Minecraft wiki entry for Beginner%27s_guide, associated text: Minecraft is a sandbox game, in which your character wanders around in a world, collecting resources and using items. To get an advantage, you need to master the control system. If you are having trouble with it, you may want to start with a Peaceful Mode world to practice and. if necessary, change the keyboard bindings. Your world is made of blocks, mostly cubical. These blocks represent objects in the game, but their size also makes a standard measure of distance. This and many other pages talk in terms of, e.g., "five blocks away" (officially, each block is a one-meter cube). Your character can stand within a single block's space, and it stands a little less than two blocks tall. Time passes within this world; a game day passes in 20 real-world minutes. Nighttime is much more dangerous than daytime; the game starts at dawn, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. The primary purpose of this guide is to let you "find your feet" and get basic equipment and shelter before night.