to be present at. This causes a large number of zombies to spawn at once, aiming to slaughter the village.
  • Zombie Gait: Zombies show that in action. Skeletons do it too, but it's probably because they carry bows.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Unknownnote 

Top