Customise Your Minecraft Experience

Minecraft is known for being not so much a game as an experience. To be able to mine, to farm, to build a house, a village, a town, a city… all within a world that can be expanded to eight times the Earth’s surface, given every block is a metre-wide cube. There is, clones not included, nothing quite like it.

But the standard, vanilla experience isn’t for everyone, and for that reason there are all sorts of ways to tweak your Minecraft experience so you’re getting what you want out of it. So what are the three ways you can mix it up?

1) Texture packs.

Being able to re-skin the entire game is incredibly easy – download the texture pack, drop it into the texture packs folder (not while the game is running – this is important), boot the game up, and boom! New look. It might take a while to adjust (spotting ore, etc), but to give the game a new look can really change things for you – especially if you feel the game doesn’t look quite right for what you want to build, whether you’re constructing a castle or a skyscraper-size version of the PartyPoker logo.

2) Mods.

Mods will change the way the game plays, what’s in it, and what abilities you have, but they’re not supported by Mojang themselves, so you’re on your own if things go wrong. But their capabilities are astonishing – automated quarries, more animals, floating islands, new items, airplanes, guns, windmills, lifts – the possibilities are many, and one of them in particular (Millenaire) makes Mojang’s attempt at NPC-filled villages look absolutely terrible.

3) Custom maps.

Custom maps are world saves that have had anything from recreations of Star Wars locations and ships to adventure maps full of puzzles and monsters to defeat, which can be a ton of fun if you’re not really enjoying the sandbox feel of normal Minecraft exploration, combat, building and resource collection.

Of course, Minecraft is what you make it, so the most important thing is to have fun playing it, however you choose to play it. See you in Minecraftia!