The series follows Runt, a 12-year-old Villager, and his quest to become a heroic warrior like his idol Steve instead of a normal defenseless farmer/crafter/miner a Villager usually is. It's all written in a first-person diary format.
In other words, actionized Diary of a Wimpy Kid IN MINECRAFT!note
The Spin-Off series, Tales of an 8-Bit Kitten, follows a kitten named Eeebs who goes into the Nether, gains supernatural powers, and must become the Champion of the Nether to defeat evil.
See also Diary of a Minecraft Zombie, another published Minecraft fanfic inspired by Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Diary of an 8-Bit Warrior series provides examples of:
- Adaptational Intelligence: While the hostile mobs in Minecraft have simple predictable behavior, the hostile mobs here are intelligent enough to come up with techniques of their own, such as Creepers exploding on Slimes to rain them over a wall, and Witches drinking Fire Resistance potions to form a bridge in lava.
- Adaptational Expansion: Villagers in the story now have two genders, with females having long hair and smaller noses. Additionally villagers have inventories, health and hunger bars and are able to wield tool and weapons. Other beings in the game seems to be able to do the same.
- Adapted Out: Since this book series started in 2015, updates to Minecraft games that were introduced since than don't appear in the story.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Runt's house for the building assignment is made out of furnaces, and it's said to be able to cook one thousand steaks at once. The teachers call it ridiculous and pointless. It takes Runt a while to find out it's impractical because you would need so much more cobblestone than you would usually find while surviving, unlike the girls' mushroom house which you only need a few ingredients to build.
- Bad Liar: In the beginning of From Seeds to Swords Runt is telling us how brave and ready he is to face the monster that spawned in the farm he build next to his room. Pictures he provided proof otherwise.
- Big Bad: Herobrine is the villain of the story. Shocking, isn't it!?
- Child Soldiers: Runt and his classmates are 12 years old making them fit this trope. Majority of players are also teenagers.
- Death Is Cheap:
- Steve is able to die and then respawn somewhere else repeatedly, being practically immortal.
- In the first book, Max is somehow able to come back alive after being burned in lava by sheer overconfidence.
- Descriptiveville: Runt's village is simply called Villagetown.
- Distant Sequel: Book 6 reveals that it is 2039 on Earth.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first book has a few of these.
- All of the mobs came from Minecraft instead of being created for the series. Except for Herobrine, but he came from a Creepypasta and was only mentioned, unlike later monsters like Urk. The only exception being Runt briefly mentioning having met a wolf person, but this plays no role in the plot.
- Steve explains how he can come Back from the Dead after being killed, but later books imply that death is permanent for humans.
- On page 93 there's a drawing of a villager family, the mother and daughter have the same big nose and baldness as the father. Early in book two it's established that girl villagers have long hair and small noses unlike male villagers.
- Overall, the tone is much more lighthearted. The village is never at risk of seige, and combat only plays a minor role in the main plot, it being much more focused on the projects Runt and Stump make. The only other book to have the school projects play a major role is the fourth one, and combat still plays a huge role in it, as well as the stakes being much higher.
- Earth That Was: Earth is said to be completely destroyed by pollution and war. Players transported to Minecraftia chose to stay logged in to the very end.
- Eldritch Location: To the denizens of Minecraftia, Earth is a strange world where people have no health and hunger bars and trees fall down while being cut.
- Fantastic Racism: Villagers in Runt's village distrust humans from Earth, since players steal their crops, plunder their chests, and treat them like vending machines.
- Fictional Age of Majority: Villagers become adults when they're 12, becoming two blocks tall and having a final year of school before choosing their profession.
- Genius Ditz: Lola, she is an amazing redstone engineer, being able to create a flying machine. Runt recruits her in book 4 because one of the upcoming tests is about redstone, a class no one on his team bothered to take. However her being a Cloudcuckoolander hinders Runt's team. she ends up helping them in the end with her unique idea to fend off the mobs.
- Kiddie Kid: Despite being an arrogant bully around Runt's age, Max likes to read baby books such as The Adventures of Cow the Cow.
- MacGuffin: The Advanced Crating Table or Aeaon Forge is this in the novel. It's a crafting table that allows the user to craft 5X5 recipes. The books hint about even greater crafting tables too.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Villagers believe that players were brought to Minecraftia by Notch. It is even confirmed with Notch's appearance. Half of players believe that the world they found themselves in is real, but there's also a faction who sees this world as a glitch in program.
- Self-Deprecation: Max finds a book called Diary of a Grass Block, as a jab to the phenomenon of Diary of a Wimpy Kid-inspired Minecraft books like this series.
- Stylistic Suck: The book series within a book, The Adventures of Cow the Cow, with poor grammar, lack of plot, sloppy artwork, and an average rating of 0.77 stars plastered with the President of Minecraftia's fake positive review.Cow the Cow: Hejjo! I am a creeper!
Creeper: Okay, but why are you wearing boots?
Cow the Cow: Because boots are cool.
Creeper: Give me those boots. Give... me... boots.
Cow the Cow: NOOOOO. - Training from Hell: Runt and his classmates are put through such a training to prepare them for mob attacks.
- Trapped in Another World: The book series reveals itself to be this kind of story. Players who appear in the story are humans transported to Minecraftia by Notch. It's an isekai from an NPC's perspective.
- Sudden Musical Ending: In Forged Destiny, Emerald sings a song during a mob siege, "Let 'Em Know", a parody of "Let It Go" from Frozen (2013).
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Players initially treat inhabitants of Villagetown as NPCs, even outright telling them that they're not real.
- Verbal Tic: Runt regularly says "Hurrr", just like other Villagers do.
Tales of an 8-Bit Kitten series provides examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: In the grand scheme of things, this is this series main trope.
- Animesque: The spin off series has a different artistic style in the pictures. With brighter colours and more visible outline it's very reminiscent of manga and anime. The artstyle change becomes
Fridge Brilliance because it would make sense for Eeebs and Runt to have different artstyles, this is even given a Lampshade Hanging when Eeebs reads Breeze's diary, noting that her artstyle is much more detailed than his. - Blinded by the Light: An army of mobs travels from Nether to Overworld to conquer it. They make a quick retreat when sunlight blinds them. Living in the literal Underworld where lava is the only source of light, will make your eyes vulnerable to daylight.
- Hero of Another Story: Eeebs fills this trope to comedic levels. His destiny is to help Runt save the world. Both heroes meet only once and it is awkward.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Eeebs is actually pretty cute for someone who looks like a cat with an Enderman's colour palette.
- Shapeshifting: Eeebs is given a potion that gives him a more humanoid figure.
