Minecraft Creative Mode Tutorial

Minecraft is a very popular game but many parents teachers and librarians don’t really know fully what it’s about or how to play the champaign-urbana community Fablab actually runs a number of workshops with building with minecraft so it can be a very positive activity with kids this is a very basic

Video that goes over some of the basics of Minecraft and how you can use it to teach building and learning and collaboration amongst kids you can purchase minecraft for about $27 and it requires Java which is free there are three basic forms of the game there’s survival mode where you’re stuck

Trying to find food and avoiding zombies at night and it’s a little bit more violent and dangerous there’s adventure mode where there are stories and characters participate in levels and adventures that are created by programmers and then there’s creative mode creative mode is what we use at the

Fablab it’s where you just build things this video shows you how to play creative mode so you can start by going to single-player and then you can create a new world and we’re going to name our new world remember to name it something that you’ll recognise and go ahead and

Switch it from survival to creative mode by clicking on the button in the middle it create new world and it will take a second to create the world depending on how fast your computer is this may go faster or slower now in creative mode you could get the standard same world

Here where it creates lots of blocks and essentially the basic idea of what minecraft is is that it’s a game like Legos so you have lots of blocks and you can place these blocks and build things out of them so I’m just showing this very quickly to explain what that looks

Like now in order to control Minecraft you have to be familiar with what is called WASD and this refers to the keys on the keyboard you’ll notice that the keys are in sort of a triangle formation and this combination of keys is used to control many kinds of first and third

Person games as well as many kinds of video 3d rendering interfaces and other kinds of interfaces on the computer if you’re new to WASD see if you can find a game or tutorial online we should have some links where this video is found or you can learn about more how to control

It if you’re familiar with W SD that’s great you’re ready to go and play Minecraft so minecraft is basically the same as most games with WASD but there’s one key difference so you use W and ast to move around and the mouse to look but you can also double tap on

Spacebar and that will help you begin flying and the more you hold down spacebar the higher you will fly you can begin falling by holding down shift that lowers you slowly to ground alternatively you can turn off flying by double tapping spacebar again and then you cool quickly fall your double

Tapping has to be fairly quick it’s a lot like double-clicking a mouse now there are lots of blocks in Minecraft and you can go ahead and destroy those box by left-clicking and place them by right-clicking that’s the basic interaction model now minecraft is about more than just moving around and looking

Around the world you can actually equip blocks to build things so if you press the e key you will notice a whole giant pallet of blocks and yours will look something like this where there’s many different kinds of colors and if you want to work with a given type of block

You just click on that block so I’m going to pick the orange wool here and I move that down to what we call my inventory which is this set of slots down at the bottom and if I put that wool down there it will start to be

Recognized as a block I can build with so I’m gonna put some of these blocks down here and you’ll notice I just click and click again and that’s how I transfer from this selection of possible blocks to putting down my inventory if I want to look for a very specific block I

Can go to this compass here and I can type in the name of the block so let’s say if I’m looking for some bricks there are lots of different kinds of bricks I could put those in there there are also more fantastic blocks or unusual blocks some of these are also items and

You won’t be able to build with some of these necessarily so for instance if you equip a shovel here that’s a lie or that’s an item that’s used to affect the environment in the survival version of the game it doesn’t really do anything special in creative mode now I can build

By just placing these blocks down if I want to switch between blocks I can scroll on my mouse bar or my scroll button on my mouse to select different blocks alternatively I can press the numbers on the number pad up here so if I press 3 it will go

To brown because that’s the third block and a sequence there so I can switch between these different blocks if I want to select a block that I’m looking at so let’s say I like this grass and I want to make more of it if I literally press down you physically push the scroll

Button on the mouse don’t scroll it push it down you will select that block once again you’re not scrolling like you would in a web page you actually look at the block and press down physically with button to select the block that you’re looking at you know that you’re looking

At a block because it will highlight with these black outside lines and these are how you use these are what guide you in building so if I look at the ground here I can see that black highlighted line there and if I right click on the ground it will lay down the block

Likewise if I look at the side of these blocks you’ll see how the side highlights with the black line I can right-click on it and we’ll build off the side now minecraft doesn’t have physics in the way that normal world does if I destroy the blocks underneath

This it will actually stay floating in the air as you can see it’s just sort of floating there as pink wall and the most infamous version of this is if you destroy the bottom of a tree the tree continues floating and many servers with little kids you’ll see this just left

All over the places lots of floating trees because they don’t feel the need to cut down the entire tree worth looking at right now is the stairs so if you type stairs you can pick a set of stairs and we’re gonna use these as an example of how when you lay things down

At different positions they’ll look different so if I look at this grass block in front of me and I go to the very top edge of it and I right-click to put down my stairs it will actually invert the stairs or is if I look at the

Very bottom of the block and right click it will put the stairs the other way and then these vlogs will start connecting to each other if you have them next to each other so the behaviors will change depending on what their conditions are see how those two connect and if I put

It on the edge here you get this nice clean edge with the blocks and there are similar objects like fences where if I lay down one of these fences in the middle of nowhere it’s just a fence post but if I start putting them next to each other they start attaching to one

Another now you have a fairly large distance that you can modify things so if I walk out this far you can see I can highlight that block from like you know four or five blocks away and I can actually destroy it all the way from over here

Likewise I could place a block from about that far away so you can modify your buildings and your shapes fairly easily from different distances there are a few types of blocks that have behaviors that are a little bit more odd than these and one example is if we go

In here and look up water so if I type in water I’ll get all the different blocks and items that have to do with water and if I equip this water bucket here and I’m gonna do something to help with this first so I click the water

Bucket and I pour the water down into one little hole it will just stay there as water but if I destroy this pink block there the water will actually start flowing and it will try to flow to the lowest point in the ground and you’ll notice it actually flows all the

Way off into the ocean here but that water has the source block that I initially laid down so if I actually overwrite that source block I get rid of all the source of the water this is a common way people will add water and other kinds of things into their builds

You can also do things like grow trees so if I pick one of these saplings I’ll pick an acacia sapling here and I equip that and I have to get some bone meal which is something that you capture from skeletons and the basic game if I lay

That down and I right-click on the acacia wood and actually will build into a tree now you notice it took me a few times of feeding at bone mill to actually feed it into this tree and here’s another example of this minecraft physics this tree doesn’t really connect

Here that’s just kind of how minecraft works is and sometimes they have these things that look like they’re not fully connected so you know if you wanted to fix that you could actually put your own block there and now it looks a little more connected if you actually destroy

The wood in the tree what will happen is the leaves will start to decay and then eventually you can see actually a sapling just fell down from the tree there and will come apart and sort of just dissolve there are a few ways to do lighting you can lay down torches put

Some torches in here I’m gonna go ahead and set my time to nighttime there we go so if it’s nighttime we want to light up an area you can put down a torch and that will light up the area alternatively there are some other kinds of blacks there’s glowstone and

Glowstone I have a texture pack on so my glowstone looks like pretty glass but the basic minecraft it’ll look a little bit like the sludge in the bottom of a bathtub drain so you know you can pick these things depending on how you stylize your game and go ahead and look

Up texture packs later if you want to learn how to stylize your game differently and one other kind of block is a redstone lamp so if I equip a redstone lamp here I can go ahead and lay that down and in order for that lamp

To turn on I have to feed it some power and I can do that with a redstone block here if there’s a redstone block next to it it will actually light up that lamp and if I destroy it it will stop being lit up and there are some different ways

We can give it power for instance if I do a button next to it and this is this is something a larger topic called redstone in general let’s see here we’re gonna put some pink wool down next to it and I’m going to destroy that red and so

We have just our lamp with some pink wool next to it but if I put a button on that pink wool if you right click on that button it’ll light up the lamp for the time that the button is pressed in there are all kinds of little

Interactive things you can add to builds like this in Minecraft okay so that concludes the basic tutorial now obviously it looks very simple when you’re building like this you know if I wanted to build a house it would be you know let’s do some wood planks so you

Know I can add some oak here I’m gonna build the world’s worst minecraft house here we go I can sort of attach some of the front here and we’ll do a different kind of we’ll do a red roof and that door that I picked up before I just look

At the ground and click on it and it’ll make a door and if I right-click on that door will open now my house has got some big holes in the side and I could actually add some glass if I wanted to and this is another example of how

Blocks interact one or another if I put glass there put glass there it’s initially just very edges of the glass but if I puts them in between it the glass actually connects for the whole surface so there we go I’ve actually made my house now it’s not a very good house and you

Can probably do better than this and if you want to see some really great examples you can log on online I’ll just quickly show you what you know you have some people actually go from those really basic one block by one black kinds of buildings and I practice and

They practice and they practice and eventually they get to much more impressive kinds of builds and I’m trying to find a good example of one let’s see here we’ll try the Dwarven city so here we go we have an underground city that was made by people that spend a lot of time

In Minecraft you can see they’ve added all this lava and all these different sort of shapes of blocks and people do really quite impressive design setups you’ll notice how large it is that’s one of the big tips to when you’re learning how to do creative mode is that if you

Build bigger it will generally look better if you do these small little creations that are basically just squares they won’t look very impressive but if you start using larger scale builds and put a little more depth into your builds you’ll see much cooler effects and again there are more videos

On this I would just start out by sort of building basic things okay thanks for watching