Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Formally released on 18 November 2011 for personal computers following its initial public alpha release on 17 May 2009, it has been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles.

In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated, three-dimensional world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels. Players can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures, earthworks, and machines. Depending on the game mode, players can fight hostile mobs, as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities.

Originally created in 2009 by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's continuing development following its full release in 2011. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the cross-platform version based on the mobile Pocket Edition which replaced the existing console versions in 2017. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences.

Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 350 million copies sold (as of 2025) and 140 million monthly active players (as of 2021). It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time; social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing the game. It also has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as they grew up playing the game online at a young age. The game's speedrunning scene has attracted a significant following. Minecraft has been used in educational environments to teach chemistry, computer-aided design, and computer science. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A live action film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025, and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time.

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game also features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a 3D grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. Comparatively, the game's physics system has been described as unrealistic, with nearly all blocks unaffected by gravity.

Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or axes), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with a villager (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes.

New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively.

The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not.