YMMV / Minecraft

Sub-pages

• Demonic Spiders
• Good Bad Bugs
• Memetic Mutation
• Scrappy Weapon

A-B

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Pointed out by one review: You start in a wonderful world. After some time, you look back and realize you have destroyed a large patch of nature and terraformed ground just to make that mega-building of yours. What you once fell in love with is now gone because of your megalomania.
    • Some private servers have a "minimal interference" policy specifically to avoid this. (Underground caves are usually fair game, though.)
    • This one can also be interpreted in the exact opposite direction, though, if you start with a patch of empty, barren desert and painstakingly rework it into a lush, fertile farmland.
    • Also note that you can easily plant new trees, so you can actually act on this aesop. With enough bone meal, you can create a forest overnight.
    • Many players have found quite a different one through years of play and paranoia: The only safe forest is a razed one.
  • The highly efficient animal farms of Minecraft might seem implausible in real life, but real-world industrial farms actually do mistreat their livestock in a similar way. While it's definitely not to the extent of Minecraft (eg: cramming 100 baby chickens into a square meter of space and roasting them in the same chamber they grow up in), Minecraft farms end up paralleling common practices real-world industrial farms employ: packing livestock in as little space as possible, giving them the bare minimum to survive, and slaughtering them as soon as possible.
  • Renewable resources are the most sustainable, efficient and least damaging to the environment. Putting the Mending Enchantment on tools means you no longer have the tear down caves for resources to repair them. Crops are just as effective as a food source as livestock and can be recycled for Bone Meal. Dried Kelp serves as a better and replenishable source of fuel compared to Coal mining, and the list goes on.
  • Repelling a Raid from a village will give you Hero status amongst the Villagers, who will give you free items and discounts...The thing is, there is no real limit at how many times a single village can get Raided, so some players will intentionally try to get the village raided as often as they can extract more rewards from the Villagers. That's not being a hero, that's a protection racket.
  • Creepers can be taken as a representation that all work is transitory, here one point and gone the next, or that some people just can't accept what you have built (or, in light of the Green Aesop approach, they represent Gaia's Vengeance).
    • A very similar Aesop can be derived from "anarchy" multiplayer servers, where there are "no rules" and people are allowed to hack and cheat. There are groups on these servers dedicated to griefing any build they can find. If your build's coordinates are found, chances are it will soon be destroyed. Why build anything then, knowing it will be destroyed? Some people view their builds like a Japanese sand garden, where the fact that it existed at all is more important than preserving it perpetually.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • This fanart of the Ghast.
    "Mysterious traveler, why do you ignite when I greet you?"
  • Creepers:
    • While mostly thought of as outright Jerkasses who exist only to frustrate the crap out of you, they have sometimes been interpreted as sad, lonely little Woobies (due to being Perpetual Frowners) who only want a hug and just happen to explode with happiness when they approach you.
    • Then there's the view that Creepers' aggression is entirely justified.
    • Creepers are just spoiled brats who don't want to share their world with Steve? and adopt the "If I can't have it, nobody can" behaviour by blowing up everything around them and trying to kill Steve? in the process.
    • Why are they afraid of cats? Is it just an Absurd Phobia? Is it because cats (as demonstrated by them bringing phantom membranes home) can kill phantoms? Is it because they mistake the hiss of a cat as a sign the cat will explode?
  • Justified with Steve or Alex since everything he/she does is based on you, so whether he/she is The Hero, an Anti-Hero or a Villain Protagonist is up to you.
  • Is the Ender Dragon actually evil, or is it just doing its job by protecting the egg? To the Ender Dragon, Steve? could be a villain, focused on stealing the egg, which rightfully belongs to the Ender Dragon.
  • Are villagers nice, innocent, people, or are they Jerkass conmen who swindle you out of your emeralds? Some will charge you more for the same stuff, and for no reason.
• Americans Hate Tingle: While not outright hate, as of 2020 the Chinese are less enthusiastic about Minecraft due to enforced play-time limit reduces potential investment toward the game as well as how the Chinese as of late prefer either bite-sized games or (usually domestic made) games with memorable characters and progressing Story Arc, something that Minecraft lacks.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: The recipe book notifications introduced in the 1.12 update. While it's a boon for newbie players, seasoned players tend to get annoyed very fast at how often you'll be notified how to craft X item that you memorized by heart long, long before the system was introduced. Worse yet, the crafting recipe list is saved by world, so you get the notifications on every save.
• Anticlimax Boss: The Ender Dragon used to be this. By the time you were able to reach The End, you'd likely be more than strong enough to beat it. Diamond armor nullified almost all the damage the boss could deal, the crystals that healed it were easy enough to destroy (especially if you brought a bow and either enough arrows to waste some or the Infinity enchantment), and the boss itself wasn't terribly difficult to dodge. In fact, the bigger threat was the absolutely massive army of Endermen that wandered around the field, which you'd spend half of the fight trying to avoid pissing off accidentally. The biggest annoyance while fighting it was getting it to sit still long enough for a decent hit. Apparently, the "diamond armor negating Ender Dragon damage" was a bug. Some players actually considered the armor to be irrelevant — a pumpkin and a bow was all they took to fight the dragon. After the revamp, it was taken out of this territory and became far more difficult — some of the crystals are protected by iron bar cages that have to be climbed and then mined away, the dragon now has a Breath Weapon that coats an area in Dragon's Breath, which lingers for a long time and does pretty harsh damage, and it becomes immune to arrows whenever it perches.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The mid-to-late 2010s is considered to be this by many, for several reasons.
  • One of the most common reasons cited is the slow rate of major updates, not to mention the fact that many of the updates that were released at the time were fairly unmemorable, or outright controversial, such as the much discussed Combat Update.
  • The game's public image also began to falter during this stage. While still massively popular, the game was more and more being played by, and associated with, young children, which inevitably tends to drive away both the original audience of a franchise and older players in general. The fact that many Minecraft content creators at the time were adopting a squeaky-clean, family friendly image meant many players took the game as a whole even less seriously, particularly as the original crop of Minecraft content creators either had grown tired of the game, got caught up in controversy or outright retired as a whole.
  • Multiplayer as a whole was also in rut at the time, since servers grew larger, and notoriously began using pay-to-win tactics, eventually leading to battles with Microsoft and Mojang once they began implementing measures to clamp down on pay-to-win servers. It was also considered the age where servers became far more homogenized, with highly structured, strictly moderated minigame servers dominating, while more novel concepts, as well as more traditional vanilla servers became somewhat marginalized.
  • However, this era is commonly thought to have ended by the turn of the decade, with a wave of nostalgia bringing back a large section of original players, spurred on by a massive influx of new, less child-oriented Minecraft content by massive content creators, while also rehabilitating the game's public image, an increased diversity of servers, with concepts such as survival multiplayer servers, and notably Anarchy servers rapidly gaining massive playerbases, the popularization of Minecraft speedrunning, and a series of very well-recieved updates, many of which dwarfing the mid-decade updates in size and scope.
• Base-Breaking Character: The Warden is steadily gearing up to be this, with fans being split in two groups. Some players think that Mojang made it way too powerful, without any means to even try to fend it off, and made the Ancient City no longer worth it with such an obviously overpowered foe forcing every encounter to be the same (this especially hit once Mojang began patching out means to defeat it in snapshots, only narrowing valid strategies against the Warden short of simply not going to an Ancient City at all). Other players find it a fascinating concept and an intriguing element of the Ancient Cities, with a lot of potential to create lore for those who care about it, and think the first group is completely missing the Warden's point (the player is not supposed to fight the Warden in the first place) and that, while the Warden is hard to fight, it's very easy to avoid.
• Better as a Let's Play: Building awesome structures requires significant time investment for getting the tools to do so, farming resources, planning out and actually building the structure. Maybe not so fun to play, but when Let's Players cut out much of the busywork, or make that busywork entertaining with their own commentary, it's way more entertaining. Minecraft lending itself well to LPs is a big reason why the game got popular in the first place, even: early content creators such as Yogscast Minecraft Series helped spread its influence.
• Breather Boss: Getting through an Ocean Monument can be quite a challenge, but the Elder Guardian within isn't so bad by comparison. While it does curse you with mining fatigue as soon as you enter the temple's area, the guardian itself is pretty simple to fight, so long as you have good equipment.
• Broken Base:
  • The 1.9 combat update. While it did introduce many well-received features, other features and changes were very controversial and remain so to this very day.
    • The attack recharge mechanic, which rendered spam-attacking ineffective, as attacking during the cooldown will reduce the damage output. As the previous versions of Minecraft simply involved the same damage output even when spam-clicking, this was controversial to many people. On one hand, it was seen as adding depth and challenge to the combat system, allowing combat to become more of a skill-based mechanic. On the other hand, it was seen as not only complicated to new players, but players used to the old system would have difficulties of utilizing this mechanic. This had remained a contentious issue to this day, and although Mojang has tried to ease the issue with the new combat snapshots, some say that a full rollback of the combat system is needed.
    • To a lesser extent, the Enchanted Golden Apple nerf, which reduced its effects and removed the ability to craft it. While some say it's a welcome change from the Regeneration V to Regeneration II (itself being reduced to 20 seconds), some also say that it ruins the effort to harvest resources required. The fact that it cannot be crafted in any way became an issue, as some say it would negate the use of gold even more, while others say it makes it more valuable.
  • The 2020 Mob Vote was very controversial due to claims of the poll having been brigaded by a certain popular YouTuber and his subscriber base to skew the vote in favor of the Glow Squid. This led to the formation of two groups. One group believes that the Glow Squid won unfairly because of Dream interfering in the voting, and the Iceologer would have otherwise won, due to it being an overall better choice compared to the Glow Squid and the Moobloom. The other group believes that Dream's actual influence in the poll results has been greatly exaggerated, and the Iceologer fans are in denial and just refuse to admit that the Iceologer would have lost anyway due to other reasons.^note To elaborate, this group usually points at two reasons. One, the Glow Squid trailer was very misleading and implied several things that wouldn't actually happen: that Glow Squids would spawn in deep oceans (they spawn instead in flooded caves), that they would give light (their glow is a mere visual effect that doesn't affect the light level), and that they would hypnotize other mobs (nothing remotely similar to this happens). While the developers explained this on Twitter, not everyone received these news. Two, the Iceologer had the disadvantage of competing against two peaceful mobs, after the Phantom vote. The Phantom has become the most hated mob in Minecraft, and many players wanted to avoid any risk of having a repeat of that. Mojang seems to agree with the latter, considering how similar the three mobs in the next vote were.
  • Mob votes in general are very controversial among the playerbase. Some fans believe that the concept is inherently flawed due to polls being easy to brigade (see the Glow Squid fiasco above), and that the polls are a cheap way to bring attention to the game. Others find the votes fun and a good way to filter out potentially useless or annoying mobs. However, the reception worsened in 2023, when they started vote ALL three mobs instead of one and the "#StoptheMobVote" trend, likely due to the community believing Mojang was too lazy to add all.
  • The Wild Update, or 1.19, was a controversial update due to cutting of promised features like the fireflies^note The plan was for frogs to consume them to generate Froglights, but it turned out fireflies are poisonous to frogs in real life, so they moved that function to Magma Cubes and decided against adding fireflies in the game and the birch forest redesign^note It was just a concept proof, with no intention of actually updating the birch forest in 1.19. While Mojang never actually announced a birch forest update, they didn't make outright clear they weren't going to do so either, thus creating a misunderstanding.. This is in addition to other promised features from previous updates, like Bundles and Archeology, being nowhere to be seen still as well as the majority of content in 1.19 being related to the Deep Dark biome, a feature that should've been added in 1.17, as well as the Warden being made vastly more powerful than every other mob in the game (including bosses) for seemingly no good reason and Mojang then only buffing it in subsequent snapshots. This has led to debates as to whether Mojang is being lazy or if their reasoning behind cutting such content is genuine. The fact that 1.19 also introduced the much-despised player reporting feature did its already-dodgy reputation no favors.
  • After 1.19, a frequent complaint is, as mentioned, that Mojang is "too lazy" for taking so long to update the game (and, when finally doing so, adding barely any content), leaving game progression to become stale over time after years of barely touching it, and exploration to become meaningless as there's few features to encourage the player to move around the world. Some people will counter that Mojang is already updating too frequently to give players enough time to get accustomed to the new features^note in-depth, Minecraft is on its roots a sandbox game, not a progression-based game^note in-depth, exploration is NOT something that should be encouraged at the moment, given the flawed state of the game in that regard^note in-depth, and Mojang has to also worry about version parity and making a game for all of the incredibly large playerbase^note in-depth, so Mojang should rather take its time in polishing content, instead of frequently updating the game with lots of content without depth^note in-depth.
  • Possibly the biggest issue among the fanbase to date is the Java Edition vs. Bedrock Edition debate. Despite technically being the same game, both versions have some major differences. Java Edition players will usually point out that Bedrock is extremely buggy and forces people to pay (via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace) for maps, skins, and texture packs that Java players can get for free, not to mention the ease of modding compared to Bedrock. Bedrock Edition players will point out that Bedrock has better interconnectivity, allowing one to play with friends online no matter what device they're using, as well as the far more consistent framerate due to better optimisation. This, of course, is not bringing up the many smaller quality of life differences between the two versions. The issue is worse for Redstone oriented players as Bedrock's Redstone is completely incompatible with Java's and vice versa, forcing them to pick a side.
  • Among the modding community, Forge vs. Fabric as the modding API has become a major source of contention. While some mods do maintain a Forge and a Fabric edition, far more focus on one or the other. While Fabric tends to be a lot less resource intensive, Forge is far more well-established. Most players of modded Minecraft don't particularly prefer one or the other, the most common concern being that it means many mods that people like pretty much have to be played on separate game instances, unless one has the technical knowledge and time to install and load mods without using an API like Forge or Fabric. It has subsided a bit over time as more and more mods choose to have both Forge and Fabric ports, or allow for fans to create unofficial Forge/Fabric ports themselves.
  • The choice between default and Programmer Art textures, usually shortened to "new" and "old" textures, is pretty controversial within the fanbase. Fans of the new textures often promote their more consistent visual identity, due to being done by the talented pixel artist Jappa instead of a variety of different programmers. Meanwhile, fans of the old textures usually say that the new textures look too blurry, such as the ones for Netherrack and birch wood. Certain textures from each are less controversial, however; the changes to glass are liked even by most Programmer Art users, while others, such as cobblestone and melons, are generally considered to have been better originally.
  • The shift away from having C418 compose for Minecraft has been somewhat divisive; while many players find Lena Raine, Kumi Tanioka, and Aaron Cherof to be worthy successors, others feel to varying degrees that their work doesn't mesh with the original soundtrack and the feel of the game. This tends to get lumped in with the fact that C418 has confirmed he composed a third album's worth of material for the game, but it's stuck in limbo because he refuses to give the rights up to said music to Microsoft. A number of fans still hope C418 can eventually return to composing for the game, or that at the very least the album can see the light of day. For the most part, they respect the fact he desires to own the music himself, too, and aim their ire at Microsoft for not having the leniency to let the rights remain with him.
  • Has Minecraft gotten too easy? This is a topic that has sparked a lot of debate over the years. People point out that with the inclusion of high level enchantments that can easily be gotten from villagers shortly after starting the game, the ease of getting diamonds now, the inclusion of potions, and the amount of farms to amass resources easily, Minecraft has become too easy and taken away the fun of actually having to go out and grind resources for your builds, and that even on hard, you're unlikely to die due to becoming Nigh-Invulnerable with enchanted Netherite armor. Other people will counter that the amount of set up needed to get those resources in the first place, the headache that is villager wrangling, and how long it can be to build the farms in question is still a process in itself that can still take days of IRL time in order to set up to get those resources in the first place (not to mention that building those farms is something completely optional, so the option of playing without them is still there, and as hard as before).
  • Among players building advanced machines in their world, the topic of whether or not the Gravity Block Duplicator should be considered cheating or not is debated. Some argue that this machine is too much of an unintentional glitch (it requires first destroying the end portal frame using a first glitch, then using the strange properties of end portal blocks to cause a second glitch and duplicate any gravity block, including the normally unique dragon egg), other argue that most advanced machines use glitches already one way or another, some going as far as causing chunks to crash and be reset, and that this machine has the advantage of letting the player use large amounts of concrete, sand or glass without having to destroy an entire desert.

C-D

• Catharsis Factor: Play creative mode and plant a ton of TNT all over the place and make yourself a safe spot high up in the map, just floating there, with a block of TNT ready to fall upon lighting it. Wait for night and for a few mobs to spawn, then light the TNT to start the timer and make it fall to the earth. The explosion can be so big that even the lowest graphics settings won't save you from the lag, but the resulting aftermath? Worth it.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Going into caves where monsters are can be troublesome, as you can quickly be overwhelmed and lose all the hard-mined goodies you went in there to get. However, monsters in caves follow the same rules as monsters on the overworld and won't spawn in lit areas. Thus, crafting a metric buttload of torches, going in with nothing but them and some stone tools, putting them up as you go, routing the few enemies who spot you, and illuminating the entire area, will stop enemies from spawning there ever again. Even if you die during the attempt you're only out a bit of stone, a few sticks, and some coal, which can be found anywhere, and can easily come back to try again risk-free. Once the cave is lit and no more monsters appear, you can come back with better tools to loot stuff like gold, diamonds, redstone, and enemy treasure chests in peace.
  • Monster spawners are tricky. As soon as you get near one, it begins quickly spawning hostile mobs and will make quick work of a player who tries to stand his ground or take it out. Or, you can just burrow under the ground like a mole, seal the hole behind you to prevent enemies from following you, navigate underneath the spawner, and dig up to take it out from below. Failing that, if you sprint up to it like a madman and manage to plant a torch on top, it won't be able to spawn monsters anymore: you'll take some hits from the enemies it spawns, but it'll put an end to that spawning nonsense quick, fast, and in a hurry.
  • Making a Nether Portal requires obsidian, a hard mineral that is incredibly rare, can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe, and often necessitates finding several such old portals on the overworld to cannibalize for minerals. Or you can just make obsidian yourself by letting water flow over lava: using dirt as molds and meticulously creating the obsidian in the very shape of the portal. This allows you to reach the Nether as soon as you've found enough iron to make a bucket, which is likely well-before you've found diamonds.
  • Mob grinders. In layman's terms, this means creating a structure that takes advantage of the game's mob spawning mechanics and forces mobs to only be able to spawn inside said structure, which funnels them into a kill zone where you can effortlessly wipe them out by the dozens to gain items and experience. Suddenly keeping all your Mending-enchanted Netherrite gear and obtaining arrows and gunpowder is very, very easy. The best part is, while incredibly convoluted mob grinders exist, the simplest one is effectively a tower with a few trapdoors and an "AFK platform", all of which can be built early game with some trapdoors, a water bucket, some hoppers, and a few stacks of cobblestone.
  • When a new villager spawns, he will take a nearby bed and, if a work table exists, will adopt that trade and have several randomly-selected trades available. So long as you don't trade with him, you can replace his work table and change his trade. If you replace it with the same table, it will shuffle his randomly-selected trades. Furthermore, when a villager is turned into a zombie you can cure him and get lifelong discounts. These discounts stack, allowing you to repeatedly infect and cure a villager until they'll sell everything for 1 emerald. A patient player can have a Librarian who sells Sharpness V, Infinity, Protection IV, Unbreaking III, or god-forbid Mending for sale for 1 emerald a pop, and all you have to do to earn some emeralds is grow some sugarcane and craft it into paper to sell to that very same Librarian. This was so effective that Mojang heavily nerfed the tactic in Java 1.20.1 and the corresponding Bedrock version, making it so cured zombie discounts don't stack. Additionally, experimental features in the associated snapshots and previews/betas made it so only specific villagers can sell specific enchantments (though this is somewhat balanced by how a master of each biome is guaranteed to sell a certain enchantment), but this hasn't yet been added to the full game as of Java 1.20.4 and Bedrock 1.20.51. It's very telling, however, that even then this tactic is still a bit cheesy.
  • Not even The Wither can break Bedrock, and you get to summon this guy anywhere you want. So, by summoning him beneath the top-layer of Bedrock in The Nether or beneath the portal in The End, you can render him completely unable to move or fight back. Suddenly the hardest part of fighting the flying withering land-destroying abomination is farming the Wither Skulls needed to summon him, and that can also be cheesed since Wither Skeletons can't enter 2-block-high spaces like the player can.
  • Zerg Rushing your foes with armies of wolves. With two tamed wolves, a chicken farm, and some patience, you can have an exponentially growing army of wolves. These things will follow you loyally and lay waste to any foe that either you attack or that attacks you, and while they will die quickly they are easily replaceable. Youtuber Kolanii took this to the extreme by unleashing 2000 wolves against various Superbosses like The Warden or The Wither on hardcore and devastated them so quickly he was able to win both fights in third person, against three Withers at the same time, and ended both fights in about a minute — he only took 1000 of the 2000 wolves for each fight, and even then he comments that he really only needed 100 or so wolves for each fight.
    Kolanii: We are 30 seconds in and I think I've broken the game. It doesn't matter anymore! There is nothing good enough to beat me! I'd say we're about 100 dogs down... most of them are from me... oh this is just embarrassing! This is hard to watch; the game is too easy now! I do boss fights in third-person mode! It's too easy now!!!
  • Playing Hardcore Mode following the Village & Pillage Update has allowed players to use the Totems of Undying to avoid dying in a game mode where the challenge is to avoid dying.
  • In speedruns, thanks to Piglins being able to trade gold for ender pearls, players use Piglins as a means to gather ender pearls to enter the End instead of gathering them via the Endermen, which was the initial way to gather ender pearls.
  • The Ender Dragon can be blown up by spamming beds and trying to use them in the End dimension (since they don't work because time is broken there, just like the Nether), allowing players to kill it with the occurring explosions without having to use any combat skills or take out the healing crystals.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game is well-known for its modding community. Moreso Java Edition, mostly due to Java simply being easy to write code for. Bedrock Edition is also modded quite a bit, but is somewhat more restrictive, as mods for Bedrock Edition can only add things to the game, not edit what's already there. And while installing mods is much simpler in Bedrock Edition, the modding community tends to lock them behind paywalls. Though Java Edition has its own downsides as well, ranging from demanding more resources, to compatibility with other mods.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • It is game where you can literally do anything you want in the world and build anything you want. However, most players, when they start to build a home, will tend to make a basic square house with one or two floors since it's simple and suits the basic needs such as having a place to sleep, store items, smelt stuff, and craft new items. Other players will make more elaborate homes with more complex mechanisms, such as using pistons to make hidden doors or using certain blocks and items to make a makeshift chair, though these methods are more for show than for practicality. And others will just hollow out the hill closest to spawn and put in a door. Some people just take wherever the hell they just got the resources to start their house, and make a hole in the ground. For survival mode, many players will make simple, square-shaped homes, which provide for basic needs with a low resource cost. Fancy structures are often reserved for creative mode, where resources aren't an issue.
  • Expect to see a lot of baked potatoes consumed as the average player's primary or only food source. The harvest is decently plentiful (one matured crop can provide up to 3 potatoes), they're fairly simple and low effort to prepare, and the baked potatoes themselves are pretty good on saturation and hunger restored. The one problem is obtaining the first potato, but zombies and villages aren't especially rare. Many other foods aren't as effective (seaweed), have low crop yields (bread), or take a lot of effort to prepare (meat, mushroom stew).
  • Iron tools and iron armor will be the most common items used by the majority of the players since iron-based items last quite a while and iron swords are pretty strong. Diamond items are better in durability and power, but their rarity and the high probability of losing your items in lava make diamond items more of a trophy than a tool. Netherite items, since ancient debris is even rarer than diamonds, and the process of making said items is much more demanding, are even more likely to be stored away (though netherite's immunity to lava makes it somewhat more practical, at least). Leather armor and golden tools and armor are too weak to be of any use as well. Since iron is quite common in caves, players will be using iron for everything.
  • Many multiplayer servers offer different types of play, but the majority of the servers are usually either clan wars, survival with griefing allowed, or servers in creative mode where players build large structures or pixel art.
  • The Mindcrack guys demonstrate this Trope very clearly with their Ultra Hardcore (UHC) PVP series. In the beginning, the competitors always went looking for a full set of Iron Armour and a bow and arrows before going hunting for prey; if they could find any diamonds, it was a great bonus, but too rare to be counted upon. As the series evolved and became more refined, certain (ever more convoluted) tactics became a necessity; for example, prior to Etho's Lab's pioneering of getting one during a Free-For-All match, an Enchanting Table was an expensive and tricky luxury even in the team games. Nowadays, it's virtually mandatory if you want to make it to the top 5, let alone win the series. In the same vein, virtually no one risks 'hunting' for other Players in the first 3 or 4 episodes despite the advantage of surprise, and going to the Nether is usually seen as far, far too risky despite the rewards it offers. The Player with the biggest pack of friendly Wolves (and isn't accidentally killed by them first) usually wins; players have been known to spend whole episodes and wasting numerous hearts worth of health trying to harvest enough bones to recruit them, sometimes when they'd be better off conserving their limited resources and investing the energy into more practical advantages.
• Crazy Is Cool: The modding community in general. Special mention goes to More Creeps and Weirdos, Mr. Dirtman, the Mutant pack, and OreSpawn.
• Creator Worship: Notch, creator of Minecraft, was once revered as a physical god, to the point of having temples built in-game to him. Nowadays, however, most fans (and even the current developers) don't look upon him kindly after he sold Minecraft, and started to say some... controversial things on social media.
• Creepy Awesome: Creepers, the horrible kamikaze shrubs, are quite popular with the fanbase precisely because they're paranoia-inducing abominations.
• Creepy Cute: Creepers. They look like screaming zombie cacti, but they're pretty much the game's mascot. You can even buy Creeper plushies that go "SSSSSSSSSSSS" when you squeeze them.
• Dancing Bear: Though not developed by one man any more, the game allows each player to become their own "one-man/woman development team" in-game, due to the absolutely huge game world ^note How huge? How about approximately eight times the total surface area of the planet Earth? Of course, you can go beyond even that, but the game glitches up very badly. and seemingly infinite building possibilities boggles the mind, to say the least.
• Difficulty Spike: The moment you enter the Nether is where the game takes its gloves off. Hostile mobs are almost everywhere every time, there's frequent lava flows that threaten your safety, the Netherrack burns forever if ignited by the Ghasts' explosive fireballs, and one wrong step while mining can send you plummeting into the lava sea. Maps outright don't work, and attempting to sleep to set up a convenient respawn point only gets you blown up. It's why this place was called "hell" in earlier builds. But there's reason to go there, as the Nether is home to several rare materials, and setting up a Portal Network can facilitate transport across the overworld.
• Discredited Meme: The infamous Creepypasta "Herobrine" has been deemed not-scary and way overused by many creepypasta community members, and, in spite of Notch's recurring mentions of the ghostly NPC (including an explicit statement that it's fake, which may have also contributed to the popularity downfall), Notch's ex-wife ezchili made this tweet regarding the character's overbearing prominence, a statement with which a good amount of members of both communities seem to agree.
• Disappointing Last Level: The game's ending has earned some criticism. Minecraft is a brilliant sandbox of a game until the very last bit in The End realm. After spending ages exploring, digging, building, crafting, and generally soaking up a colossal and oddly beautiful world, you drop through a portal and find yourself in a small, ugly, simplistic world where your only goal is to kill an ultra-tough dragon. And then you read a confusing, scrolling-text prose poem. At this point, you've already explored the overworld (plains, mountains, oceans, caves, etc.) and the Nether (lots of fire and lava in a hellish world), but The End is just very plain looking; you're on a big floating landmass of what looks like the moon, towers made out of obsidian with a crystal on top of them are dotted across the island, a huge dragon is trying to kill you by flying into you so you go flying off the island and into the void, and the realm is filled with Endermen. To make matters worse, the dragon heals itself by flying near one of the crystals, which you will usually need to build a makeshift tower just to reach it within range of your bow or sword and it explodes when destroyed. At the same time, you might fall off your tower if the dragon pushes you off. Beating the dragon nets you 20,000 EXP and a very slow scrolling ending message that is a total Mind Screw. This might be the first game to deliberately invoke Disappointing Last Level. Fortunately, 1.9 introduced End Cities with unique loot to give The End more to offer after you've defeated the dragon.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Considering the lack of characterization of any of the mobs, with most of their personality being relegated to Alternate Character Interpretation. Best example would be the Creepers, who are nothing more than Demonic Spiders in the game itself, but the fandom frequently treats them like Tragic Monsters, thinking they're suicidal because they explode or that their exploding is a result of happiness. There is no evidence of this in the game at all. As far as we know, they explode and blow up your stuff because the game tells them to.

E-F

• Ensemble Dark Horse: For a game without traditional characters, Minecraft has a lot of popular, well-liked mobs.
  • For a failed pig model and something that ruins your work easily, the Creeper is most likely the most well-known Mob and arguably the face of Minecraft (often literally).
  • On a similar note, Pigs are quite well recognized, thanks to being the game's first passive mob and for its cute, yet dimwitted design.
  • Wolves (more specifically, dogs) are also very well-liked for their loyalty and for being Badass Adorables. This has gotten to the point that one of the most requested features for the game is dog armour, which finally arrived in 1.21 alongside new dogs!
  • The Enderman, a mob that became popular straight from its reveal thanks to its cool, intriguing powers in a game with enemies that are otherwise fairly basic (save for the aforementioned Creeper and maybe the Ghast), and for being possibly based upon the Herobrine myth. In fact, the Enderman potentially has the most mods based around it out of any single thing in the vanilla game.
  • The Illagers got a lot of attention since their inclusion for their backstories and interesting hierarchy. Besides the Witch, they're also the first intelligent, aggressive mobs, making them stand out among the undead and mindless monsters the players have to fight. Among them, the Vindicators are especially popular.
  • Out of the newer passive mobs, Pandas are among the most popular, due to being Ridiculously Cute Critters and to the surprising amount of work put into their varying personalities (even though they don't do an awful lot).
  • Since their reveal, Bees got an unexpected amount of love from the community (and even outside of it) for being Ridiculously Cute Critters, as well as for being the source of honey blocks, an addition which the redstone community has found dozens of uses for.
  • From the Nether update, the Strider was adored practically from day one thanks to its incredibly strange Ugly Cute design, its many endearing quirks, and for being the first official way to cross lava lakes, opening up the door for increased exploration in the Nether (and being the first breedable passive mob in the Nether doesn't hurt either).
  • During Minecraft Live 2020, the upcoming Caves and Cliffs update was revealed, and with it the Warden. Thanks to its eldritch, genuinely menacing design, blindness and unique sound-based traits, Warden fanart and speculation flooded the Minecraft subreddits mere hours after the mob's reveal.
  • Despite being removed after a month of being in the game and only existing in the game's infancy (2009-2010), Rana still gets fanart to this day for being a cute Chibi-esque girl in a frog-themed outfit.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Notch has clearly stated before that the only reason zombies used to drop feathers is that they only dropped feathers before chickens were implemented, and there had to be a source of feathers, and he didn't know what zombies should drop, so he just rolled with the idea of them dropping feathers. This hasn't stopped fans, however, from coming up with random theories on why they dropped feathers, like chickens being a common sacrifice in voodoo rituals.
• Evil Is Cool: The Ender Dragon, the Final Boss, is considered one of the most iconic villains in pop culture, and for good reason, being a jet black, purple-eyed Draconic Abomination with an over-the-top death sequence. She is still acknowledged for being evil, of course, and players actually like journeying to the End to take her down.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Since 2017, a huge rivalry has started with Fortnite, generally due to Fortnite eclipsing Minecraft as the most popular game on the Internet, which ironically enough, may have contributed to Minecraft's revival in popularity in 2019. Which is funny given that fans of popular internet games that were eclipsed by Minecraft often gave Minecraft the same treatment.
  • Fans of Minecraft and Roblox were infamous for frequently clashing with each other. A lot of it has to do with the games' similar, blocky aesthetics, leading many people unfamiliar with Roblox to call it a Minecraft rip-off despite Roblox coming first. While it still comes up from time to time, it mostly died down by the time Fortnite came along.
• Fanon: Stuff despawns because creepers steal it, at least according to the Filk Songs. This became Hilarious in Hindsight when a new mob was added in beta 1.8 that steals stuff. Granted, Endermen can't steal anything that could despawn, but still... And the 1.4 update took it up a notch by letting Zombies pick up dropped items.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Minecrack, due to being too addictive.
  • Mein Kraft, for sounding similar to Mein Kampf.
  • Minecrap.
  • Fans like to call the main character "Steve" or "Minecraft Steve". Ever since Notch jokingly suggested "Steve?" in an interview, that name (yes, with a question mark) has been widely accepted as his official name. The name "Steve" did go on to become his official name, even being brought into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as "Steve."
  • Thanks to Yahtzee's review, many of the monsters have come to be called "Fisher-Price Shoggoths" with Creepers being "exploding hedges" and/or "kamikaze shrubs".
  • Creepers are often called "penis monsters" or "exploding dicks" due to their shape. Sometimes, they're called boomers.
  • Slimes are often called "squishies" (probably comes from a rather infamous slime from the Coe's Quest Minecraft series named Squishy).
  • Skeletons are sometimes called "skellingtons".
  • The Ender Dragon is sometimes known as "Joan".
  • Golden armor is often called "butter armor" due to its relative fragility and yellow color. In fact, there is a mod that renames all gold objects to "butter". And you can actually eat them.
  • Villagers are often called "Squidwards" or "Testificates". The former because their bulbous noses and low-pitch voices resemble the character of the same name and the latter because of a name tag that appeared over them in beta tests.
  • Some people call chickens "ducks", due to them resembling ducks more than chickens, and the fact that they can swim in water.
  • Thomas the Sheep.
  • Before Redstone was officially named, there was a whole palette of Fan Nicknames for it, with the most popular being Cuprite and the troll-coined Aspergite.
  • Obsidian is often called "obby" for short.
  • Netherrack is often called "Hellstone", "Bloodstone", "Netherstone" or "Brimstone".
  • Glowstone is often called "Brittle Gold", "Sulfur", "Australium" or "Bananabrick".
  • Soul Sand is often called "Slow Sand", "Mud" or "Hell Mud".
  • The Nether is called "Hell" a lot, the name which was originally used in development before it was Bowdlerised; the F3 menu still called it "Hell" until 1.13.
  • "Adminium" — the indestructible block that is found in the bottom five layers of the map, because only server admins can create or destroy it. Officially known as bedrock.
  • Chunk errors are sometimes called "beta holes" or "voids".
  • The moon is Rana.
  • Now and then, you'll come across someone who calls the sponge block "cheese".
  • Towers that extend upwards only are called "nerdpoles" or "dummy poles". One-block-wide, straight towers built to serve as landmarks are sometimes referred to as "noob towers".
  • Establishing a home by digging it into the side of a mountain (as opposed to building it in the open from wood or stone) is sometimes called "the dwarf route".
  • The Far Lands were named so by fans, because they're very far away from your spawn point.
  • Golden apples are often called "gapples", and enchanted golden apples "god apples"
  • Most of Minecraft developers are almost exclusively referred to by fans by their Minecraft usernames.
    • Markus Persson, creator of the game, is called Notch.
    • Jens Bergensten is referred to as Jeb.
    • Nathan Adams is referred to as Dinnerbone.
    • Agnes Larsson is referred to as LadyAgnes.
    • Brandon Pearce is referred to as kingbdogz.
  • Bedrock Edition, being significantly more unstable than the Java edition, is sometimes called "Bugrock".
  • Any massive contraption built to store and/or sort items is called a "Chest Monster". This also applies to any mess of disorganized chests, typically before one constructs a storage room in their base.
  • The Spanish-speaking community refers to the player characters as "cubitos", from cubo ("cube") with the diminutive suffix -ito tacked on. Starting from the rise of the QSMP in 2023 and the subsequent mingling of English- and Spanish-speaking fans, the nickname has gained traction among English-speaking fans as well, especially on Tumblr.
  • As soon as it was revealed, many players were quick to nickname the Mace the Market Gardener, due to being a melee weapon that deals increased damage on hit if the player is falling.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • There are a lot of people shipping Steve/Alex, even though neither has much of a personality.
  • Creeper/Enderman is also a popular ship, due to both characters sharing the spot of the Series Mascot and both being a Person of Mass Destruction, from a certain point of view.
• Faux Symbolism: The alternate realms (Nether, former Sky Dimension, and End) have been interpreted as Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory/Limbo, respectively.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Mojang scrapping the idea of fireflies — "they're poisonous to frogs, and they didn't want kids to feed fireflies to frogs" was very polarizing amongst fans and was mocked by everyone. Minecraft already did something similar in 1.12, where parrots used to eat cookies but were changed to seeds because chocolate is poisonous to parrots. This makes sense because parrots are a pretty common pet, and with all the "Polly Wants a Cracker" stereotypes, it wouldn't be uncommon for a little kid to feed their pet bird a chocolate cookie because they saw it in Minecraft. However, frogs are a much rarer pet and fireflies aren't easily found as food, making it much more contrived than the previous example. Furthermore, the removal of cookies in the parrot's diet didn't remove cookies altogether (upon being fed a cookie, a parrot is poisoned by the chocolate and dies), while fireflies were a promised feature that was ultimately Dummied Out.
  • Mojang has a bad habit of rushing updates to meet a deadline (usually around June), leaving many new features unpolished and sometimes delaying announced features to later updates. Most players immediately think of the Caves & Cliffs Update when hearing this, with some of the features initially announced for 1.17 being delayed to as late as 1.20, and many of them being felt by some players as lacking depth. However, this goes even further back than the Caves & Cliffs Update. During the Nether Update, praised as one of the best updates ever released by Mojang, a complaint made early during community testing was about the difficulty of bastions not being properly balanced for their reward. The update was released without fixing this, despite the feedback being present for most of the testing. It wasn't until the 1.16.2 minor patch two months after the release of the 1.16 main update that piglin brutes and gilded blackstone were added to bastions, with developers stating that they'd already been planning for them when 1.16 was still in development, but they didn't have enough time to add them before the June 1.16 release. Players were still new back then to Mojang releasing unfinished updates to meet the June deadline, and the Nether Update was otherwise very innovative and game-changing.
  • Starting around late 2023, players have complained about updates adding mobs whose only unique function is niche: Frogs give froglights, sniffers are used to get ancient seeds, goats are used to obtain goat horns, armadillos give wolf armor, axolotls battle drowned and guardians, and camels are worse horses. There's no point in killing them because they drop nothing, and these mobs have yet to be revisited or updated, rendering them too niche to be useful most of the time. This has been polarizing among the fandom since their use is limited despite the game's sandbox design. The thing is, mobs like this existed as early as 2011: Wolves and ocelots (Later cats) only really serve to be tamed, don't drop anything upon death, and are situational when tamed (wolves can assist in battles but don't deal a lot of damage, cats can scare two mobs and bring you gifts). However, these mobs had the advantage of being the first tamable mobs, so the novelty factor worked in their favor. New mobs, however, don't bring anything new to the table: It's just another light source, another saddle, another plant, and thus it's harder to justify their addition outside of aesthetics.
    • Pigs have been in the game since its inception but don't have any unique traits that make them preferable to any other animal (beef is functionally identical to pork, and riding pigs is a joke). But since they were added so early in the game, the fact that they're simple is accepted more readily. Also, porkchops are still a good food source, while new mob-related items like goat horns or froglights are often niche or aesthetic-only. Helping the pig's perception is that getting their resource is as simple as killing them, while newer mobs have very complex resource procedures,^note getting use out of frogs, for example, means bringing them to the dangerous Nether so they can eat small Magma Cubes, while goats need to ram a block to get their horn to fall off and be collected, making it much more frustrating to use the newer mobs.
    • Furthermore, mobs with even less of a reason to exist have been in the game for ages. Bats are only ambient mobs, llamas are only used to carry items in their chests, parrots have no practical function when tamed, dolphins only lead you to the easy-to-find ruins and shipwrecks, foxes require a lengthy process to trust them and even then are worse wolves, and pandas only drop bamboo which is ridiculously easy to farm in large quantities. However, most of these mobs were secondary features in updates that already were full of other useful stuff, so it was easier to overlook some of the less useful additions. In contrast, some of the new mobs are announced as among the main features of new updates, so it's more irritating that they add so little.
• Funny Moments: This too.

G-L

• Game-Breaker:
  • Giving the player the ability to fly in Survival Mode is a common addition in the many mods of the game. What most mod makers fail to realize is that in the vanilla game, flight is restricted to Creative Mode for a reason. On paper, flight would simply make navigation easier, when in reality it makes everything easier: combat, construction, movement, mining, you name it. Anything even remotely challenging in the game is broken in half by this ability. If a mod allows access to flight in Survival Mode, whether it's through an item and/or ability, then regardless if it's nerfed to oblivion or difficult to get, there's no reason not to try and obtain it as early as possible and no reason not to use it once acquired.
  • Version 1.9 introduced the Elytra, a very rare non-renewable item that allows flight without mods or cheating; with a set of Firework Rockets to start and prolong your flight, you can cover a lot of ground easily and reach distant places like Woodland Mansions. However, this is only obtainable in The End after defeating the Ender Dragon, and can only be repaired with Phantom Membranes or the rare Mending enchantment. Depending on what you use the Elytra for, it can border on Bragging Rights Reward.
  • Shields in survival play, after their buff in 1.11 to negate all damage from most attacks. They can easily deflect both melee attacks and projectiles (making skeletons far less of a threat), and can even negate damage from creeper explosions, though at a heavy cost to their durability. They're cheap to craft as well, only requiring an iron ingot and 6 wooden planks, so they can be a Disc-One Nuke if crafted early. Their intended downside is that you can't block and attack at the same time, and they won't protect you from behind, but good timing and positioning makes this a minor inconvenience in most circumstances. They also won't protect you from axes (which disable them for a few seconds), so they're not as broken in PvP or when taking on woodland mansions.
  • In multiplayer worlds, the Fire Aspect enchantment for swords, which when coupled with diamond armor and a diamond sword, makes it unbelievably easy to kill any player in PvP matches. The Flame enchantment for bows is similar, if not deadlier due to the bow's potential for even higher damage than a sword thanks to the Power enchantment.
  • The Mending enchantment is by far the most valuable enchantment in the game. It gives the ability to automatically heal your equipment with EXP, meaning that it will never break as long as you hold it in your hand while picking up EXP periodically, a trivially easy task with something like a sword or pickaxe. Even other equipment can be quite easily repaired as there are numerous ways to acquire EXP, such as mob farms, smelting, breeding, fishing, and trading. With this, diamond and netherite equipment with high level enchantments are no longer Too Awesome to Use, and once obtained can last indefinitely. This is why it's also a very rare enchantment, being one of the few which cannot be acquired from the enchantment table, but it flies into game-breaker territory if one finds a villager who trades for an enchanted Mending book, which basically means you now have an endless supply of Mending. This is even easier as of the Village and Pillage update; you can take an unemployed Villager, give him a Lectern to turn him into a Librarian, and he'll have a chance to be selling a Mending book. If he's not, as long as you haven't traded with him, you can destroy the Lectern to make him unemployed again, then repeat the process until the Random Number God answers your prayers.
  • Once you set up a Villager trading hall and build up a good stock of emeralds you basically get renewable sources of many things in the game. Although you have to put up with wrangling villager AI and the costs of curing Zombie Villagers, most professions have some very worthwhile trades. Farmers can be traded melons and pumpkins, two crops that are easy to farm en masse, for a large amount of emeralds, and when maxed out they sell Golden Carrots, the single best food item in the game. Clerics give you a use for rotten flesh, as well as provide an infinite source of Redstone, Glow Stone, and Ender Pearls without needing to set up a Witch and Enderman farm, respectively. Armorers, Toolsmiths, and Weaponsmiths sell diamond, enchanted armor, tools, and weapons at higher levels. Librarians, if you're patient with rerolling, can provide enchanted books for enchantments that you'll never get off an enchanting table normally, and that also includes the aforementioned Mending. And this isn't going into the fact that trading nets you a metric ton of EXP if you do a bunch in a row, not only letting you have an easy way to repair tools with mending but also lets you average around 50 or so levels on any given playthrough, giving you plenty of room to reroll enchantments off your Enchanting Table.
  • In PvP servers, by far the most overpowered Potion available is Strength II, which allows someone with an unenchanted Diamond Sword to two-shot players in full Iron Armor if the hits land correctly. If the Nether is in play, expect people to rush to make them ASAP, because the increased power allows a single person to kill multiple opponents at once and take all their stuff, immediately shifting the power differential in their favor. It doesn't hurt that the brewing ingredient for Strength (Blaze Powder) is derived from the main component of Brewing Stands (Blaze Rods) to begin with.
• Gameplay Derailment: The game had people come up with creative ways to farm for drops by mobs, but once skeletons and zombies were able to spawn in with their equipment being a rare drop, players focused more on mob traps to score the rare items without having to bother to hunt for the materials to create the same items. A few patches adjusted the rare drop mechanic where now all dropped equipment by mobs will be heavily worn down. Needless to say, the popularity of resource farms went right back up after the nerf. Due to the simplistic way Minecraft implements many of its core features, disabling or removing farms is nearly impossible.
• Gateway Series: This game has gotten a lot of people into indie games.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This Swedish game is beloved basically everywhere, but there are standouts.
  • The game is exceedingly popular in the United States. Merchandise can be found practically everywhere and a well-known American company bought out Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion.
    • It seems that New Hampshire loves Minecraft enough to make it the most torrented game there relative to the US national average.
  • Minecraft is very popular in Japan, to the point that the Bedrock Edition is more known than the Java Edition in Japan (Java requires a PC, in which is hard to put into an average house in Japan due to small dimensions, while Bedrock can be played on Nintendo Switch and iPhones). When going to Twitter, you will likely find Japenese users posting gameplay of Bedrock more than Java there. It is one of the most popular Western-developed games, the best selling Western-developed game on the Nintendo Switch, and one of the best selling games on that console, all in Japan.
  • Minecraft has a notable British fanbase as well. Many of the most popular Minecraft YouTubers (e.g. Yogscast Minecraft Series, DanTDM, Stampylongnose, GeorgeNotFound) are British, and it was a British developer (4J Studios) that was responsible for porting the game to consoles.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Zombified Piglins in the Nether are relatively passive and actually sort of cute despite their Body Horror, until you inadvertently harm one of them (for instance, with a stray arrow from your projectile spam at a Ghast). Then they begin to swarm you and attempt to beat you to death with swords from all directions. Oh, and if they kill you? Good luck getting your stuff back from the damn army of Zombified Piglins camping around (and in some cases, even wearing) it. Luckily, if you stay out of their sight for a while, they'll forget that anything even happened, and even if they do pick up your armor, you can safely kill them without angering the others by suffocating them with gravel.
  • If you don't particularly care about dying or have sufficiently strong enough armor to negate their threat, Creepers become this. It's mostly due to the fact that their only attack creates a crater in your lawn that you now have to go back on and patch up so it doesn't look like an eyesore/war zone.
  • Giant spiders pounce, crawl through 1-block-high passages, and typically spawn in groups. Now with glowing red eyes! Mercifully, they mellow out and become passive in the sunlight, unless they're already after your blood. They can also climb walls. The Horse Update (1.6.1) gives spiders a random chance to spawn with a status buff like boosted speed or health regeneration, making them even more annoying.
  • For more experienced players, Ghasts are downgraded to this from Demonic Spiders. They aren't a huge threat, but the fact that they fly out of range of your conventional weapons means they take a long time to kill, and they blow huge holes in the environment and set it on fire, making the Nether even more of a pain to navigate. You know it's bad when there's a song about how they ruin trips to the Nether.
  • When you have armor (or a shield), skeleton archers downgrade from demonic to mere pests. Their arrows become far less damaging, though with a bit of knockback that can throw you into lava at inopportune moments. But when you know where they're coming from, dealing with them becomes a matter of patience by blocking their arrows.
  • With the 1.6 update, zombies have a chance to spawn more zombies if attacked, and get stronger when attacked.
  • Ironically not directly the case with the game's actual Bats, which are non-hostile and will generally try to avoid you. Though they will make annoying squeaking sounds and get in the way of your pickaxe. However, as of the Wild Update, they become Goddamned Bats, but not for the reasons you'd expect. The Wardens of the Deep Dark biomes are completely blind, relying on sound and smell to detect intruders, and will despawn if they don't receive any kind of stimulation within a certain amount of time. Add the incredibly noisy Bats into the equation and they'll often annoy the Wardens to the point that they'll never despawn, but will still harass you if you try to get by them.
  • Husks, desert-dwelling zombie-like creatures capable of inflicting hunger on you if they hit you, forcing you to waste food in order to offset the dent on the hunger meter that you take. They are also immune to sunlight unlike normal zombies, making them a pain in the neck to deal with if you're watching over a village in a desert biome. Also like normal zombies, they can sometimes spawn as babies.
  • Like many Airborne Mooks, Phantoms are quite a pain in the rear. They spawn in groups, fly out of reach most of the time, meaning that you either need a bow or some very good timing with melee to hit them before they hit you. Fortunately, they only appear if you haven't slept for days, meaning that you need to go out of the way to encounter them, but groups will spawn with increasingly larger frequency the longer you stay sleep-deprived. If you do have cats around you, they are forced to keep their distance so you have peace of mind at night.
  • Baby Hoglins are just as aggressive as the adults, and are smaller so they can fit into tighter spaces and are harder to hit. However, they're not as damaging, and a single swipe of your sword can send them scurrying. Just don't be too aggressive with pursuing them, as they are accompanied by adults.
  • Even in Creative mode, Slimes are definitely this if you choose to play in a Superflat world (they're pretty rare otherwise). When you kill medium or large sized ones, they split, which isn't helped by the fact that they're annoyingly common to begin with, since the Y-coordinates in Superflat mode are very low (and they spawn regardless of the light level). If you're in a village, they trample your crops because they get around by hopping. And because they're so common (and easy to kill), their loot wastes inventory space. Worst of all, despite their low attack strength, they deal damage and wear down your armor at an alarmingly fast rate. Even just one large slime can rapidly drain your armor durability if it backs you into a corner and you don't deal with it immediately. The only saving grace is that the smallest ones cannot even hurt you.
  • Magma Cubes, the Nether counterpart of the Slimes are even worse. They have all the same Asteroids Monster abilities as their cousins, but they jump significantly higher, hit much harder, and can kill you much more quickly if they corner you. On top of this, due to the Nether's environment, there's a high risk of them knocking you into lava. Doubly so in the lava-filled Basalt Delta biome, where their spawn rates are buffed to the point that they practically become Demonic Spiders. Even worse, their tiny versions can still deal damage, knock you back, and rapdily whittle away your armor and health unlike tiny Slimes.
  • Shulkers, found only in the End Cities in The End after defeating the Ender Dragon, take this to an extreme. They're living turrets, popping out of their boxes every now and then to shoot projectiles that deal Scratch Damage and cause their targets to float upwards for a few seconds. While this could be helpful to traverse the End Cities' Bizarrchitecture, it's unnecessarily tedious and hard to control when you can just, you know, mine and build your way up. Worst of all, shulkers like to hang out at the most hard-to-reach places possible, such as under the floor or on the outer side of walls. And those projectiles? Not only do they home in on you, they can round corners to get to you. What make shulkers Goddamned Bats and not Demonic Spiders is because at this point, you're most likely wearing armor strong enough for you to survive the inevitable falls. In addition, due to the nature of the End, you're almost guaranteed to have at least a few ender pearls on hand anyway, and you can cancel the fall damage (apart from that of the pearl itself) with a carefully-timed throw.
• Good Bad Bugs: Enough to warrant its own page.
• Good Bad Translation: You have the option of translating the text into almost any language. The languages are named only in that language (Spanish is Espanol, etc.) and only in that language's alphabet. The languages are listed in alphabetical order of said names. This is where the problem comes in. The Hebrew word for Hebrew transliterates as "Ivrit." However, Hebrew is listed under "H" in the list, and it instead says "Anglit," which, besides not starting with "H," is the Hebrew word for English.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the random splash messages in the main menu could display "Absolutely dragon free!" Around the pre-release 6 of Minecraft Beta 1.9, the Ender Dragon was introduced. This has since been changed to read "Kind of dragon free!"
  • After beetroot was introduced to the Pocket Edition, a picture of Jeb in-game in the PC version was found, but it turned out to be fake. A fan asked if beetroot was ever going to be in PC, and Jeb said it wouldn't. And then, a few years later, beetroot was confirmed for the Combat Update, contradicting what Jeb had said before.
  • The 2011 April Fools update involved locked chests that, when clicked on, would invite the player to go to the "Minecraft Store", which "sold" various joke items and would greet you with a screaming velociraptor if you clicked "Proceed to checkout". There are now several actual Minecraft Stores, one selling the actual game, one selling DLC for the Bedrock and Legacy Console editions, and one selling The Merch.
  • On April 25 2015, CaptainSparklez released a music video Find The Pieces which featured living Pigmen as the main antagonists. Four years later, the game was updated to include "Piglin" mobs, which look strikingly similar to the Pigmen, even down to the ears.
  • Later on, JT Music released the music video Mob Rap Part 6, which featured illagers attacking a village at one point in the song, before the actual implementation of illager patrols and raids in Village and Pillage.
  Illager: It would be a shame if it all got pillaged!
  Villager: Oh no! Illagers are taking my village!
  • Yogcast's "Screw The Nether" involves someone trying to move to the Nether and make a permanent settlement, only to find that it's not a great place to live. The Nether Update introduced enough resources, from substitutes for wood and cobblestone to a semi-reliable food source that isn't rotten flesh, to make a permanent base there viable enough to be a common Self-Imposed Challenge. Cue many players quoting the song.
  "I'm moving to the Nether!"
• Hype Backlash: Being one of the most popular games ever let's played (especially by the Yogscast and Achievement Hunter) has turned some people off, while others think that "It's a lot of noise made over glorified LEGO."
• I Knew It!: Players correctly predicted that when zombies stopped dropping feathers upon death, they would drop rotten flesh instead.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • After Notch received an interview in a popular PC magazine and was plugged on the Team Fortress 2 blog, some people called the demise of the game. The cries of "Notch is a sellout!" became even more common among fans once he announced Minecraft would come to the Xbox 360, which happened because of the game's huge success. Even more so when the game was ported to 8th Generation platforms.
  • With all the popular Minecraft let's players on YouTube, it's not uncommon to see at least three or more million view Minecraft videos in the related videos section. This, however, has made some gamers absolutely sick of seeing or hearing about the game entirely; especially from the Nintendo community.
  • While it never really had a target age group to begin with, Minecraft in the days of Indev, Alpha, and early Beta was relatively obscure and was mostly played by college students and computer geeks. Once it became a household name and was released on almost every game console available, it became really popular with very young children and a handful of the original players were annoyed by this. A part of it being that they find the younger players to be annoying or immature, while others are annoyed about the general public pegging Minecraft as a "kiddie game".
  • This has subsided during Minecraft's Popularity Polynomial, with the previous generation of players having grown up and had started to play the game again.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: In some unholy fusion with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, after every major patch, people complain They Changed It, Now It Sucks! about things that did not actually change. For instance, after the Halloween update, someone made a thread complaining that creepers no longer drop gunpowder when they explode (they never did).
• Junk Rare:
  • Many of the rare drops from mobs:
    • Wither Skeletons have a 8.5% chance to drop... a stone sword, at a point of the game where the player has likely moved on to iron equipment at minimum. Subverted if you're trying to save up your iron for a beacon, in which case it's a godsend.
    • Zombies have an exceedingly low chance to drop iron ingots (2.5%), and while iron is good, it's far easier and faster to mine for it.
    • Any mob that spawns with armor or weapons equipped has a chance to drop it ^note which is even more ludicrously difficult, as they have a maximum 15% chance to spawn wearing it on top of having to contend with the 8.5% drop rate, but even if you do get the randomly dropped armor, chances are it's gold or leather, and in incredibly poor condition too. Somewhat downplayed with the introduction of the anvil; if you're lucky enough to get decent weapons/armor from mobs, you can simply repair it. Later versions also added the ability to smelt gold and iron equipment into their respective nuggets, giving a bit more use to those drops.
  • Plenty of it when it comes to late-game fishing as well:
    • Downplayed by Tropical Fish (formerly Clownfish). You have a 1.7% chance of getting one via fishing and a 2% chance of a Guardian dropping one when killed, making it the rarest fish, but also the most useless; Fish and Salmon restore more hunger points when eaten raw (two for both) than Clownfish (one), and unlike the former two, Clownfish can't be cooked to increase how much it fills you up. There's also no potion that uses it, unlike the Pufferfish (Potions of Water Breathing). The best thing you could do with them was feed them to cats to tame/breed them so you could keep the more useful fish for yourself. No longer the case in Update Aquatic, where they're no longer "rare" and can be easily obtained by killing Tropical Fish mobs. The Village and Pillage update also gave them a proper use, in that high-level fisherman villagers will buy them for emeralds.
    • Enchanted books are among the best things you can get while fishing. If it's a good enchantment. Commonly disliked enchantments are especially bad here, when getting them is pretty easy but getting the one you want takes a long time because you can't tell which one is coming and the pool of possible enchantments to get is way larger than that of say, a sword. So instead of getting the Sharpness III you want, you're getting Bane of Arthropods (which nobody uses, in the distinct non-abundance of bug-type hostiles ^note It ups the damage against Spiders, Cave Spiders, Endermites, Silverfish, and Bees. Bees should be kept alive as they're useful to the player, Cave Spiders and Silverfish are only encountered in certain areas, and Endermites can't spawn normally but have a low chance to spawn from Enderman or Ender Pearl teleportation. Did we mention that all damage-boosting enchantments are Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups, so putting Bane of Arthropods on your sword locks you out of things like Smite and Sharpness?), more enchantments specific to fishing rods, and books which literally have the word "Curse" in their name. Doubly frustrating when hunting for Treasure Enchantments (especially the game breaking Mending), which can only be gotten from fishing unless you get lucky with pre-generated Chests or Librarian Villagers; you'll be getting a lot of enchantments you've probably long since gotten from an enchantment table before you fish up even one Mending book. Slightly mitigated with the introduction of the Grindstone, which allows you to disenchant useless books in exchange for experience and a now-blank book that you can use as you wish. However, the Grindstone doesn't remove Curse enchantments, so unless that Curse of Vanishing book comes with enough good enchantments for you to think it's worth it, you'll likely still toss it into the lava pit.
    • Saddles become this very quickly, when you've been fishing for long enough that the amount of saddles far exceeds the amount of horses you'll ever have at any one time. The wiki defines them as being part of the "treasure" category, meaning they'll become even more common if you have Luck of the Sea on your fishing rod.
    • Lily Pads have a similar issue to saddles. They can be placed on top of water to allow you to walk on it, making them helpful in farms so you don't always fall into the water blocks as you're harvesting your crops. However, you only need so many, and their main perk was made obsolete in the Aquatic Update; you can now do the same thing with any slab placed in the water source block.
  • Cocoa beans. You find them from either jungles or dungeons, both of which are fairly rare (and, before jungles were introduced, they couldn't be farmed either). They only have two uses: dyeing things and making cookies. However, after hunger was implemented, cookies became an incredibly bad source of food. All food was made stackable ^note prior to the introduction of hunger, cookies were unique in that no other food could stack and to add insult to injury, cookies have one of the worst saturation values in the game; that stack of 64 cookies will go away incredibly fast. They almost had another use in early 1.12 snapshots where cookies were used to tame parrots, but after Mojang realized this could have bad repercussions in the real world (as chocolate chip cookies can be poisonous to any pet birds the young target audience might have), cookies were changed to actually insta-kill parrots, which are now tamed with seeds. Even for their primary use as a dye, it's not that good, as other shades of brown can be acquired very easily (logs and planks will fill your building needs, and leather already comes colored brown by default). Thus, for such a rare item, cocoa beans have very few applications. The Village and Pillage update might have alleviated this slightly, as cocoa beans can be tossed into a Composter to be turned into bonemeal with a decent 65% efficiency.^ExplanationEach cocoa bean has a 65% chance of filling the composter one level, with seven levels giving you one unit of bonemeal. On average, 10-11 cocoa beans will get you a unit of bonemeal. Everything that compares to or beats that is either a more useful crop, something you can't farm that you normally wouldn't go out of your way to gather a bunch of, or a crafted/cooked food item that you wouldn't want to waste like that.
  • Chainmail Armor cannot be crafted, only obtained through villagers or rare mob drops. As cool as it looks, it's only slightly better than Gold Armor, having a whopping one more armor point than it. By the time you obtain Chainmail, you've likely moved on to Iron Armor at the minimum. Sure, it receives better enchantments than Iron or Diamond, but it's still not worth the effort of seeking it out. Later versions allow you to smelt chainmail armor into iron nuggets, making it slightly useful when dropped from a mob, but still not worth spending emeralds to obtain.
  • The "Thing" banner pattern, which is Mojang's company logo. You can only obtain it by crafting it from an enchanted golden apple, which is an exceedingly rare and powerful food item. Many players agree that it's better to consume the apple rather than waste it on an okay-looking banner pattern.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A rare version that isn't attributed to the game itself, but most of Minecraft's playerbase came about during its boom in Game Mods, being that a good few singular mods actually contain more content than the vanilla game itself.

M-R

• Memetic Badass: Steve, the player character. Beating animals to death with his bare hands. Fitting cubic tons of material into his pockets. Swimming up waterfalls. Going for days without sleep. Yes, truly an average day in the life. Alex can also be this for being as powerful as Steve.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Videos on the game's official YouTube channel tend to portray Jeb in a comedically negative light.
  • Despite being the game's final boss, the Ender Dragon is often seen as a total joke by players. When it was first added, it was already quite an easy boss, having no attacks outside of Collision Damage, and mostly being a game of destroying all the Ender Crystals while trying not to anger any Endermen. 1.9 (and the Bedrock version of the fight) tried to make it more of a proper fight, with a new dragon breath attack and some of the crystals being protected by iron bars... which does nothing to stop the tactic of blowing the Ender Dragon up with beds.^note Beds in the Nether and End will create a huge explosion when you attempt to sleep in them, and the Ender Dragon has no Contractual Boss Immunity to these explosions. Once this strategy became more widely-known and used, the Ender Dragon developed a reputation for being a non-threat which gets blown up by beds in a few seconds.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Misattributed Song: A lot of people tend to confuse the song “Sweden” from the game’s soundtrack with Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” or outright think the latter is part of the soundtrack, which isn’t a surprise considering they’re both similar-sounding, melancholic piano pieces. However, it’s such a common misconception that nearly every video of “Gymnopedie No. 1” on YouTube has a handful of comments referencing the game.
• Misblamed: Since Minecraft is so widely known as Notch's creation, for a while it wasn't common for people to act like he never stepped away from the game's development after it officially dropped, as despite Jeb taking over as director in late 2011, many people still praised or hated Notch for every change made to the game despite having no part in any of them, which was a huge factor in why he sold Minecraft off to Microsoft and ultimately stepped down from Mojang.
• Moe:
  • Bees. With their huge eyes, fat bodies, and affinity for flowers, they're quite adorable (when they're not stinging you at least).
  • Slimes are dangerous Asteroids Monsters, but you can't deny their Black Bead Eyes make them rather cute.
  • The baby animals, obviously.
  • Parrots. They are some of the smallest critters in the game, and make very adorable chirping noises.
• Moment of Awesome: Has its own page.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The pickup sound, especially hearing it in rapid succession. You've just mined out all that clay and step into the pit to pick it up — pop pop poppoppoppoppoppopopopopop!
  • If you're hunting for food, the sound of a nearby chicken, or especially a cow or a pig, becomes this.
  • The sound of wolves barking, if you have bones to tame them with or they're tamed wolves that are yours. So you're minding you own business and somewhere you hear a loud "Bark!" from afar. Much squee ensues.
  • The comforting meow of the cats, especially if it's nighttime and there are Creepers and/or Phantoms in the vicinity.
  • If Shhh is not created by creeper, but instead is created when the water meets still lava and obsidian starts forming.
  • The sound of a creeper dying.
  • When fighting The Wither, it's their dying breath that is the cue for players to stop, give themselves a pat on the back, and go make themselves a Beacon sandwich.
  • The sound of a Nether Portal. It sounds a lot like the TARDIS. Of course, it stops being such once you actually enter.
  • You're just mining away when you suddenly hear multiple cries of one kind of mob. There must be a dungeon nearby! Time to find ya some mossy cobblestone, saddles, cocoa beans, and music discs!
  • You're in a cave and weak, and are waiting in a hole in the wall. Suddenly you hear the sound of zombies and skeletons burning in the sun. Bliss.
  • If you're an avid collector, the chorus of your completed set of passive mobs, especially if it includes dogs and cats.
  • You returned from being AFK to your mob farm born from a spawner, you strike the weakened crowd of skeletons or zombies with your Sweeping Edge III sword. The continuous dinglinglinglinglinglingling of thousands of EXP fills your ears.
  • Completing a challenge advancement such as "back to sender" triggers a very satisfying jingle sounding like a "whoosh", a drumroll, and the aforementioned EXP chime.
• My Real Daddy: Many consider Jeb to be the real "daddy" of Minecraft after Notch left Mojang, due to the sheer amount of content added under Jeb's direction massively outstripping what Notch did and/or the inflammatory comments Notch has made on social media after his retirement.
• Narm:
  • The high-pitched noises that the baby zombies or husks make.
  • The Pillagers' raid horn. It's supposed to be ominous and frightening, but many of their calls sound like somebody farted into a megaphone.
• Narm Charm: The chicken jockeys look like they're supposed to be childish, but they work well — they don't take fall damage, because the chickens just float down, and the baby zombies can attack surprisingly well.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Spider jockeys can climb walls and shoot you, and seem terrifying at first. Then the skeleton shoots its spidery steed by accident and you get to see a mob fight bitterly with itself, its common enemy (you) all but forgotten.
  • One of the best antidotes to all the (copious) Nightmare Fuel in Minecraft is Creative Mode. Not only are you indestructible and capable of flight, but all the normally hostile mobs become neutral. You can use special eggs to spawn a bunch of Creepers all around you, and they'll just wander peacefully around and occasionally stop to look at you quizzically. Also, you can look directly at Endermen and they won't be fazed at all.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Minecraft is pretty much a Trope Codifier for Wide-Open Sandbox tropes — but many concept(s) that fans love to credit Minecraft as "inventing" were old news by the time Minecraft was even in Alpha — namely Second Life, Furcadia, and Garry's Mod. This has led to some amusing bits where fans accuse precursors of ripping off Minecraft.
  • And speaking of Minecraft, the whole "3D world made up of cubes" thing was done by the freeware title Infiniminer first. Minecraft is largely believed to have copied the world format from that game.
  • Considering how popular the game is with young children, virtually anything with a pixelated look to it (usually a game from the 80s or 90s or anything based on that) will be compared to Minecraft despite the thing being around since before they were even born.
• Pandering to the Base: Updates from around the 1.5 full release era saw many changes that were designed for mapmakers (with many of them from Vechs' input). For example, custom spawner data, command blocks, and custom mob stacks were all implemented features that a completely vanilla game would never see.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Imagine digging underground when you suddenly hear the sounds of an unseen enemy waiting for you to dig towards them. Or perhaps the silent Creeper is waiting somewhere by your house for you to step outside.
  • When underground deep enough, you have no idea whether the monster sounds you hear are actually nearby creatures or just the creepy ambient noises.
  • Not to mention that you always hear monsters before you see them. You know there's something waiting to kill you, but WHERE IS IT? And if you built you house right over a cave, you'll have to listen to the monsters as you go about your daily activities.
    • The one exception to this rule is, of course, the Creeper. By the time you hear the hissing noise signalling that it's about to blow, it's already too late to run.
    • And then sometimes you do see one coming. Standing on a high ledge. Watching you. Somewhere in the world, a Creeper is plotting your death.
    • Parrots are intended to reduce the fuel by mimicking the sounds of mobs, including the aforementioned Creeper, so you might be able to detect their presence before anything bad happens. However, they'll also sometimes imitate the sounds of mobs that aren't present, so that might ramp up the fuel for situations that don't call for it whatsoever.
    • So you decide to go home, turn in for the night, but..."You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby." There are monsters near your house, maybe trying to break in if they saw you before you got inside, and you probably can't see them from within your house.
  • There's no way to tell the footsteps of harmless pigs and your own character from Skeletons. Until you hear the "oink" or "burrr" outside, and laugh because it's another creature you spend your day slaughtering. But then again, Creepers oink.
  • An update included a glitch, the current cause for which is unknown, that causes random pain noises within tunnels for no apparent reason. Even on peaceful. Very creepy.
  • Even creepier, Notch had his music developer, C418, make sounds for creepy ambiance when you're underground. They can all startle you, but the 10th one, known by some as the "banshee call", has been known to even force players out of caves.
  • CRAP IS THAT A CREEPER!? Wait, no, it's just a cactus. HOLY SHIT A SKELETON! Never mind, just a sheep...
  • Even if it's a hoax, the idea of Herobrine is pretty unsettling. Basically, he's a silent human entity with completely white eyes who randomly walks around the world. It would make you pretty paranoid about going exploring, especially at night. Especially if he's watching you.
    • Worse, the official changelog says "removed Herobrine"... several times.
  • The Endermen. They're pitch black, so you'll have a hard time spotting them at night but the worst part is that if you look directly at them, they'll attack you the moment you're looking away. One of them could be hiding behind the next corner. You won't know until you look...but if you look at it, it will attack you. And they can teleport, so the moment you try to kill one it will be somewhere else, and you don't know where. You could step outside, look around for a moment, then walk back inside, and have no idea you triggered an attack by one until it teleports beside you inside your own home and starts tearing you to ribbons.
    • Made even worse for Doctor Who fans because of their similarities to the Weeping Angels in how they act...
    • Worst as of the 1.9 Pre-release, Endermen don't burn in sunlight anymore, however they make an effort to avoid it by teleporting randomly. With that, there's the paranoia that they can teleport right into your reticule.
  • Speaking of Weeping Angels, someone modded them into the game.
  • Ghasts, whose cries are always heard at the same volume no matter how far away they are. Ghast noises carry an extremely long distance, leading to situations where you can clearly hear a Ghast nearby, but you can't see it and have no idea which direction it's in. The player has no idea upon hearing the sound whether the Ghast is in another cavern or right behind them. Pair that with the fact that they can detect and shoot at you from outside your render distance if you're playing with the Short or Tiny render distance and they certainly qualify as this.
  • The Wither is made of this. The idea of an inescapable, highly murderous flying monster that may as well be the Grim Reaper is terrifying. Fortunately, at this point the only way it will spawn is if the player makes a conscious effort to make it spawn. Still, suppose you're playing on a server and a griefer gets their hands on the materials needed to spawn it... although this could be nullified by a server admin killing it, then checking the logs for the first person to die and make an educated guess.
  • On certain Survival Mode servers with PvP enabled, you might have to go at it alone. You'll never know exactly when a bandit wearing diamond armor who's been preying on others will jump you, kill you instantly, and steal the resources you're starting out with.
  • Silverfish hide out in ordinary-looking stone blocks in Extreme Hills biomes and Strongholds. The only clue you have if the block you're mining is hiding one is if it breaks slower with a pickaxe or faster with something else. Every time you mine a stone block in Extreme Hills or any variant of it, you're basically playing Russian Roulette if you're not paying attention.
  • Haven't slept for a few days and venturing out into the night or a Thunderstorm? Better keep watch on the sky to check for your safety, otherwise you might not have much warning time to react before you hear the horrible screech of a Phantom right before the foul creature bites into you.
  • Elder Guardians keep you from simply digging through the mazelike corridors of ocean monuments by inflicting you with Mining Fatigue, a status effect that slows your mining and attack speed. The effect is heralded by a ghostly image of an Elder Guardian appearing on your screen, accompanied by a terrifying chiming sound. Keep in mind that this can happen whenever you are anywhere within a 50 block radius of an Elder Guardian, meaning that you may get assaulted by the Jump Scare outside an ocean monument, including while passing over one on a boat, travelling on nearby islands, or unwittingly mining beneath one.
  • Illager patrols. They randomly spawn on the map, consist of Vindicators and Pillagers, and can appear anywhere, regardless if there's a Pillager outpost or Woodland Mansion nearby. Meaning there's no knowing when you might run into one, and if you're unprepared, good luck fighting them off. Even if you are prepared, killing the captain will cause you to get a bad omen, which will force you to deal with a raid the next time you enter a village, or if you had fought off a patrol while in a village... immediately after killing the Captain.
  • Survival multiplayer servers can be this. Every time you log off, you're leaving your base and all your hard-earned resources defenseless. If anyone finds it while you're away, you might log back on to a burning wreck. And with X-ray mods and texture packs out there, nowhere is ever truly safe...
  • Everything about the Deep Dark seems based on this concept. It's a biome found deep underground filled with a substance called Sculk which literally eats away at and replaces the natural blocks of the world when things die. Making noise that triggers sensor Sculk and Shriekers multiple times will summon the blind but very dangerous Warden, a nigh-unkillable monster inspired by music disc 11 which will pursue you by smell or sound and quickly obliterate you if you're near, all while applying a darkness effect to the world while active that greatly reduces your visibility. Navigating the Deep Dark at all is a paranoia party in itself, but even worse is that you never quite know when you'll come across the Deep Dark while caving. The most unfortunate players could literally fall into it and trigger the Warden with no warning.
• Popularity Polynomial: The game was well-liked during it's first few years of going public, but the community was pretty small and niche during most of that time. Then it would up becoming a cultural phenomenon after its official release, cultivating a huge audience of virtually all kinds of gamers and becoming a staple of early-to-mid 2010s internet culture. But by 2016, the game had lost quite a few of its early fans due to a combination of the game becoming increasingly associated with young kids, the slower pace and often mixed reception of major updates, etc. Eventually, due to other games getting similar attention, as well as the fact that said younger players had grown up, some players ended up looking back at the game fondly, and by 2019 it had actually usurped Fortnite's crown as the year's most popular game. It helps that most of the updates after 1.9 were more well-received.
• Porting Disaster: The game is quite broken on the Vita. Aside from suffering from a highly limited world size, before the first patch, the game would randomly create a "Crashed" duplicate save. But what takes the cake is that the auto-save system will corrupt the save file if the game is closed incorrectly, as the Vita uses a different way to close games.
• Quicksand Box: Many people give up after finding that the game has no plot. After The End was added, this took a strange turn as the plot seemed meaningless to many people. While there's also a lot of user created maps that have their own stories, a casual player tends to not look for such maps.
• Recurring Fanon Character:
  • Herobrine began as a Creepypasta fan character, but soon rose in popularity to become one of the most recognizable villainous icons of the game, despite never actually being in it. Countless fanfictions, mods, music videos, parodies, fan books, and the like have featured Herobrine as a recurring villain. Additionally, Herobrine became something akin to Ascended Fanon when Mojang included references to the character in the game, such as adding "Removed Herobrine" to patch notes, referencing him in the console edition trivia facts, and even sneaking him into some promotional material for Minecon 2011.
  • Entity 303, also referred to as "The New Herobrine", was another popular Creepypasta fan villain that was meant to be regarded as even more powerful and evil than its predecessor. While Entity 303 never reached the same popularity as Herobrine, it was still featured prominently in fanfictions, videos, and mods.
  • Humanized versions of the Minecraft mobs, usually portrayed as scantily clad Animesque girls, have become quite popular in fanart, music videos, and mods, especially the Creeper, who is portrayed as a small, cute blonde girl in a green hoodie and leggings.

S-Z

• Sacred Cow: Never criticize Minecraft as a whole for anything in front of anyone, or the community will immediately give you backlash for it. At the same time, the community will accept its own criticism of questionable mechanics/updates.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Speaking of which…
  • Back when strip mining was the most efficient means of getting diamonds, gravel pockets generating deep underground were every player's bane. Anyone tunneling deep underground for ores will inevitably come across gravel, which is affected by gravity, so gravel in your path will mean you'll also need to clear all the gravel above before you can continue, briefly doubling or tripling how much digging you'll need to do. Even using the fastest method to remove it (the torch trick) is quite finicky and annoying to pull off.
  • The hunger system when it was introduced in beta 1.8. Before this, food instantly restored your health. Once hunger was introduced, food no longer were instant heals (Potions of Healing covered that), but instead, food takes about 1.6 seconds to fully consume and they restore hunger points instead. Keeping your hunger full gives slow health regeneration but letting the meter fall too low prevents you from sprinting and letting it go fully empty will damage you and even outright kill you if playing on Hard difficulty. What makes it worse is doing too much physical stuff (running, mining, etc) will make you hungry more quickly and every piece of food has different amount of saturation, which determines how full you stay until the hunger meter starts to drop again. Naturally, you aren't told of this.
  • On Xbox 360, those tutorial captions that always seem to show up when you're underwater, being shot at by a skeleton, or having a Creeper run at you. You also can't jump or swim up until you respond. Not that big of a deal, until you get into 2 block deep water or drop into a hole.
  • 1.8 added a way to get mob heads. Unfortunately, the only way to get them is to have the mob (zombie, skeleton, or creeper) be killed by a charged creeper. This entails waiting for a thunderstorm, hoping for a creeper to get struck by lightning, staying at a distance where the creeper neither kills you or despawns, bringing a mob to the creeper, and then not dying when the creeper explodes, which is very difficult, especially on Hard or Hardcore mode. Needless to say, not many people were happy with the unnecessary difficulty in obtaining a trophy.
  • Repairs with anvils. Repairing any one item on an anvil (say, your diamond sword with Sharpness V, Fire Aspect II and Knockback II) gets much more expensive in terms of experience, and even more expensive when you want to rename it. At a certain limit (39 levels of experience, to be exact), the anvil will decide that an item costs too much experience to repair and refuse to let you fix it.
  • The combat revamp in 1.9. While it makes facing monsters more challenging and fun, nearly everyone agrees that it ruins PvP combat and turns the originally fast-paced duels into slow games of waiting for your opponent to drop their shield. If you join a PvP oriented server (minigames, factions, etc) don't be surprised if they abolish the new system by making all swords have a million points in attack speed.
  • Building with stairs will make even the most experienced builder groan. Sure, they can add a lot of character to a building (especially when used in making a roof), but they're incredibly fickle and hard to place in the correct position. Half the time, you'll have a sideways-facing stair when you wanted it to face forward.
  • Harvesting pumpkins or melons while holding pets can be quite the juggle. Since they won't leave your side, the danger of them getting crushed by a pumpkin or melon is very real and telling them to sit can impair their usefulness if the player forgets to undo it. One must wonder why they didn't do anything to fix that yet, like having the produce push them out of the way instead.
  • The revised world generation can make gathering certain resources incredibly tedious. In the old days of the game, biomes could appear next to one another without much thought, meaning snow biomes could be located right up against desert biomes and other such silliness. The devs ultimately revised it so it now takes into account adjacent biomes into consideration when generating the land. While it's certainly realistic, it also means that you'll often end up with two repeating biomes stretching onward for miles. Worst still, the world generation seems to greatly favor warmer biomes as oppose to cooler ones, making it so that ending up with "desert-savanna wastelands" that go onwards for tens of thousands of blocks, often stretching far beyond oceans frustratingly common.
  • Some villagers can spawn as Nitwits, meaning they can't obtain a job and will never provide any trades. They're just as common as other villagers, thus causing them to take up space that could have been taken by useful villagers.
  • Parrots like to drop off of a player's shoulder for a ton of reasons, including falling off a block. Given the game's terrain, this can cause a ton of annoyance while transporting them.
  • While Llamas can be outfitted with chests and grouped up to make a caravan, they can only be controlled by Leads. This practice is tedious at best, and they become obsolete altogether once Shulker Boxes enter the picture.
  • Most of the Wandering Trader's trades, which are decided at random, are rip-offs that primarily ask for emeralds in exchange for plants you can easily find around the overworld. He might, however, carry uncommon items like Nautilus Shells or Blue Ice.
  • Piglins becoming hostile because of chests being opened. Understandably they would be angry if the chests inside the bastions they often spawn were the ones being opened by the player to loot their items out, but they also tend to get angry about any chests opened near them, even those directly placed by the player, or even container types not native to the Nether at all, like barrels, ender chests, or even shulker boxes, making for a rather annoying Berserk Button for these neutral mobs the player is trying desperately to barter with.
  • Java Edition's chat reporting system, introduced in 1.19.1, has been frowned upon almost universally. It allows players to report explicit chat messages by other players, likely dooming them to be banned from playing on any multiplayer servers, even those private servers with only a handful of players and even going as far as to ban players from LAN play functionality. Players were highly upset with this not only because of how little the playerbase was listened to throughout the development process, but because of how it upended a decade's worth of tradition of players effectively policing their own servers and communities, rather than having a centralized moderation structure, controlled by few but wielding power over millions of players. What's more, some players have theorized that it was Microsoft pulling the strings on that decision.
• Scrappy Weapon: Has its own page.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • There is a sizable amount of Minecraft fanart that draws the default player skins (Steve and Alex) as non-polygonal humans, with Steve turning into a full-blown bearded Tall, Dark, and Handsome hunk and Alex into a cute long-haired redhead girl. For example...
  • In a bizarre case, piglins got hit with this. Some people thought they looked like cute girls wearing flapped pig hats◊ at first glance, causing humanized fanart of them to become common.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Since Minecraft has very little in the way of plot, but much in way of personal freedom, many players attempt to liven up the experience by arbitrary limitations and try to beat the game like that. This can be anything from "can't use the crafting table", "never leave the underground after the first day", or "only allowed to use wooden tools".
  • Flatworlds are generally meant for open-ended builds in Creative Mode, but you're free to play them in Survival Mode with some potential consequences of no ore, stone, or tree generation, depending on the specific Flatworld. Flat Plains in particular allows for the player to theoretically survive due to world generation allowing for villages (and by extension, blacksmith chests) to generate, opening up the door to Survival Mode play sessions, with the general challenge being the early game; grinding for normally plentiful resources and the constant threat of slimes due to the low Y-axis.
  • You can power a beacon using a pyramid of ore/gem storage blocks of any type, with the easiest generally being iron blocks, but if you want, you can choose to power it with diamond, emerald, gold, or (most impressively) netherite blocks. Note that you need 128 blocks to construct a fully-powered pyramid (amounting to 1152 gemstones or ingots), and if you choose to do netherite, this is compounded by the fact you need to mine 4 ancient debris (and use 4 gold ingots), which only spawn on average of 1-2 per chunk in the Nether, just to make one netherite ingot. This is even lampshaded in the changelog for the snapshot that allowed for a netherite pyramid.
    Netherite blocks can be used as the base of a beacon and Netherite ingots can be used as the fuel for a beacon. Weird flex but ok.
  • The Nether update has seen a rise in players starting their journeys in the Nether and trying to survive long enough to make it out; the resources introduced in that update turning it from a suicide mission to "theoretically possible, but good luck".
  • The 2022 April Fools snapshot "One Block at a Time Update" added the specific challenge of only being able to pick up and place one block at a time, along with tools that break after a single use (yes, even netherite tools) and a complete rehaul of the crafting system.
• Sequel Displacement:
  • The old Minecraft Classic — the one where there's an unlimited number of blocks, simple shading, no monsters or items, and no day/night cycle — seems to suffer from it when compared to the regular Minecraft. The comments on this video show that some people aren't even aware of Classic:
    Why do the blocks destroy so easily???
    how do you break the blocks so fast and how do you do the unlimited block thing
  • The "unlimited blocks" (and easy block destruction) function of Minecraft Classic is superseded with Creative Mode, which may further push Minecraft Classic into obscurity.
  • It doesn't help that Mojang's been deliberately doing everything, short of deleting the game, to dissuade people from playing Classic (removing links to the game, removing sound and music, removing the ability for premium users to save levels online), though versions of it still exist in the launcher and can be accessed by enabling "old alpha" versions. Ironically, this would be reversed years later, with Mojang re-releasing an old version of Classic to celebrate the game's 10th anniversary.
• Signature Song: While a lot of Minecraft's songs have their fair share in the spotlight, Stal is perhaps the most popular. Mostly due to how associated it is with YouTuber Jschlatt and his undying hatred for that specific track. Go to any video related to Stal in some way, there will be a comment about Jschlatt.
• Silent Majority: In the eyes of most people, Minecraft is generally seen as having a gradual rise to popularity throughout 2010, a meteoric rise from 2011 to 2013, a gradual decline from 2014 to 2015 until dying around 2016 (and then being eclipsed by games such as Fortnite) but then receiving a massive revival in 2019. However, even in the game's "dark ages" from 2016 to mid-2018, the game was exceedingly popular, to the point that even in 2018, generally considered the "year of Fortnite", Minecraft actually still eclipsed Fortnite in YouTube growth.
• So Bad, It Was Better: There have always been bugs of all kinds, the most infamous ones being lighting and world generation bugs. As much as they sucked, fans came to grin and snark alike when they came across them — until they slowly began to be fixed. A lot of people were nostalgic about the loss of these hilarious Epic Fail bugs. So much, that some of them were put back in the game due to popular demand.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • The Creeper◊, one of the most iconic characters, was actually a miserable failure from the coder's part to create the 3D model of a pig. Its distorted shape and downright terrifying face, as well as the fact that it sneaks onto you with a SSSS sound followed by your death — and probably a heart attack — make it one of the most original and frightening enemies in modern gaming history.
  • A bug that most veteran alpha/beta players know about definitely qualifies for this: creepers and such nodding their heads rapidly while they look at your dead body lying on the floor.
  • Minecraft in a nutshell.
• Special Effects Failure: The 1.8 release introduced rotating block textures. While it's known for looking... okay with default textures, it really looks odd with some popular, more detailed and higher resolution resource packs, such as Sphax Pure BDCraft and DokuCraft. Unfortunately, the option to turn this feature off was removed in the 1.9 snapshots.
• Spoiled by the Format: In general, Let's Plays that have a Permadeath gimmick (such as Hardcore runs) and haven't been updated for some time can fall victim to this. If you're familiar with the game and see that the latest episode is at a point far from the game's end, it's a fair bet that things aren't going to go well for the player.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Some forum-ites will look down on you for playing on Peaceful difficulty, and that's nothing on what they'll say about using inventory editors to get free building supplies.
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those who will flame you half to death if you prefer spending time building instead of cave-diving and hunting mobs.
  • There are also people who simply hate newcomers, accusing them of being late adopters and blaming them for Minecraft changing too much.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: If you play in Creative Mode on the Peaceful setting, it's just you and a whole wide world to explore. Want to built a giant castle that reaches to the sky? The Normandy from Mass Effect? Kami's Lookout? You've got an infinite supply of tools you can use to build all three of them and an infinity more. No worries about enemies, no worries about supplies running out. Just you and your imagination.
  • Also, Cats. Not only is their meowing extremely adorable, but they also scare away creepers. Put a few cats around your precious builds, and you will no longer have to worry about them getting ruined by those green griefers.
    • As of 1.14, Cats also keep Phantoms away, seemingly turning this into a literal example!
  • Tamed wolves appear to have permanent Puppy-Dog Eyes, and taking out food in front of them causes them to tilt their heads and whine at you. They can also be helpful in alleviating the game's ever-present Paranoia Fuel; bring a few with you when you go mining and you don't have to worry about the monsters as much. They'll even autonomously go after nearby skeletons, making it less likely for you to get a surprise arrow in the noggin.
  • C418's soundtracks of the game saw some emotionally beautiful songs like "Sweden" and "Mice on Venus".
  • The Warm Ocean biome especially. It's just you and schools of fish swimming in a beautiful coral reef, while having some of the most relaxing music in the game.
• That One Achievement:
  • "On a Rail." The goal: "travel 1,000 meters by minecart from your starting point". It requires obscene amounts of materials, and it has to be 1000 blocks away on a straight line. It's not that hard, but the engineering and resources required are insane. One minecart costs 5 Iron Ingots. 16 meters worth of minecart tracks is 6 Iron Ingots. That's 378 Iron Ingots, right there. If you find abandoned mine shafts, however, the abandoned tracks can be collected for no cost. Of course, the carts won't travel forever, so you'll need boosters. That's 6 Gold Ingots and one Redstone for 6 rails. Then there's the items needed to activate the rails, which is more resources. And after all of that, you have to build the whole track, which involves lots of excavation, clearing, placing, and testing the whole thing to make sure it actually works. But on the bright side, as long as the track is still active, it'll work if the achievement happens to be cleared. Thankfully, in the Xbox 360 version, the distance requirement is halved. PC players can build in Creative mode. What really hurts, though, is that every minor game update tends to wipe your achievements. Hope you saved that world with the 1000 meter track.
  • "Sniper Duel" is tough since it requires you to kill a skeleton with an arrow from a 50 meter distance. Unlike arrows in other games, Minecraft's arrows follow the laws of gravity where the arrow is pulled down by gravity as it travels. Arrows lose altitude as they travel and it's tricky to aim accordingly due to the skeleton never staying still. You'll have to snipe from a ledge or mountain to compensate for the gravity, but it's still tough to do since skeletons don't stand still and you can burn through all of your arrows trying to hit a far target.
  • 1.12 replaced achievements with advancements. "On a Rail" is no longer available, but instead gave us "How Did We Get Here?", which requires having all 20 status effects that can be legitimately acquired in survival at the same time. The worst part is that requires having Mining Fatigue and Levitation at the same time: those two status effects are only inflicted by a mob who only lives at the bottom of the ocean and a mob who only lives in a floating island in the middle of nowhere, respectively. And then you'd have to be inflicted with Wither at the same time, which requires a mob which is found nowhere near the two aforementioned mobs, or another mob who is summonable but destroys everything close, including those two aforementioned mobs. Even then, you'll also need to spend lots of resources in building beacons and brewing potions.
    • "How Did We Get Here" has only become progressively more difficult as the game has been developed, with 27 different effects now being required.
  • The advancement system also gave us "Serious Dedication", which would be more a Goddamned Achievement if that trope existed, but anyway. You must waste two diamonds on a diamond hoe, something you would never think of crafting if it wasn't because of the advancement. And that's not the end: you must use it until it runs out of durability, which will require a lot of time (it has 1562 uses) unless you till every single dirt block you see (1562 blocks being much more than you'd till in a normal, or even somewhat large, farm) or use it to hit mobs (which drains durability faster, but hoes are very weak in combat). The advancement has since been changed to creating a Netherite Hoe, which doesn't involve extensive hoe usage but instead requires you to expend an incredibly rare Netherite Ingot on a Diamond Hoe — getting Netherite Ingots will involve extensive excavation of the bowels of the Nether, as you'll need four of the very rare Ancient Debris to make one.
• That One Level:
  • When you light up a new cave, only to discover a fall into water, or worse: Lava yawning below a series of unlit caves that suddenly begin to rain hordes of nasty beasties down onto your head, then you'll understand.
  • A less random case would be The Nether, a molten wasteland that's difficult to navigate due to containing a literal sea of lava, a handful of powerful mobs, and titanic clusters of Netherrack that make it difficult to find Nether Fortresses, which contain mobs that drop items necessary to progress.
  • Speaking of the Nether, 1.16 introduces new biomes that exist there, one of which is called the Soul Sand Valley. Navigating them for the first time without dying is much more difficult than it looks, as countless Ghasts and Skeletons reside there, and are guaranteed to be firing at you as you slowly try to avoid their attacks on the Soul Sand you're trekking across. The Basalt Deltas also come close, as it comprises of basalt pillars of differing height that form deep pits that make inescapable drops into lava, and it's populated by Magma Cubes that love to knock you into them.
  • Ocean Monuments are filled to the brim with spiky laser-shooting Guardians, alongside the elder variant that inflicts Mining Fatigue, a status ailment that makes it almost impossible to break blocks, thus forcing you to go through it normally instead of just mining your way through it. On top of that, they're exceedingly frustrating to navigate due to their maze-like structure, and require preparation for underwater combat and maneuvering so that you don't die from the fish or from drowning. The only "treasure" you'll get from them are eight gold blocks, a bunch of sponges, and any prismarine blocks you mine on the way out. Many players tend to avoid them altogether because they're just not worth the effort.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Rabbits are much harder to breed than any other passive mob in the game with the possible exception of turtles. Breeding a mob temporarily causes it to ignore the luring effects of its breeding food, as does going out of their luring range. Not only do rabbits run away at breakneck speed from players not holding dandelions or carrots, but they also have a slightly smaller lure radius than other passive mobs, who tend to just stand around or walk about aimlessly. In order to get all varieties of rabbits, you'll need to go to a multitude of biomes, many of which are co-inhabited by rabbits and wolves, who like attacking rabbits. Whipping out your sword to deal with the wolves before they kill your rabbits leaves them scurrying about, and then you have to slowly lure them back to you. Thankfully, most of these problems can be eased by attaching the rabbits to leads, or putting the carrot or dandelion in your offhand slot so you can use your active slot to fight.
  • Obtaining Turtle Shells. These are made from 5 Scutes, you only get one when a baby turtle grows into an adult, and turtles are one of the hardest passive mobs to breed since it's more complicated than "just feed two turtles sea grass and a baby turtle appears". They have to return to their home beach to lay eggs that need to be protected for a few nights. Just about any player or larger mob merely standing on said eggs will cause them to break one by one, and zombies will actively seek them out and stomp on them. The eggs hatch only at night into baby turtles that need to be protected by various mobs that will target them on purpose. Finally, when they grow up and drop the scute, chances are that it'll be dropped somewhere in the wide open ocean they swim out to making things akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Most of this can be alleviated if you have the resources to make a proper enclosure, but the time needed to obtain them will still be just as slow as a turtle's pace.
  • Axolotls can only be bred with Buckets of Tropical Fish. No, this doesn't mean you can take any old Tropical Fish you fished up and stick it in a bucket, you'll have to swim out to the warmer ocean biomes and then scoop the Tropical Fish there into a bucket. Buckets of Tropical Fish don't stack unlike other foods that you use for breeding, so you can only breed so many axolotls at a time due to inventory limitations. Trying to get yourself a blue axolotl? Be prepared to make frequent trips to and from a warm ocean biome. This has been alleviated by tropical fish now spawning in lush caves, making a much shorter trip for the axolotls.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The game goes through this every time something in the game changes. Every single update generates this to some capacity:
  • The bone meal item, which makes plants instantly grow, was nerfed so that you had to use several bone meal to get the plant to fully grow. People complained it was too much work and made farming tedious.
  • Mobs were also reprogrammed to (mostly) stay off mine cart tracks so that players that are riding in a mine cart would not suddenly stop because of a sheep blocking the way. People then complained about how the rails were now overpowered because it acted as monster repellent while ignoring the fact that crafting rails is more expensive than just using blocks of dirt for barricades.
  • The fan base also complained loudly when the sun and the moon were changed from squares to circles (admittedly, curves don't look very great when you only have a dozen pixels to work with). Mojang switched them back to squares shortly after.
  • The additions of potions and enchantments caused complaints from people who felt Minecraft was becoming too much like an RPG.
  • Changes to boat mechanics generally never go well. In 1.6.1, turning boats right, left, or backwards with WASD was removed, leading to rampant complaints among the fanbase to the point that 1.7.2 had to revert them back. Snapshots of 1.9 tried to change them again, this time to an oar system where you had to hold D (previously to turn right) to steer left, and A (previously to turn left) to steer right, and you could only go straight by holding both A and D. Once again, another snapshot reverted the controls back to the old ones.
  • In a rather preemptive example, the announcement of 1.9 removing blocking with a sword as well as not allowing weapons in the off-hand to be swung had some people already denouncing the update as a dud.
  • With the weapon power timing mechanic and the old armor mechanic (durability = protection) being reintroduced, but reworked, many are saying that it makes PvE for those used to the old combat system unnecessarily difficult and/or slow. How difficult? Some have reported that, at full diamond gear, they very nearly get killed by five unarmed mobs.
  • Plenty of fans were disappointed when the Killer Rabbit was no longer allowed to spawn naturally.
  • 1.12, or the "World of Color" Update was largely seen as a good update for those who liked building, as the new Glazed Terracotta and Concrete blocks gave more color and texture variety. However, one change that hasn't been completely accepted is the pallete changes to the pre-existing Stained Clay (renamed to Terracotta) and Wool, as some were used to the duller color pallete used by them. Specifically, Wool has been used in many medieval builds to make tapestry, flags and tents, with the new pallete causing previously reasonable castles and villages, in the eyes of the builders, to now look like carnivals.
  • In one of the most acute examples, snapshot 17w45a drastically simplified◊ the model for the Horse mob, ostensibly to make it more visually consistent with the rest of the game, and the backlash was immediate and intense. The model was tweaked◊ in the following snapshot. However it should be noted that the offending snapshot was leading into the 1.13 update, which at the time was labelled a "technical" update with no new features. So it wasn't just about the Horse, it was about the fans' dissatisfaction with the slow rate of new features being added, despite the high volume of suggestions on /r/minecraftsuggestions, and instead of Mojang focusing on fixing what was actually broken, they attempted to fix something that wasn't broken at all.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
  • Some people would think that Roblox is a ripoff of Minecraft, but Roblox came before MC.
  • While on the subject, almost any game that involves mining blocks and moving them around is going to get slammed with this, the most blatant being FortressCraft. Terraria also gets accused of being a Minecraft clone.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Wandering Trader's concept is actually quite useful, since he could give the player items like melon or pumpkin seeds or rare blocks that aren't guaranteed to be found in the Overworld within the playthrough. However, his behaviour comes across as obnoxious rather than endearing and the times where he shows up are way too frequent and at complete random. Some may tolerate him better if his role was closer to the merchants from Terraria or he was trading with Villagers as well, much like in his own character trailer. Heck, he does actually spawn in villages in Bedrock Edition, although even then he still only trades with the player.
• Ugly Cute:
  • For some players, creepers. Deformed pig model that's green and aptly-named, but is absolutely adorable and quite charming at the best of times. Even though it likes blowing up your stuff.
  • The Iron Golem mainly due to how it offers kid villagers a red rose.
  • From the Nether Update, Striders have wispy hair and no stereotypical cute features, but the way they waddle around and shiver when they get cold is cute is its own way.
  • Almost any mob is bound to be this, due to the simplistic style of the game. Made even more so in Creative Mode, where Hostile Mobs aren't likely to attack you, meaning you can look at Endermen, who are probably getting a block, with impunity and bask in how surprisingly cute they look.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: The game is basically a treatise on the location and allocation of natural resources disguised as a video game. Learning how to use redstone is a good way to learn boolean algebra.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The procedural generated dimensions of the 2020 April Fools update can actually have some incredibly breathtaking results, leading to some wishing for their proper implementation as a lasting feature.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Minecraft is a pretty timeless game... except for those taglines on the title screen which frequently contain references to memes that were popular during the development of a given version.
  • Until version 1.12, Java Edition had the achievements system — and a Portal reference in it ("The Lie", obtained by making cake) which allows you to date the time that system was added to the early 2010s, before everyone got sick of "The cake is a lie" references.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: A lot of first time players tend to mistake the Ender Dragon as a male (who is confirmed female as she lays an egg), considering she doesn't have any Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
• Win Back the Crowd: The 1.13 "Update Aquatic" is this, as after a lengthy period with few new features added (the 1.12 "World of Color" update was seen as particularly lackluster), 1.13 brought radical enhancements to gameplay, including longtime fan-demanded mobs like fish, dolphins, and turtles. New variants of doors and trapdoors were added as well as the ability to place item frames on floors and ceilings, and a "debug stick" that can cycle blocks through different blockstates, greatly enhancing creative freedom for builders.
• The Woobie:
  • The passive mobs. Exist only to be shot down by the player character for freebie resources, most of which can't be easily acquired any other way. Sheep got a break in beta 1.7, which lets you harmlessly shear them for wool instead, and pigs got a break in beta 1.8 when the other animals gained food drops — but chickens got it worse, as in addition to now being edible, they became the only source of feathers, which no longer drop from zombies.
  • The Villagers. They were always this once they were hunted down by Zombies, being unable to defend themselves. It got even worse once the "Village & Pillage" update rolled around, showing them to be relatively normal people living normal lives and having their own worries about the survival of their village and the job market. Now they are raided by the Illagers in broad daylight and the game makes an effort to show them emote; they now express fear through sweating as they are still mostly unable to defend themselves. While they can be real jerks sometimes, most players agree that protecting the Villagers actually makes sense now, especially since they now reward the player if they do so.

---