Minecraft / Tropes G to L

Minecraft tropes: A to F || G to L || M to R || S to Z

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G

• Gag Nose: The NPC villagers are known for their Squidward-like hanging noses, enough so that many players simply refer to them as "Squidward." Illagers and zombie villagers have similar appearances. The witches are even sillier, complete with a wobbly nose and a migrating wart.
• Gainax Ending: After killing the Ender Dragon, you're treated to a wall of scrolling text depicting a discussion between two Sentient Cosmic Forces discussing you, the player of the game. The discussion in question implies that the entire game was All Just a Dream, life as we know it is merely an even bigger dream, the many mobs we fought in the game were the darkness in our hearts, and humanity's entire existence is a quest to understand itself.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Even though the game has (officially) gone gold, Mojang still outsources the majority of update beta testing to the player base, just because there's so damn many of them. Nearly every release contains something that just doesn't work, though it's generally fixed very quickly.
  • Several of these can do anything from deleting your best items on death instead of dropping them, forcing you to start getting resources again from scratch, to getting you stuck on the (inescapable) bedrock roof of the Nether or dropping you out the bottom of the world. Luckily, if you are stuck, you can set the game on Hard difficulty and let the hunger meter drain to empty and let the hunger kill you off.
  • It also has a bug where it will occasionally zero the level file (and the backup!) if the computer crashes, wiping your entire inventory and causing the game to not recognize the save unless you copy a level file over from another save (which causes other weirdnesses such as snow in the desert, due to the biomes being dependent on the world seed, which is stored in the said level file).
  • The 14w26a snapshot is a possible candidate for the most bugged snapshot ever released by Mojang. Besides lots of minor bugs, the snapshot is infamous for permanently (unless using external programs) corrupting any world that was loaded into that snapshot, as well as having a big problem with chunk rendering. The biggest bug, however, happens upon entering the Nether: this snapshot is also known as the "double Nether snapshot". A glitch on Nether terrain generation will split the whole Nether into eight blocks wide strips, which alternate between normal Nether strips and strips full of air that go all the way down to bedrock (fortresses, the only Nether structures at the time, can intersect these airstrips, however, since structures use a different, non-glitched system). On top of that, crossing the bedrock layer on top of this Nether will bring you to a second Nether, just as bugged as the first one.
  • Wii U Edition tends to completely ignore button input on the world selection screen. It usually occurs after connecting to Nintendo Network.
• Game Mod: If you can dream it, there's probably a mod for it, ranging from simple texture changes to full-scale gameplay overhauls, and almost no mods exist without having some compatibility with other mods. Several mods have their own pages, which can be found at the Fan Works page. Several organizations have even sprung up to facilitate the distribution of coordinated packages of dozens of mods. Curiously enough, though, Minecraft does not actually have a modding API; the API most mods use is itself a mod.
• Gameplay Automation:
  • The game doesn't have any built-in automation, but it's easy for the player to build their own automatic or one-button devices to collect certain resources.
    • One of the classic examples of this is "mob grinders" that spawn monsters, kill them, and collect the loot all by themselves. Grinders that spawn monsters from the darkness have been around since the implementation of mobs, and the spawner block helps facilitate their use (at the cost of being immoveable).
    • The hopper block, introduced in 1.5, revolutionized automation in making it possible to have item transport between containers and item collection, both automatically. Thanks to them, automatic sorting systems, AFK fishing farms, powerful super-smelters, item collection for the aforementioned mob grinders, and so much more have been made possible.
    • Starting with 1.8, farmer villagers were changed so that they could harvest crops and give the resources to other villagers. Enter true automation for crop harvesting, which was only partially possible before but required the player to go in and replace the crops manually after.
  • Automation is a frequent feature of many mods; Buildcraft, for example, provides machines to mine resources and pipes to transport those resources to your storage.
• Gang Up on the Human:
  • Most mobs will not attack other mobs unless a ranged mob accidentally hits another while trying to attack the player. Even when this does happen, it does not affect if the player has ever previously attacked the mob.
  • Can be exploited — zombies can go after villagers, but if a player is nearby, they will turn away from the villagers they were after.
  • On multiplayer servers, mobs still prioritize players over other mobs, but once they begin following a player they will not switch targets as long as that player is within range. This can lead to large groups of mobs following one player and completely ignoring others.
• Gelatinous Trampoline: The game uses slime blocks this way.
• Gemstone Assault: Diamond swords are top-tier weapons. Other diamond tools (axes, picks, etc.) can also be used as weapons, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
• Gender-Inclusive Writing: Since the person playing Minecraft can be either gender, the poem that is revealed after defeating the Ender Dragon avoids using gender-specific pronouns of any sort when referencing them.
  • Additionally, every creature in the Minecraft universe is confirmed to be naturally genderless, with the only exceptions being the female Ender Dragon and the Player (whose gender is the player's gender).
• Genius Loci: Activating a beacon or a conduit makes it emit a sound very similar to that of a heartbeat, giving any land or structure it’s a part of a sense that it’s actually alive.
• Genre-Busting: It's like Legos, but with 3D voxel first-person graphics, ambient classical music, and vaguely survival-horror elements.
• Gentle Giant: The iron golems. They are neutral by nature and will go apeshit if anyone attacks them or a villager, but can be occasionally seen giving villager children a red poppy.
• Geo Effects:
  • The game has various weather effects and day cycles. When it rains, the sky grows dark enough for undead monsters to survive in the day and the rain also extinguishes wildfires, lets conduits grant buffs on land, and makes the trident significantly more powerful outside the water. Thunderstorms do the same thing but make the sky darker, allowing hostile mobs to spawn in the day, and the lightning bolts can strike mobs for damage (including you), set flammable blocks on fire, and transform mobs: pigs into zombified piglins, red mooshrooms into brown and vice-versa, villagers into witches, and make a creeper supercharged for more explosive damage to everything. When it is daylight outside, monsters can't spawn and zombies, skeletons, and phantoms catch on fire from the sunlight. When night falls, all the baddies come out to play, making exploration in the fields more dangerous.
  • Similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, the landscape can be a hindrance or an advantage to the player. With enough height, you can strike mobs below you while they cannot reach you. If there's a huge drop-off nearby, you can attack a mob and push them off a cliff for major damage or outright kill them.
  • Endermen simply hate the water. If they are outside when it is raining, they will run all over the place trying to seek shelter. Rainstorms are good if you want the endermen to stay away.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: The Ender Dragon flies away from you as soon as you LOOK at it. Good luck trying to shoot it with arrows…
• Ghibli Hills: The vast majority of the Overworld is absolutely pristine wilderness (at least until you start developing on it), and the player is encouraged to explore it as much as possible. The terrain generation algorithm can often produce some quite picturesque scenes.
• Ghostly Gape: The iconic creepers are not any sort of ghostly being (probably), but they are decidedly unnatural and otherworldly — they spawn alongside zombies and undead skeletons, after all — and unlike anything, players had ever seen before. They walk around with what appear to be empty eye sockets and a gaping mouth that sags at the corners.
• Ghost Town: Very rarely, a village may spawn as a "zombie village"; where all the buildings have fallen into a state of disrepair and have no people living in them. If you arrive at night, you might get the chance of encountering (and if you have the right resources, curing) a few zombie villagers, but it's more often than not a completely dead and barren place due to all the inhabitants burning in daylight.
• Giant Mook: Giants are zombies that happen to be 12 blocks tall, have 50 hearts of health, and can one-shot unarmored players on Easy difficulty ^note 13 hearts of damage to be exact. On Hard it's a staggering 37.5 hearts, enough to one-shot someone in full iron armor. Thankfully, they were removed from most modes, but remain in the game's code (they can be spawned with the /summon command), so it's possible that they could be re-implemented.
• Giant Spider:
  • One of the mobs. It's about half as tall as you, but they're the fastest mobs in the game, can often be found in groups, and can climb walls.
  • Cave spiders are less than half the size of the other spiders, but at twenty inches tall, they're still giant by real-life standards. Smaller is not necessarily better though, since their hitboxes are smaller (and they poison you on hit, so missing is painful).
• Global Currency:
  • Emeralds are accepted at all villages, which is odd considering how emeralds are only found in extreme hills biomes, where villages do not generate. Where did they get them in such large quantities?
  • In the Nether, gold is the global currency for bartering with piglins. Just try not to do the same with baby piglins or piglin brutes.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Spiders have glowing eyes in the dark, as do endermen and drowned.
• Glowing Flora:
  • The Shroomlights are bioluminescent fungi found in the Nether which grow in the canopy of the tree-like crimson and warped huge fungi and produce the same light level as glowstone (the highest possible light level).
  • Cave vines and glow lichen are both light-emitting foliage found in Overworld caves. Cave vines are much brighter than lichen, although only the edible berries actually glow.
  • To a much lesser extent, regular brown mushrooms also glow very slightly, but their light level is so low it's barely noticeable.
• Glowing Gem: Amethyst crystals emit light. Although their output isn't especially high compared to other light-emitting items, full-sized ones are still noticeably brighter than single candles.
• God Mode: The creative mode is sometimes referred to as "God Mode". You can fly and have access to the complete inventory including things you can't get in survival, like eggs that spawn mobs. The only way you can die is by falling into the void, and even then, you can survive if you enable flying quickly enough.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: Zig-Zagged. Gold gear is generally seen as useless due to having low durability even though gold is a fairly rare resource in the overworld, and its attack damage being about as good as wooden gear. However, gold tools break blocks faster than any other material and generally get better enchantments. Gold is also a common Nether ore, and piglins won't attack players who are wearing at least one piece of gold armor.
• Gold Is Yellow: All golden items, included but not limited to golden armor, golden tools, golden apples and carrots, gold ingots, and gold blocks, are colored a bright yellow.
• Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Subverted: Sure, you can make a sword out of that gold you just mined. It'll be roughly as effective as one made of wood and break about as quickly. Logical, given that in its pure form, it's one of the softer metals. On the other hand, using iron...
  • Of course, a gold pickaxe can bore through stone at an incredible rate, but only stone. And it still breaks easily. Gold armor looks pretty and shiny, but the protection they give is not much better than leather armor and it breaks just as fast. However, gold armor is still better than having no armor at all. Gold armor and gold swords have their weaknesses compensated by having a much higher chance of getting strong enhancements compared to other tools made out of other materials, making gold-based items a Glass Cannon (until you can reliably get the good enchantments on diamond or netherite, at any rate).
  • Gold-plated food. Golden apples are one of the most coveted items in the game, being used to make horses breed, cure zombie villagers, or give the player not only several drumsticks' worth of hunger satisfaction but also regeneration for a short time. A twice-plated ("enchanted") golden apple also grants fire resistance, damage resistance, and a limited feather-fall effect. Golden carrots are also used to breed horses, or give the player regeneration, and are used in potions of night vision. Glistering melons are pretty much only used in potion-brewing, and aren't edible.
  • The game's highest-tier resource, netherite, is an alloy made of ancient debris and gold.
• Golem: The game has iron golems and snow golems that the player can build. A snow golem looks like a snowman with a jack-o-lantern on top, and it distracts enemies by throwing snowballs at them. Iron golems can be found in large NPC villages, where they defend villagers from zombies at night.
• Grandfather Clause:
  • When it was announced that version 1.8 would drastically overhaul the villager trading system, it was also mentioned that any pre-existing villagers with more than one trading offer unlocked would retain all of their offers. The same applied to 1.14's subsequent overhaul.
  • As of 1.11.1, no new bows can be enchanted with both Mending and Infinity (a rule made to prevent easy, endless flight). However, old bows enchanted before the update will still work. This also applied when a subsequently-patched bug in 1.14 allowed for all 4 Protection-type enchantments to be placed on the same armour piece.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The fishing pole isn't meant for this purpose, but it has the ability to stick to mobs and when you yank the reel back, the mob is dragged to you, making it extremely handy to drag flying mobs like Ghasts and Blazes to you so you can whack them with your sword, or hook the line to a mob across a cliff and yank the line to make them fall in the abyss or even a lava pit. This can also be used to pull items towards the player.
• G-Rated Sex: Breeding in Minecraft differs a lot from breeding in real life. They just rub faces, and then a baby (or, rarely, an egg) comes into existence.
• Grave Robbing:
  • The game lets you rob treasure from pyramids in the desert. Pyramids spawn in desert biomes; they have treasure inside them. Each pyramid can contain things like gold, iron, diamonds, bones, and rotten flesh, but they're also guarded by TNT traps that trigger if you step on the pressure plate. Doing so will destroy all the treasure and kill you.
  • Ditto jungle temples, taking a page from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jungle temples have arrow traps that are triggered the moment you walk through the linked tripwires or destroying the wire itself. The only safe way to disarm the trap is to use shears to cut the wire. Luckily, you can just stand on one side of the hall to avoid the arrows and just loot the dispensers of their arrows. Jungle temples also have chests that contain similar treasure from the pyramids.
  • Looting sunken ruins, on the other hand, requires fighting the zombified remnants of the former inhabitants.
• Gravity Barrier: Subverted: sheer face cliffs exist that are impossible to traverse...that is, until you mine some steps in them, or use a water bucket to make an impromptu elevator out of a waterfall.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Sand and gravel sometimes forget to have fallen down in freshly-generated terrain. Until you disturb the underside.
• Green Hill Zone: In the early days of the game's development, the player used to spawn in a bright green world. Later on, the player could appear in any biome. The ones that still are green and colorful are plains and forest biomes. There are different kinds of forests, though: dark oak, birch, flowery, jungles, taigas, and standard oak — some of which have different environmental colors and elements.
• Green Rocks: Redstone, a red dust that's commonly found deep underground. It can be used to make a compass, as well as a clock. Mix some into a potion and it lasts longer. Not to mention the fact that it can be used to make a wide variety of logic gates and digital circuits.
• Green Thumb: Step 1, get a skeleton bone. Step 2, create bone meal. Step 3, watch as bone meal turns a 2x2 square of jungle tree saplings into a thirty-block high tree instantly.
• Grid Inventory: Actually an important part of gameplay, since the crafting system uses a 2x2 grid (self) or 3x3 grid (crafting table).
• Griefer: Creepers are basically in-universe griefers. Their only purpose in life is to kill you or at least destroy the structures you put a lot of effort into building.
• Group-Identifying Feature:
  • You can tell a villager's job by its clothes: farmers wear straw hats, fishermen wear fisher hats, shepherds wear brown hats and white aprons, fletchers wear hats with feathers, clerics wear purple aprons, weaponsmiths wear eye patches and black aprons, armourers wear welding masks, toolsmiths wear black aprons, librarians wear glasses and a book-shaped hat, cartographers wear golden monocles, leatherworkers wear brown aprons and gloves, butchers wear red headbands and white aprons, masons wear black aprons and gloves, and nitwits wear green coats.
  • You can also tell a villager's home by their clothes under their professsion's apparel. Desert villagers have sandy colored cloaks, jungle wear ocelot pelts, savannah wear red robes and laurel wreath crowns, snow villagers don fur-lined parkas and earmuffed hats, swamp villagers weave clothes from plants, taiga villagers wear fuzzy coats, and plains villagers are stuck with the original, plain brown robes.
  • Pandas have several different personality types that you can spot by their facial expressions. Weak pandas have runny eyes and noses, playful pandas have their tongues poking out, aggressive pandas have angry eyes, lazy pandas have slight smiles, and worried pandas have wide eyes.
• Guest Fighter:
  • Steve (referred to as "Mr. Minecraft") was a playable character in the PC version of Super Meat Boy.
  • Steve also appears as a playable DLC fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate added in 2020, with Alex, a zombie, and an Enderman also playable as alternate costumes.
• Guide Dang It!: For a long time, Minecraft in general. The game deliberately contained no instructions. You weren't told how to make tools or other crafted items, nor were you told using a bed changes your spawn point after you die. Without an external guide, you were left to stumble around, randomly trying combinations of things in the hope that some of them produce a useful item. Fortunately, the Minecraft wiki covers everything you could think of and then some. The mobile and console versions dispense with the crafting grid and simply show you everything you can make, the Xbox 360 version eases this slightly by showing you what items are needed to craft other items and what their functions are; they still don't tell you what you are supposed to do, though. Some mods add in-game recipe books and similar guides. Today you can even buy a literal Minecraft manual from book/gamestores.
  • Downplayed as of version 1.12. New games give you explicit instructions on movement and come with a recipe book that can be clicked on to serve as a crafting guide. However, things like farming, smelting, enchanting, etc. aren't explained unless it's directly involved in crafting, and some recipes aren't explained even if they are crafting-related.^note Repairing items via crafting, dyeing armor, and copying written books/maps are a few examples. Fortunately, the developers are currently working on moving all complicated crafting recipes to specific blocks, making the system much simpler for everyone.
  • Ender chests are a minor case—unlike normal chests, and almost all other craftable blocks, you can only collect one using a silk-touch-enchanted pickaxe. Breaking it with a normal pick just gives you a bunch of obsidian, making it seem like you have to re-craft it with a new ender eye each time. Knowing this trick makes a huge difference in its usability; the whole point of an ender chest is that its inventory is retained even if you destroy it (or access it through a different ender chest), so being able to simply grab one and take it with you makes it vastly more convenient. Silk touch is hard to acquire and doesn't work on every block type (even with a specialized magical tool, you can't pick up a cake, for some reason), so you wouldn't necessarily try this without knowing it's necessary.
  • The game has several statistics and factors in play which it never even hints at in gameplay or any tutorials, for example, that each food item not only fills your hunger meter (represented by hams) but also fills an invisible bar known as saturation by a differing amount depending on the food item (which is why eating something like a steak keeps your hunger at bay for longer than if you ate two carrots, even though both fill the same amount of your hunger bar). Another example is "regional difficulty", where the game takes into account how long you've spent in the current area when spawning enemy mobs and the current phase of the moon when spawning enemy mobs; the longer you spend in a region and the fuller the moon is, the higher the chance that stronger mobs will spawn (with the maximum chance being when you, or a group of people, spend at least fifty combined hours in an area on Hard mode while the moon is full).
  • The food item suspicious stew, which inflicts a status condition (positive or negative) when eaten, can be found in shipwreck chests, as well as being available from high-level farmer villages via trading. However, there are also two other methods to obtain it that you are never told about, which also let you control the effect the stew has. To craft a suspicious stew, you use the crafting recipe for mushroom stew with a flower added, with the type of flower corresponding to the effect the stew gives (allium gives fire resistance, lily of the valley gives poison, etc.). You can also feed a flower to a brown mooshroom and then "milk" it with a bowl to obtain the flower's respective stew. The recipe for suspicious stew does not appear in the recipe book, so you would never know this without looking at a wiki.
  • There are some incredibly obscure mechanics that will leave veteran players scratching their head upon being informed of their existence:
    • The zombie villager curing process is already quite obscure,^note the only in-game hint of its existence is a rare random structure spawning under igloos in snowy biomes, which Player Nudges players by presenting a zombie villager, a cured villager, a sign that points between the two of them, a golden apple and a potion of Weakness and even moreso is the means by which players can accelerate this. When curing zombie villagers, having iron bars and/or beds nearby will accelerate the rate at which they revive. Creating a miniature prison cell for zombie villagers is likely a thought that will never occur to players since it's not a frequent action to occur, it's quite a bit of hassle to construct just to do so, and the acceleration given is quite small and hard to notice even at the maximum value.
    • Imitating real-world crop diversity practices, crops in Minecraft grow faster if they're placed in rows and each row is a different crop type. Since players obtain seed types one at a time, it likely would never occur to anyone to intersperse the different crops like this, and even when they do it's usually easier to keep the fields monoculture.

H

• Hailfire Peaks:
  • The random biome generation will do this occasionally (although it tries not to), leading to deserts beside tundras, or frozen oceans in the middle of regular ones. Mods occasionally generate volcanoes in frozen wastelands.
  • Packed and blue ice never melt for any reason, not even in the Nether, so with enough ice you can create your own literal Hailfire Peaks. You can even pour lava directly onto the ice just fine!
• Hair-Raising Hare: A rabbit variant is a hostile version formerly called "The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog," but now just the "Killer Rabbit." Fortunately, it no longer spawns naturally.
• Hammerspace:
  • The grid inventory allows the player to carry (and swim with!) up to 2368 cubic meters of material. Even more impressive if you consider the fact that chests can store just as much as the inventory. You can tear down a mountain and carry half of it with you, then stash the other half in a chest that takes up less than a cubic meter of space.
  • Exaggerated with the ender chest. Ender chests even work across dimensions, making it possible to transport items from one realm to another and destroying the chests won't destroy the items! Any item that is placed in one of these chests can appear in another ender chest no matter how far away the chests are or they're in completely different dimensions! On top of this, even if every ender chest placed in the world is destroyed, the items will still be in the hammerspace of the chest once you make a new ender chest. And if you carry an ender chest in your inventory...
  • The Exploration Update added shulker boxes, which are like regular chests, except that when you break them, the items remain stored within. You can also place shulker boxes into ender chests to reduce all those boxes into a single inventory space, though you can not place a shulker box within another shulker box.
• Harder Than Hard: Hardcore Mode, which is the same as Hard Mode, but when you die, you're spawn in Spectator Mode. Parodied with 3D Shareware v1.34, the 2019 April Fools' joke update, where players constantly lose health if their world is set to "Obligatory Nightmare Mode".
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • Harder difficulties increase the frequency of monster spawns. This also means increased frequency of Random Drops, allowing you to gather materials such as gunpowder from creepers, bonemeal from skeletons and ender pearls from endermen faster than otherwise.
  • On easy mode, villagers don't come back at all on death. Villagers have a 100% chance of turning into a zombie when killed by one in hard mode, which can make zombie sieges spiral out of control, but also give a lifeline to save the village if every villager dies thanks to zombie curing. This is especially useful since cured villagers give very good trade deals.
  • The number of waves in raids depends on difficulty, 3 waves in easy, 5 waves in normal and 7 waves in hard. Evokers only come after wave 4, meaning Totems of Undying are only renewable on harder difficulties.
• "Harmful to Pets" Reminder: The same update that added parrots, which could be tamed with cookies at the time, added splash text saying "Don't feed chocolate to parrots" due to chocolate being poisonous to them and the cookies being chocolate chip. Later, in 1.12-pre3, they just changed it so that parrots were tamed with seeds instead, and feeding a parrot a cookie will instantly kill it, complete with poison particles.
• Haunted House: The woodland mansions have this sort of vibe going on with it, considering all the strange rooms, the ghostly vexes also appearing, as well as the evokers and vindicators stalking the halls.
• Haunted Technology: Although most of the music discs are alright, there are three of them that are somewhat... unnerving when played: The "13" disc plays haunting sounds when played. The "11" disc, meanwhile, looks damaged to the point of being unplayable, yet works fine anyway, and plays back the sounds of a person fiddling with a flint and steel, coughing, flicking through a book and then the sounds of him running almost as if he's being chased by... something, before it abruptly cuts out. Similarly, the "5" disc needs to be reassembled by the player, and also plays the sounds of someone being chased by a warden.
• Have a Gay Old Time: Inverted. On the console versions, the text entered onto signs is run through a profanity filter and if anything is detected, the whole sign is censored. For some strange reason the words "hoe", "shaft", and "monster", while having dirty modern connotations, will still censor out the message even though these are common innocuous things in the game.
• Have a Nice Death: Dying produces an announcement on how you died. Some of these can get pretty sassy, such as, "[Player] discovered the floor was lava" or "[Player] walked into a cactus".
• Healing Boss: The Ender Dragon's arena contains many obsidian towers with End crystals on top, which heal the Dragon when it gets close. This healing has no cooldown, which means the crystals must be destroyed to kill the Dragon (it is possible to kill it without destroying the crystals, but it makes the fight harder).
• Healing Potion: These can be made with some water, netherwart, gold and watermelon. Another variety made with ghast tears will steadily regenerate your health.
• Healing Shiv: Arrows can be tipped in potion effects. Instant Health and Regeneration aren't excluded from this, and Weakness arrows can be used almost as easily as Weakness potions to cure zombie villagers.
• Heart Container:
  • The Absorption effect, which increases your maximum health by 2 hearts per tier level. The effect is only temporary; once the effect wears off, all the extra hearts vanish. They also won't come back if you get hurt too much.
  • Health Boost, on the other hand, features regenerating extra hearts. They still disappear when the effect runs out, though. Unfortunately there is no way to obtain this effect in Survival.
• Hearts Are Health: Used for the Life Meter, as well as some Status Effect symbols related to health.
• Heart Symbol: These can be seen after taming a wolf, cat, or horse, or when mobs breed.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Sometimes hostile mobs spawn in partial or full sets of armor that can vary in material^note from most to least likely: gold, leather, chain, iron, and diamond, the latter having a ridiculously small probability of happening (but still possible), and they can sometimes pick up and wear YOUR armor if you drop it for whatever reason. If they already had armor, chances are good that it'll be enchanted with a spell or two. Getting it from them, however, is quite a Rare Drop without a Looting weapon.
• Hell: The Nether. In fact, the Nether was originally called Hell, and "Hell" remained the Nether's only biome for many years.
• Hellfire: Soul fire, a turquoise flame that burns only on soul soil, doesn’t combust the blocks around it, drives away Piglins, and is also twice as damaging should anything wander too close and get burnt. It can also be used via implementing soul soil into certain crafting recipes to craft special lanterns, torches, and campfires which, despite being slightly dimmer, share the Piglin-repelling properties.
• Hell Gate: With a minimum 4 x 5 obsidian frame^*The corners don't matter since "ten blocks is the magical total". (and a maximum 23 x 23) and a fire to activate it, you can build a portal to the Nether.
• Hell Is That Noise: The nineteen "cave sounds" that play whenever one enters a dark area can creep many first-time players out.
• A Hell of a Time: While the Nether is still an unfathomably weird, creepy and hostile place, the scenery can sometimes be really breathtaking, especially if the Procedural Generation strikes gold, and the exclusive resources mean that there’s always something to show for your travels. And for the more bloody minded, there’s always an enemy to fight.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Any mob can be given a custom name using an anvil and a nametag, a creative-only spawn egg, or console commands.
• Heroic Mime: None of the main characters ever speak. Might have something to do with no one else being there to talk to.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Villagers are always named whatever their occupation is, unless the player renames them.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Before sprinting and knockback-enhancing enchantments were added, the standard way to kill a creeper with melee weapons was "hit it, then step back out of it explosion-triggering range for a few seconds, then repeat". After their introduction, it became possible to run at them, knock them out of range, then do it again without much fleeing.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • The Ghast's hitbox is much smaller than it seems. In earlier versions, a bug caused the tentacles to be the location of the hitbox and not the actual body.
  • Chickens' hitboxes are strangely shaped for swords, but it works just fine for arrows.
  • Cows, pigs, and sheep all have hitboxes with the proper width but aren't long enough, meaning they can fall into holes they shouldn't be able to. Conversely, horses have hitboxes that are the proper length but are much too wide, meaning they cannot fit through gates or passages that they should be able to.
  • In general, any mob with a long, horizontal body is going to suffer from this. Since hitboxes are independent of rotation, they have to maintain the same width along both horizontal axes.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • It is possible to harm yourself with your own arrows, either by firing them upwards, having them recoil off an enemy currently experiencing Mercy Invincibility or a shield, or simply outrunning your arrows, which got much easier when bows became hold-to-charge instead of instant-fire. Also, casting a fishing hook straight up and letting it hit you used to cause damage.
  • This can happen to the skeletons as well: if you have another hostile mob in the way, the skeleton will be attacked by it if its own arrow hits the mob. Skeletons can even duel each other if one were to shoot another. It's also the only way you can get records out of creepers.
  • Ghasts love to fly out of range of your arrows and shoot fireballs at you that aren't affected by gravity. It's possible to kill them by hitting their fireballs back at them, and this in fact is complete overkill (ghasts have 10 HP, and a reflected fireball does 1000 damage to them). There's even an advancement for it called "Return to Sender".
  • Splash or Lingering potions cause an area-of-effect radius. They have a really short range compared to other projectiles, so throwing one at point blank is bound to get you in the radius too. (Although Revive Kills Zombie is in effect, making splash Healing potions a good offensive potion that doesn't hurt you.)
  • For a literal take on this trope, if you set off TNT and don't get far enough away from it, you may be blown into the air.
  • Invoked by the "Who's the pillager Now?" advancement, which calls for killing one of the crossbow-wielding Pillagers with a crossbow.
• Holiday Mode: In Java Edition on Halloween, zombies and skeletons may spawn wearing pumpkins on their heads. During Christmas, chests and large chests have different◊ appearances◊.
• Hollywood Darkness: Downplayed. The player can technically make out shapes in even the darkest of underground caverns without torches, but only just. However, the light during the nighttime never drops below full moon brightness, regardless of the moon's phase.
• Hollywood Density: Although gold is a very dense material, the player character can carry a cubic meter just as easily as a cubic meter of wood.
• Hollywood Torches:
  • Aside from lighting a limited range, torches play this straight. They burn indefinitely, and the smoke is purely cosmetic, posing no risk of fire, suffocation, or smoke discoloration; they do however provide enough heat to melt nearby ice. The light a single torch produces is almost as bright as the sun (torches have a light level of 14, the sun is light level 15), and adding a pumpkin to it makes it even brighter. Torchlight can even be used to help crops grow.
  • You can find torches in abandoned mineshafts that still burn nicely. Keep in mind, though, it's one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as it was originally planned for torches to go out and for lasting light fixtures to be more complicated, with all existing torches planned on being converted to the new item on patch.
  • The joke Version 2.0 previews created for April Fools' Day 2013 implemented the torches burning out as one of the many "features". Each torch would go out after a random, short amount of time and could be relighted with Flint and Steel or taken down and replaced.
• A Home Owner Is You: On the condition that you build the house with your bare hands first.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Naturally, since every mob in the game is a One-Gender Race.
• Horse Archer: It's possible to ride a horse and fire a bow at the same time.
• Horse Jump: Horses were added in version 1.6. With the right horse, it is possible to jump gaps and obstacles previously unthinkable without much effort. Camels from 1.20 provide a variation, being able to dash across large gaps, but not having much of a vertical jump.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: During or after thunderstorms, you may encounter a skeletal horse. Approaching it causes lightning to strike it and summon four skeletons with enchanted iron helmets and bows, each riding a skeletal horse (currently the only way they can appear).
• Hot Bar: Appears at the bottom of the screen and determines which item you have on hand.
• HP to One: Poison will cease damaging you at 1/2 heart of health. If the difficulty is on Normal, so will starvation.^note On Easy, it stops at 5. On Hard, it'll kill you. However, other tick-down effects, like Wither or fire, will kill you.
• Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: Pigs are only 88 cm high and 130 cm long and yet they don't seem to mind when a 1.8 metre tall player character tries to ride them. In fact, they will go about doing their usual business (that is, wandering aimlessly) unless the rider holds a carrot on a stick.
• Humanity's Wake: Scattered across three dimensions are structures built by a race (or races) now long dead, but it's anyone's guess if they were of a human race.
• Humanlike Animal Aging: Baby livestock are just smaller versions of adults with larger heads. Baby chickens have the same white feathers and red wattles as the adults. Baby squid (which only spawn naturally in Bedrock edition) are also just mini squids. Most prominent of this trope, however, are the bees, which have no larval stage and instead the result of breeding is a smaller bee.
• Humanoid Abomination: Endermen are 3-block tall creatures with very long legs and arms, purple eyes and full black skin. They're pretty thin, too. They can teleport between dimensions and are stated to have unnaturally large brains, and are the local residents of an Eldritch Location. They're neutral and only attack you if you look at them.
• Human Pincushion: Arrows will persist in your character for a while. Fighting against groups of skeletons or pillager patrols will often leave you looking like a pincushion.
• Human Resources: The game has a subtle example: zombies and skeletons both drop useful items. Skeletons in particular drop bones, which are useful as fertilizer, while zombies drop rotten flesh, which is less than ideal for proper meals but is useful in a pinch, and can also be sold to cleric villagers. Both of these are implied to have once been human, especially the zombies, which have an appearance that's almost identical to the original default character skin. Additionally, rotten flesh usually gives the player a temporary Hunger effect when eaten, but can be fed to dogs without ill effect.
• Hunger Causes Lethargy: If your hunger bar is too low, you can't sprint.
• Hydra Problem: Slimes and magma cubes will split into many smaller versions of themselves when killed. Thankfully, the smaller they are, the less damage they deal.
• Hyperactive Metabolism:
  • Before the Beta 1.8 update, all consumable food instantly restored your health. After it, having a near-full hunger meter causes fairly quick regeneration.
  • Sheep eat grass to recover their wool nearly-instantaneously. Baby animals (especially lambs and calves) can also munch on grass to grow faster than normal.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: It's possible to make a cube of 13x13x13 tiles (2197 cubic meters of material) from the blocks you can carry around and still have more than a hundred to spare.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place:
  • Any player can build a portal to the Nether, a hellish underworld where every step you take translates to eight steps in the normal world. If you enter through one Hell Gate and leave through another, you'll find yourself displaced eight times further than you traveled within the Nether. It's a very useful shortcut if you don't mind the fact that the place is full of cliffs, lava lakes, and ghasts. Where the terrain isn't covered by lava it consists of either a red rock that readily catches on fire, the jagged remains of volcanic eruptions, or a quicksand textured with screaming faces. Most of the dimension is inhabited by tribes of piglins, neutral endermen, the Nether's equivalent of slimes, and flying jellyfish who spit exploding fireballs that tear up the landscape and set the rock on fire.
  • In strongholds, you can find a portal different from the Nether's which leads players to another dimension called the End, a dark world which consists entirely of a Floating Continent suspended over an endless void, inhabited solely by endermen and a single Ender Dragon. The outer islands can be accessed via an ender pearl after defeating the dragon, and there are all kinds of loot there... and more enemies.
    
    However, the End becomes a lot less scary once you realize that 1) a simple bow with a sufficient quantity of arrows will keep you safe from the Dragon as you gradually reduce her health, 2) endermen are effectively inert if you're wearing a pumpkin, and 3) you can farm them in very efficient structures that'll level you from zero to level 30 in less than a minute.

I

• I Call It "Vera": The item repair system allows naming your tools, armor, and weapons at the expense of several experience levels. This can also apply to non-combat based items.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: When using the "pirate speak" or "LOLCats" language packs, respectively:
  • "Smooth Sailin'/Cake (Peaceful)"
  • "Deckswabber/Meh (Easy)"
  • "RegulARRRR/Cheezburger (Normal)"
  • "True Pirate/Double Cheezburger (Hard)"
  • "Aimless Sailing/HAX (Creative)"
  • "Swashbuckler/SIRVIVL (Survival)"
  • "Captain/1 LIEF INSTED OF 9 (Hardcore)"
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: When you die you drop all your stuff. This means that somebody around you can pick it up, and keep it for themselves.
• Ignorant About Fire:
  • Bats will sometimes fly into lava and then keep flying, while on fire.
  • Villagers are absolutely clueless about fire, not even trying to put any fires out when they start.
• I'm a Humanitarian: If you're really desperate to restore your hunger bar, you can eat the rotting flesh of slain zombies. It'll almost always give you food poisoning, but it could still save your life.
• Immune to Fire: Mobs native to the Nether (aside from unzombified piglins and hoglins) cannot catch fire or take damage from it. The player and other mobs can gain such fire immunity temporarily by drinking a potion of fire resistance, or having one splashed on them.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Being killed with a thrown trident will have your death message say you were impaled by your attacker. Tridents can also be given the Impaling enchant, which allows it to deal more damage when thrown in underwater combat. Additionally, dying from falling onto pointed dripstone is referred to as being impaled.
• Implacable Man: As long as its healing crystals are intact, the Ender Dragon is nigh-unstoppable. If placed in the Overworld (only possible with commands, Creative mode, or glitches), it can fly right through and destroy anything that's not obsidian, end stone, iron bars^note for balance reasons in the fight, as allowing it to destroy the iron bars in its arena would remove the challenge of the two End crystals surrounded by them or bedrock. Still feel secure in your cobblestone home?
• Impossible Item Drop:
  • Creepers normally drop gunpowder, which makes sense, but if they're killed by a stray arrow from a skeleton, they drop a music record. Guaranteed.
  • When zombies were first made, they dropped feathers when killed. This drop was replaced with rotten flesh, but later updates allowed zombies to have a rare chance of dropping carrots, potatoes, or iron ingots, which makes a bit more sense if the zombie is an infected villager.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • While swords, axes, bows, crossbows, tridents, and tools are the only practical weapons, it is possible to beat a monster to death with a torch, bed, pumpkin, or block of dirt. Best of all, items without durability don't even get damaged by using them as improvised weapons, though they won't deal more damage than your bare fist.
  • In Creative Mode, it's possible to enchant anything with enchantments intended for swords. Few things say "improbable" better than a poisonous potato enchanted with Sharpness V.
• Improvised Golems: The game allows players (and sometimes endermen) to build snow golems out of blocks of snow and iron golems out of blocks of iron, topped off with carved pumpkins for heads.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • Anything you pick up can be used as a weapon, even blocks of dirt and pork chops. Anything that isn't a tool or weapon does half a heart of damage only (same as fighting barehanded), but you can still kill any enemy with any item obtainable in the game. This includes blocks of stone, blocks of dirt, blocks of sand, blocks of wool, flowers, hunks of grilled pork meat, fish, doors, ladders, furnaces, minecarts, glass, mushrooms, diamonds, eggs, paintings...
  • With enchanted books, you can give literally any item any enchantment you want in Creative without extensive use of the console by combining it with an enchanted book in an anvil. It's very much possible to kill enemies with a sign enchanted with Sharpness V, Fire Aspect II, Knockback II and Looting III if you're so inclined.
  • All types of zombies have a chance of being able to pick up any objects floating on the ground to use as weapons. That piece of rotten flesh you threw away a moment ago? Another zombie's here to bludgeon you with the flesh of his former comrade.
• Indestructible Edible:
  • Minecraft uses Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat as detailed below; the only eatable item in this game that has reached any sort of expiry is rotten flesh, obtained from either the undead, or the implied bodies of whoever was buried in pyramids and jungle temples, and raw chicken, which has a chance to give you food poisoning. Outside that, you're free to drink milk that has gone weeks without refrigeration and eat bread you threw into swampwater and picked back up.
  • The king of this trope in the game might be chorus fruit. Chorus fruit's first purpose is to be consumed, healing a below-average two full pips of hunger with an inconvenient side effect of also randomly teleporting the player. Its second purpose is to be popped in a furnace like popcorn to turn it into a completely inedible brick-like material used to build End cities.
• Industrialized Evil: Of course with "mob farms" or "XP farms", which are all centered around the idea of breeding, trapping, and ultimately killing massive waves of living mobs with little effort on the player's part so the player can gain experience and cool loot.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Some madmen have put them deep underground with a mob spawner, into the foundation of sunken ruins, and buried on random beaches. Of course, it's one of the few games where the player can put chests containing things in the most unlikely places. Chests can also naturally spawn in strongholds, End cities, shipwrecks, woodland mansions, villages, the treasure rooms of various temples, shipwrecks, and in minecarts in abandoned mineshafts, which all make a bit more sense.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: A typical world has many abandoned dungeons, strongholds and mines where you can find chests containing food like bread, wheat, carrots, potatoes, melon seeds or pumpkin seeds, all fresh and edible (or in case of seeds, plantable). Subverted only with the food found in temples: temples only contain rotten flesh.
• Infernal Retaliation: On Java, burning zombies will set the player on fire when attacking.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • A netherite sword with Sharpness V, Looting III, Fire Aspect II, Knockback II, Unbreaking III, and Mending. You'll need to throw yourself through some RNG-induced flaming hoops and a ton of experience grinding to smith it all together, but with it you can pretty much one-hit every basic enemy in the game.
  • Golden apples are the most powerful food a player can eat. They regenerate near-fatal damage in seconds and even add a temporary health boost beyond your maximum hearts. However, they are horrendously expensive, costing eight gold ingots to craft.
    • Enchanted golden apples, an un-craftable variant, amplify the normal effects by 4x, while also giving damage resistance and fire immunity, exaggerate this.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • A diamond sword will typically be the strongest and most consistently reliable weapon the player will acquire. An argument can easily be made for the superiority of a netherite sword or an enchanted trident, but both of those weapons require the player to go well out of their way to obtain them.
  • Iron tools are a step below diamond tools, but it's much easier to find iron than diamonds.
  • While golden apples are the best combat item, golden carrots are the best actual food source in the game. While not as insanely costly as golden apples, only requiring eight gold nuggets^note slightly less than one ingot, only about 1/9th of a golden apple to craft, using them as a consistent food source still requires a crapton of gold — necessitating a gold farm in the Nether - and carrots, one of the rarer items, or a well-established villager setup with master-level farmers. The saturation given from golden carrots is the best in the game, bar none.
• Informed Species: The chickens, lacking the combs characteristic of chickens, having bills like ducks, and having wide feet reminescent of a ducks webbed feet, look more like blocky ducks with the chicken's characteristic wattle than blocky chickens.
• In My Language, That Sounds Like...: A since-removed splash screen (although still included in the Legacy Console Edition) reads "SOPA means LOSER in Swedish!" It actually means "garbage" as a noun or "to sweep" as a verb, but is often used as an insult in Sweden, so it kinda works.
• Instant 180-Degree Turn: Fortunately, you can turn around quickly if you get attacked from behind. On the flip side, monsters can do the same.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: The player can build snow or iron golems that wander around, attacking monsters. How do you get a pile of snow or iron to come to life and move independently? Give it a pumpkin for a head. Sure, why not?
• Instant Roast: Any chicken, pig, cow, sheep, or rabbit will become one or several cooked pieces of the appropriate meat if burned to death.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Fences and walls are visually the same height as a regular block, but you can't jump up on them without first using another block as a step. That's because they count as being 1½ blocks high in character collision checks (yes, that also means you appear half a block above the fence if you're "standing" on it), and you jump just less than that. Mostly for keeping things other than you from getting over them.
  • Though placing a square of carpet atop the fence lets you avert this and jump directly onto the carpet.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The old achievement system would announce earned achievements with "Achievement get!", a nod to Super Mario Sunshine. The advancement system in Java Edition averts it, using instead "Advancement Made!", "Goal Reached!" or "Challenge Complete!" depending on the type of advancement.
• Interface Screw:
  • The 'Wither' status effect acts as a more lethal (read: can actually kill you) but briefer poison effect, and also turns all your hearts black to make it much harder to tell how much you have left.
  • Putting a pumpkin on your face does this by restricting your view of your surroundings to only the eyes and mouth on the pumpkin's face, and blocks off the rest of it. It makes for effective protection against endermen - it mostly stops you from looking directly into their eyes and angering them.
  • The "Super Secret Settings" for the 1.7 update (now removed) also had these effects, which were picked at random. One such effect turned your screen upside down and laterally inverts it, another added high-speed motion blur to your movement, and yet another inverted the colours of your surroundings on your screen.
  • In the Nether and End, clocks will just cycle through day and night really fast due a lack of daytime cycle, and compasses will just have its needle spin around erratically due to a lack of spawn point (unless bound to a lodestone). Maps will also not work in the Nether due to it being a giant cavern, although they do work in the End.
• An Interior Designer Is You: And, if you want to go that far, an exterior designer is you too.
• In the Doldrums: All maps have an upper and lower Void. The upper Void is simply the sky in the Overworld and the End, while in the Nether it's the open space 128 meters above the bedrock ceiling. The lower Void, in all dimensions, is an infinite drop into black oblivion that kills entities (including players) that go below Y-64.
• In-Universe Game Clock: One complete daily cycle, from sunrise to sunset to sunrise, lasts for 20 minutes. This means that time is compressed at a 72:1 ratio (72 Minecraft days equals one real-time day). The time of day has dramatic effects on gameplay: nighttime is when the monsters come out. Daytime is when they burn. As you can imagine, being several miles away from your house at sunset is not a good idea. There are also moon phases; while mostly cosmetic, the odds of slimes being able to spawn in swamp biomes at night are greater the fuller the moon is, with a full moon guaranteeing a large number of them.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: The player has 36 slots for items (27 inventory slots, and 9 hotkey slots), plus four for armor and one for an off-hand item. While this may seem generous, you'd be surprised how quickly that gets filled during mining expeditions and such: since they're slot-based, every different item you find will take up one slot even if it's something as small as one piece of coal. Other items, notably redstone and copper, will likely take up 3 or 4 slots since finding hundreds of the stuff each mining trip isn't uncommon and you can only hold 64 in one slot. Furthermore, part of your inventory will be dedicated to necessary survival equipment (food, light, crafting material, tools, etc.). A properly managed inventory can mean the difference between making safe trips back to base and finding yourself fighting off a horde of creepers and zombies with your bare hands.
• Invisibility:
  • Potions of invisibility will make your skin invisible, but not your armor or any item you are holding. This means if you want true invisibility, you have to walk around naked so that most mobs can't see you (but they will ignore items you hold). That being said, it's not recommended for players (though villagers and wandering traders are fine) to use them against Illagers, as they aren't fooled by them.
  • For PvP servers, invisibility also hides your name tag, making sneak attacks much more effective. And yes, you can also use the splash version of the potion on a creeper for an invisible mad bomber.
  • Invisibility acts strangely on certain animals and monsters. Invisible spiders and endermen still have visible (albeit translucent) eyes. If a sheep turns invisible, the main body disappears but the wool coat doesn't, while invisible shulkers have the head visible but the shell invisible.
• Invisible Anatomy: When you're not using your fists to punch something, the item you're holding is just floating in front of you.
• Invisible Block:
  • There are glitches and hacks that let you place two separate types of these. Invisible blocks work just like any other block, but you can't see them, playing the trope straight. Intangible blocks, on the other hand, only interact with other blocks while the player passes through them just like air. The second block type is very useful for making elevators and other special redstone machines the player must pass through.
  • There is also a "barrier" block, a completely invisible (unless you're holding it as an item) and indestructible block as a tool for mapmakers.
• Invisible Streaker: Invisibility is useless if the player insists on wearing their armor. While undressing from armor may not be a problem for a player, some mobs have natural "armor", such as sheep's wool, that makes them visible whether they are inflicted with the status effect or not.
• Invisible Wall: One can build one of these using barrier blocks. In old versions you'll also encounter these if you try to go more than thirty million blocks in a straight line from the centre of the map, but in current iterations there is now a visible wall blocking the way.
• Invulnerable Horses: Horses are no less mortal than any other mobs in the game. They can easily fall from too high places, stumble upon cacti, fall into lava or get in the way of exploding creepers. Good thing they have Regenerating Health though.
• Item Crafting: With a drag and drop inventory, and a 2x2 or 3x3 craft slot depending on how you're doing it, you spend a good amount of time doing this. The recipe book helps speed it up, however.
• Item Farming: So many kinds:
  • Mob farms allow automatic collection of their useful items. Players can manipulate the system that spawns normal monsters in the darkness for a passive farm that collects a wide variety of drops over time, modify the spawning area to restrict the monsters that can spawn (and thus, what payout the farm gives), or galvanize a naturally-generating monster spawner block to have fast spawning of a specific monster type whenever they're in proximity to the spawner.
  • Monsters that die in proximity to a sculk catalyst will turn compatible blocks into the experience-granting sculk, allowing players to essentially build farms that let them collect experience points they'll be able to harness whenever they need.
  • Amethyst geodes generate a special (immoveable) block type, budding amethyst, that slowly grows amethyst clusters on its surfaces. If players want to farm amethyst as fast as they can, they'll need a farm with a bespoke design, as the precise budding amethyst placements within any geode are randomized.
  • The villager trading system. Villagers can sell better weapons and tools for you for emeralds; you get emeralds by trading items to them or mining. Wheat, paper, and sticks are the easiest to farm emeralds from, as they are derived from renewable resources.
  • And of course, normal agriculture; planting crops and reaping them when they mature. Pistons can be used to automate melon and pumpkin farms, while farmer villagers can collect everything else.
• I Was Told There Would Be Cake: In an attempt to focus public support, it was announced that cake would be added to the game if Minecraft won Indie of the year. It did, and cake was added in the first update of 2011.

J

• Jack of All Trades:
  • The player character. Players have proficiencies in mining, cooking, architecture, swordsmanship, archery, crafting, carpentry, painting, parkour, circuitry, alchemy, and magic.
  • The Protection enchantment. It won't reduce damage as much as the appropriate specialist protection enchantments (such as Blast Protection) would, but where those only work on the matching damage type, Protection reduces damage from almost everything. This makes it excellent for general use, as it can not only still prevent much of the damage from everything the other three are best suited for, it also protects against many damage types none of the other enchantments can, including common things such as zombies and fall damage. The other enchantments do shine in the right situations, but a set of full Protection IV is always a reliable choice.
  • Similarly, Sharpness. More specific damage enchantments can shine under the right circumstances, especially Smite against the Wither, but Sharpness still gives good damage buffs against everything. Power on bows can also fall under this when compared to Impaling on tridents.
• Joke Item:
  • For the longest time, the diamond hoe was considered to be one by the player base. Nobody has the need to till 1561 dirt blocks worth of farmland that its durability provides, and creating one means you're diverting precious diamonds to create something that is nigh useless. The developers caught on later, providing an advancement for creating a diamond hoe and completely exhausting every last one of its aforementioned 1561 uses, and it pokes fun at the player.
    Serious Dedication description: Completely use up a diamond hoe, and then reevaluate your life choices.
    • That said, the hoe is less of a joke item as updates, starting from the Nether Update, allowed the hoe to break certain blocks faster than other tools, most notably leaves and the Nether's fungal equivalents. That doesn't make it any more commonly used — the Serious Dedication advancement now requires the player to invest an incredibly rare netherite ingot to make a netherite hoe, lampshading the tool's very limited scope of use.
  • Any item can be held used to attack, but unless it's a tool or weapon, it won't be more damaging than if you were punching it barehanded. It's not uncommon to "tickle" things to death with a feather for fun.
  • With the enchantment system and commands, you can turn any item into a Lethal Joke Item. Want to attack zombies with a raw fish enchanted with Smite V? You can.
  • The golden sword and golden armor set play the trope straight; the gold sword isn't any stronger than an iron sword and the gold armor isn't any stronger than iron armor, but the gold counterparts wear down twice as fast as leather armor and wooden swords. They, however, are the best for enchanting purposes. Also, wearing gold armor in the Nether pacifies the otherwise hostile piglins.
  • The Poisonous Potato is at best emergency food and a requirement for an Advancement, but it has a 60% chance of applying Poison to you, outbalancing any health you would have regenerated if you got lucky and you can't even compost it or use it for anything else. Funnily enough because of this, the April Fools' 24w14potato update consisted of lots of uses for the Poisonous Potato, ironically most of which players would clamor for including in the base game because of their legitimate usefulness.
• The Joys of Torturing Mooks: With enough creative planning, you can make traps with water, lava, cacti, or natural gravity to kill mobs of all kinds, friendly or hostile, as you watch them helplessly flail about to their deaths. With a bit of trial and error, you can make a trap that leaves them barely alive so you can kill them with your bare hands and gain experience.
• Jungle Japes: The jungle biome, which is full of tall sprawling trees and the occasional temple to raid.
• Just Add Water: Crafting is a crude form of pixelated drawing with crafting materials. No actual labor required. Even complicated items like a clock can be made by merely putting the materials together in a vague clock-like shape. Averted in the console versions, as you don't need to draw the materials in, as long as you have them. The newer PC versions add a Crafting Guide which have every recipe you've learned so you can quickly craft your objective.

K

• Kaizo Trap: Inverted — the Wither generates a powerful explosion at the beginning of the fight. It's more than likely to kill nearby players.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • Rabbits used to have a variant formerly called "The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog", which is a reference to the Trope Namer. Exclusive to the Java version of the game, it was eventually renamed "The Killer Bunny," likely to avoid copyright infringement, and was eventually Dummied Out from the main game and made to not spawn naturally.
  • The endermen, sometimes. Their ability to pick up certain blocks means that eventually you will find one carrying a flower. With both hands, like it's afraid it'll damage it. Just don't look it in the eye...
• Kill It with Fire:
  • This is an effective tactic to kill mobs from a distance, lighting the ground on fire and having them walk into it.
  • The Flame enchantment for the bow utilizes this, as it allows you to shoot Flaming Arrows at your target.
  • You can also place blocks of wood or, even better, coal to use this tactic in places that aren't normally flammable, such as caves.
  • Flint and steel can ignite enemies. If they were already damaged or not near water, they will more than likely die. If you want to kill non-hostile spiders without them retaliating, you can ignite the ground below them, and they'll take damage without recognizing you as the source. It's also very good for dealing with pillager captains without getting the Bad Omen status effect. Fire as a whole is more or less lethal, unless you conveniently dug into water and lava at the same time.
  • Ghasts and blazes will kill you by shooting fireballs.
  • When livestock is killed in this fashion, the meat it drops will already be cooked.
  • Blaze powder, gunpowder, and coal can be combined to make a fire charge. This item can be used like flint and steel to start a faster-spreading fire, or you can load it into a dispenser to launch fireballs.
  • If you have to deal with an enderman, setting them on fire is one of the best ways to get rid of them if you're OK with not finding the drops.
• Kill It with Ice: Played with in that the player can use snowballs to defeat blazes from a safe distance, or he can just whack any given mob to death with ice and snow blocks.
• Kill It with Water:
  • Endermen are, in addition to fire and lava, weak to water. Leading them to a pool of water or exposing them to a rainstorm will damage them, though they're not stupid enough to keep standing there after taking one hit.
  • Prior to 1.8, this was the standard way to farm slime balls; since slimes couldn't swim, a "drowner" trap was very effective against them.
  • Also four doors arranged around a block of water suspended above a stone pressure plate, topped by any solid block. Mobs walking on the plate will cause the doors to lock them in, trapping them with their head in the water, unable to get out. Once they die, the pressure plate is released and the trap reopens to visitors. Doesn't work on undead mobs, unfortunately, since they don't drown.
• King Mook: The elder guardians are this to the guardians.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Being a game with similar gameplay mechanics to Terraria, it shouldn't come as a surprise that stealing whole structures is doable here. Certain blocks and items can only be obtained, short of Creative Mode, by finding them in pre-generated existing structures.
• Knockback:
  • A small amount with every hit from a weapon. A large amount if you were sprinting. There's also an appropriately-named sword enchantment (and a less directly-named bow enchantment) to make it even greater.
  • Iron golems produce this in spades. Anything they hit is flung into the air high enough to take fall damage, in addition to the heavy damage the attack itself does.
  • The Ender Dragon herself can cause quite a bit of this if she comes into contact with you, often enough to send you into the Void.
  • Hoglins have a similar attack to iron golems, although it's a much weaker attack.
  • Ravagers and wardens can also deal large amounts of knockback with their melee attacks.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: Most variants of zombies and skeletons are allergic to sunlight, but if they're spawned wearing a helmet, they'll be immune to it.

L

• Ladder Physics:
  • Ladders are subject to all kinds of weirdness. They seem to simply slow your fall when you occupy the same square as them, and move you upwards at the same rate when you move against them. This means, among other things, moving into a ladder square while falling at terminal velocity will instantly cushion you, and it's possible to mine a block while facing away from the ladder you're on. This reaches ridiculous levels when you realize, with a bit of luck, you can place a ladder segment while in freefall, and instantly cancel your momentum with it.
  • Also, neither water nor lava can exist in the same space as a ladder, leading to shenanigans where a ceiling made of lava lights up a room, but won't actually fall down into it because it's afraid of invading the ladder's personal bubble.
  • Spiders can climb up vertical walls, but any overhangs can stop their progress. Ladders, which barely have any width at all, can block a spider's climbing as well as a 1x1x1 cubic meter stone block can.
• Lamarck Was Right: With dyes, you can color sheep and receive wool of different shades from them. Breeding two sheep will either produce a lamb colored with an additive result of its parents' colors^*for instance, breeding a red sheep with a yellow sheep will produce an orange lamb or just one of its parents' colors if the combination does not produce another color.^*for instance, breeding a black sheep with a pink sheep will produce either a black or pink lamb, and breeding two sheep of the same color will produce a like-colored lamb This means you can use one piece of blue dye to create an entire flock of blue sheep since Minecraft animals have no set gender and can reproduce with any other animal that isn't juvenile.
• Lamprey Mouth: The squid has one of these. It's much toothier than would be realistically expected, although the squid itself is completely harmless.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": TNT + pressure plate = landmine. And if you want to get complicated, you can even rig trees so that they set off TNT when cut down (a TNTree, if you will), or use TNT minecarts for instant explosions.
• Last Note Nightmare: In the record "11", all that can be heard is the sounds of what could be a man loading a gun, or simply shifting around in his chair. For the most part, it's a quiet song, devoid of any music and comprised absolutely of ambiance. Near the end, however, the music abruptly shifts to the man walking down a path, then breaking into a run. As the music builds, we hear some type of inhuman noise roar at the man before it abruptly cuts out, switching to a soft beeping noise before going completely silent.
• Lava Adds Awesome: You can collect and use lava in constructions, either as an exotic light source, a trap for intruders, or an incinerator for junk. If you're not careful, it can easily kill you or ignite wood nearby.
• The Lava Caves of New York: Due to the randomly-generated nature of the game, it's fully possible to encounter an NPC town with a cavern full of lava just underneath or an open lava lake right next to it.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: The game has lava flow much more slowly than water to simulate its greater density^note in the Overworld and End, that is; in the Nether, lava flows as fast as water because of how hot the Nether is. Lava's not fatal if the player can escape quickly enough, but it is very painful. However, more pain occurs when one dies in lava: everything you had on your person^note except netherite is irrevocably incinerated. It also causes any wood in short distance from it to start burning and ice to melt, but it can (or at least could) be blocked by using snow blocks. It provides natural light as well. If you've drunk a Potion of Fire Resistance, you can actually swim in lava safely. It behaves like red water in that case, only with much poorer visibility. You can climb out of lava as you would a pool of water, but the fact that lava continuously sets you on fire interrupts your ability to do so.
• Lava Pit: Mostly underground, but occasionally one boils up to the surface.
• Law of Cartographical Elegance: It's a flat, square-shaped world but is notable in the fact that the current map format makes usable maps out to the tune of 8 times the surface area of the Earth.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Anything that glows blue and purple is a sign that it's powerful. Rare and Epic items also have blue or purple name text respectively.
• LEGO Genetics: Minecraft's dyes are so powerful that they can re-sequence sheep DNA. Dyeing a sheep causes it to permanently produce wool that color, and to pass the color to its offspring.
• Le Parkour: The only way to reach the top of an End city without the help of shulkers, or making your own stairs.
• Lethal Chef: Players can potentially do this to themselves (or possibly to another player) with suspicious stew, which is a normal bowl of stew with a flower added in. Players jumping in blind run the risk of having said "stew" inflict negative status effects depending on what type of flower you used. Suspicious stew found in chests... well, better cross your fingers and hope you don't almost die from poison.
• Lethal Joke Item:
  • Continuing the proud tradition of fishing rods in this role is, well, the fishing rod. Normally, it's used for just that — casting out into a body of water and flinging in a fish when it bites (or, if the rod has the Luck of the Sea enchantment, maybe something else more valuable). Most players wouldn't even bother using it for anything else. But suddenly, a whole new world of possibility opens up when the astute player realizes that it doesn't just reel in fish, it reels in ANY creature. With practice, a player atop a wall can heave up monsters into sword range and with a quick switch, slash the unfortunate on their way back down to fall-damage town. The cherry on top? Even ghasts are affected, which can be used to pull the elusive flying buggers closer so they can't avoid your hail of arrows.
    • In multiplayer, if two or more fishing rods are reeled in at the same time, the victim gets the full momentum increase from both rods, catapulting them up several times the height of the wall. As Grian discovered in the Double Life SMP, this can kill a Warden.
  • Snowballs can be thrown at mobs to knock them backward, but don't actually deal any damage, except against blazes. However, they can be immensely useful on certain challenge maps that consist of nothing but an island or two in the sky. Throw a couple, and suddenly that creeper's plunging off the edge to its death. Chicken eggs also provide the same effect as the snowballs, minus the ability to harm blazes.
  • In creative, you can enchant any item. Even things like fish. So, give a fish all the best enchantments, and you've got a pretty good weapon.
  • Hoes, especially diamond and netherite hoes, become this down in the horrible depths of the deep dark, being the tools most suited to scraping out the sculk and its sensors and shriekers, which also gives them double duty in quickly destroying the sculk for experience and revealing any more valuable ores and minerals that the sculk may be hiding.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Nether. There are full-blown oceans of lava, lava falls coming from the ceiling, more lava falls sprouting from random walls, and there are even pockets of lava hidden in the walls, just waiting for you to stumble upon them. Oh, and the flow speed and distance of lava in the Nether is double what it is in the Overworld.
• Level Grinding:
  • Experience gained by killing mobs gives experience levels. Although these are pointless for the first part of the game, once the player obtains diamonds they can make enchantment tables. These allow weapons, armor, and tools to be enchanted with special abilities, such as reduced damage from use, extra damage when attacking monsters, protection from certain types of damage (explosions, fire, water, fall, etc.), and increased item drops. The problem is that experience gained from monsters is worth much less at higher levels, and dying makes the player lose almost all their experience. As a result, even with structures built specifically to spawn and damage mobs automatically, it can take days to get enough experience for the best enchantments. Made worse by the Random Number God deciding what enchantments are received, which can absorb large amounts of XP only to give a common, less useful enchantment or even ignore up to one-quarter of the experience (but still take it) when calculating which enchantment will be given.
  • This is somewhat rectified by incremental updates, as a lot of activities beyond mob killing (such as farming, mining, smelting ores, cooking food, and fishing) all reward the player with experience, and books can be enchanted, and anvils can be used to fix items without the loss of the enchantments, and merge enchantments. Also, villagers sell experience bottles, and books with enchantments can be found in dungeons. Of course getting some of the enchantments is still a Luck-Based Mission but at least you can avoid spending 30 levels on a diamond pickaxe only to get Unbreaking I. And even if you do, some of the loss can be recouped using a grindstone.
• Level-Map Display: There's a map item which you can craft to keep track of the world you explore.
• Level Scaling: The game has a hidden mechanic known as "regional difficulty" which increases the longer the player (or on a multiplayer server, all collective players) stay in a chunk, and caps out at a combined fifty hours. The higher the regional difficulty of a chunk is, the higher the chance for stronger enemies to spawn (such as wearing armour, having enchanted weapons, follow the player for greater distances, or spawning with potion effects) and for certain enemies to spawn more frequently.
• Life Meter: The player has one, at the bottom of the screen, displaying Hit Points using hearts, so it's also Hearts Are Health.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Lightning will turn pigs into zombified piglins and villagers into witches, toggles mooshrooms between red and brown variants, and massively powers up the explosion of a creeper. It also creates portals to the Nether if it strikes a gateway of obsidian, but so does fire.
• Like Cannot Cut Like: Singular example: golden pickaxes cannot mine the Overworld's gold ore — all other non-wooden pickaxes can mine the ore they're made of, but gold, true to Real Life, is exceptionally weak. It can mine the Nether's gold ore, however.
• Lily-Pad Platform: Lily pads can be collected from water in certain biomes or fished. They count as partial block-like slabs, making them excellent for covering water source blocks in farms and such.
• Living Ship: Well, a Living Boat in this case; the strider is a passive mob that spawns walking on top of the lava lakes of the Nether, which can be ridden like a pig. It was added to act as the Nether's equivalent to regular boats. Lampshaded by the "This Boat Has Legs" advancement.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: This used to be a problem in the past when loading big maps. Fortunately, recent updates have massively optimized loading times.
• Logic Bomb: The "bomb" half of this trope is taken rather literally when attempting to sleep in either the Nether or the End. Since neither dimension has a day/night cycle (or, in the Nether's case, the cycle can't be observed due to the omnipresent rock ceiling), the Fast-Forward Mechanic of the bed is useless. Not content with having beds do nothing, the developers programmed them to explode when attempting to sleep, with the chatbox noting that the player died to "[Intentional Game Design]".
  • The same applies to respawn anchors used outside the Nether.
• Lonely Piano Piece: Some of the random background music consists of this, rather fitting in single-player mode since you are the only human being in this world.
• Loophole Abuse: Understanding how the game is coded (as documented by many inquisitive individuals) can lead to this:
  • Village population counts, prior to the 1.14 Village and Pillage update, depended on how many houses (with doors) a village had. Since the game defined a "house" as a door exposed to sunlight that has the interior (the side the door leads into) one more block covered than the exterior, you could just place a door then a block of dirt on its interior side and the villagers would treat it as a house. The population count since 1.14 now depends on the number of valid beds within the village, but the beds are not required to be within a house.
  • Iron golems are coded to attack players that harm villagers using anything that's held in the hand, including bare fists. However, this doesn't include villagers hurt by "natural" causes, so it's possible to just kill them by suffocation, drowning, or falling without repercussions from their protectors if you want new villagers for their offers (or just feel like being a terrible person). This also protects the player's "reputation", which sways the available trades and prices.
  • Collecting the Ender Dragon egg requires exploiting the behavior of certain items and gravity. You cannot touch the egg directly without it teleporting, but it is affected by gravity, and a torch will convert any block that falls onto it into a collectible item. Pistons work, too.
  • The Looting enchantment only works if you have the enchanted weapon in your hand when a mob is killed. Taking this rule literally means that you can deal the fatal blow by shooting an arrow, for example, and then quickly switch to your looting weapon just before the arrow reaches the mob. This way you get the benefits of the enchantment without wearing down the enchanted weapon itself, allowing for infinite Looting.
  • The entire concept of grinders, so much so that they form a sort of Emergent Gameplay. Some examples:
    • Monsters will naturally spawn in dark locations, including places that you yourself have made dark. Build a large dark room with space for mobs to spawn and water channels to push them into a deathtrap, and now you have a machine that'll provide a steady stream of free monster drops.
    • If you're looking for something faster, consider the mob spawner block. It'll spawn creatures within a certain radius, as long as it's dark enough and there's enough space. Again, build an area for monsters to spawn and a trap for them to fall into, and now you've got an even faster method to get monster drops, except this one can provide experience levels to you in a convenient way as well. This can only be done with certain mobs, however, since monster spawners can't be created or moved and you have to work with what the game generates.
    • Monsters in these grinders can be persuaded to willingly enter the deadly water streams by lining the edges with open trapdoors. All mobs' pathfinding A.I. treats trapdoors as full blocks regardless of whether or not they are open, so a two-block-wide channel with open trapdoors on either side will trick the monsters into trying to cross and falling in.
    • Villages are considered by the game to be locations with plenty of villagers and houses^note (houses are determined by the number of valid doors [pre-1.14] or beds [1.14 onwards]). If a village has a sufficient number of villagers, iron golems will spawn. The thing is, villagers and houses can both be created and manipulated by the player, so if one has enough time on their hands, they can build an iron golem farm to automatically kill off the spawned golems and take their iron.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • Every block in the game is destructible, with the main exception of bedrock, which forms the indestructible bottom limit of the game world, and top limit of the Nether. But just because it's supposed to be indestructible and there are few reasons to want it destroyed (you can't build hanging constructions below the bottom of the world — the game makes building there outright impossible, with any placed blocks vanishing instantly; however, you can build constructions above the Nether, and breaking bedrock allows easy access from the normally accessible section), people have figured out how to destroy it, despite the developers' continuing attempts to prevent the exploits. Reinforced deepslate, forming the portal-like structure found in ancient cities, presumably falls under the same limitations.
  • The Minecon Live 2020 demonstration showed that the then-new warden can 2-hit kill players wearing complete netherite armor and gets more aggressive as it's attacked. Coupled with no drops or significant XP and enormous health, it's meant to discourage players from killing it. When it made its debut in the 1.19 snapshot, everyone started to test various methods of killing the warden.
• Lost Technology:
  • Netherite falls under this. There are no primary sources for it, and the only way to get some is to dig up some rare "ancient debris" blocks throughout (mostly at the bottom of) the Nether and mix it with gold to form an alloy.
  • Redstone circuits are used in Jungle Temples and Ancient Cities, up to and including a prominent Redstone piston door in both. It's downplayed in that you can build them in the current day with fairly simple materials, but there's the general implication that Redstone knowledge has been lost to time, since only uninhabited places have this tech.
• The Lost Woods:
  • The Woods map setting in Indev generated a world with dim natural light and covered in dense trees, with lots of mushrooms on the ground. Likewise, the forest and taiga biomes in the Alpha version of the game.
  • The Halloween Update of 2010 introduced biomes, including the forest biome that would become one of the game's most common terrain types as well as the rare jungle biome. True to the trope, undead creatures will take refuge from the sun by hiding in the shadows of the trees during the daytime.
  • The Update that Changed the World of 2013 introduced, among others, the dark oak forest, which produces dense stands of giant Black Forest-inspired oak trees with thick trunks and broad canopies with almost no gaps, little sunlight on the ground, giant mushrooms, and even a haunted mansion. While regular forests provide some cover for monsters in the day, the dark oak forest is so, well, dark that monsters can actively spawn at all hours of the day.
  • The crimson forest and warped forest biomes in the Nether are dense stands of giant mushrooms that serve as the local tree equivalents. The crimson forest is inhabited by wandering Pig Man tribes and giant aggressive boars, while the warped forest is actively avoided by most mobs but haunted by usually large numbers of endermen.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Enchanting. You place an item and are given three lines of gibberish representing your options, with only a single enchantment being known to you.^note Well, okay, it's actually English written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, but the sentences are just word salads. The more levels you spend, the better the enchantments may be. Adding bookshelves (to a max of 15) raises the level requirement but also improves the enchantments you get. However, the basic mechanics aside, the actual results can vary from awesome to extremely disappointing. You can put in one item and get three nice enchantments, only to put in an identical one and get a comparatively useless one. You can't control what enchantments you get, only increase the likelihood of said enchantments being ranked higher. This is even worse with enchanted books, as they can have any enchantments on them, even ones that can't all apply to the same tool or piece of armour. This is a big reason why many players ignore the enchanting table as soon as they find a village where they can buy books.
  • Trading with V]villagers: Depending on how Lady Luck favors you could end up with a bunch of villagers offering some terrible trades, some decent ones, and some really good ones (items that are otherwise very rare)... or just a bunch of terrible ones. Some get a cleric to start selling eyes of ender after only a few trades, some have 8 clerics running around their village that still don't offer the darn things. You can change a villager's trades, but only before you've actually traded with them, so any higher-level trades are purely random.
  • There's no telling where your Nether portal can land you. Your best estimate is your coordinates — Nether portal destinations are a function of your X and Z coordinates and attempt to spawn you on as much solid ground as possible, but as long as you're traveling into uncharted territory, you won't know if you're spawning right into hostile territory or over a lava ocean, for instance.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields are fairly useful, as they're relatively cheap to make, and Blocking Stops All Damage when shields are in play (provided the player is facing the source of the damage and actively blocking.)
• Lunacy: The phases of the moon correlates directly with the spawn rate of stronger mobs (monsters wearing armour, holding weapons, having enchantments etc.), as well as that of slimes, with its effects being strongest when it's full.

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