Minecraft is amongst the most popular video games of all time. It is a sandbox-style game where the only limit to the creative possibilities is the imagination of the players, and it is enjoyed by an audience of all ages and all origins. However, many miss out on the customization possibilities offered by the world creation settings. This article hence offers a guided tour of these settings.
Basic Minecraft Settings
When you select the option to create a new world, this screen is automatically displayed. It allows you to give a name to your world and to play in creative or survival mode.
- Survival: The game’s default mode, players must gather in-game resources to build anything they want.
- Creative: In this mode, all resources are illimited and available anytime in the inventory menu, player characters are invincible, and hostile creatures do not attack.
It is also from this menu that you can choose the difficulty (peaceful, easy, normal, and hard) of your world. Each difficulty is described when you select it.
The purple button on the left is used to turn your world into a Realm, which means putting it on an online server, allowing other players to play it even when you’re offline. Joining an existing Realm is free, but creating one incurs a monthly server maintenance fee.
Advanced settings
The list of advanced settings may seem long, but each one has its explaination and simply needs to be toggled on or off using the buttons on the right.
The last parameter on this tab, the simulation distance, determines how many chunks (vertical segment of 16 x 16 blocks) are generated and visible around the player character. Increasing the distance will make your character see further, but it also requires more work from the computer. If you want to optimize the performance of your game, we advise you not to increase the distance. Similarly, if your game is experiencing performance difficulties, we recommend that you reduce the simulation distance
The Seed parameter is often the one that generates the most questions.
What is a seed?
In technical terms, it is the sequence of characters that form the basis of generating a Minecraft world, and it cannot be changed after the world has been created. Every Minecraft world has a seed, and it is assigned by default unless there is a manual selection.
The same seed will always generate the same world, but when the world generation algorithm is updated (usually when new biomes are added by developers) reusing the same seed to generate a new world will not result in an exact copy of the previous world.
On the right from where you can manually change the seed, the Template button allows you to choose from a selection of seeds offered by the game.
You can also manually enter a seed value and see what the generated world will look like. For example, the cover image of this article is taken from the spawn point of seed “11”.
Settings for multiplayer
The third tab on the left allows you to define whether your world is open to multiplayer, who can join, what permissions other players will have upon joining, and if player characters can damage each other or not. Each selection of a parameter comes automatically with its explanation.
If you are looking for maximum security, you can make your world accessible either by invitation only or to just your friends.
Cheat settings
It is in the fourth tab that you can allow (or not) various features to make the game easier. Just like in the other tabs, each parameter is described.
The first parameter is used to allow or not allow players to use the commands from the chat. These codes always start with a / and you can find the command list here.
The setting at the bottom is for ticks, which means the clock that manages all the elements and actions related to time in the game. By default, a Minecraft day is 20 minutes in the real world or 24 000 ticks, and a Minecraft hour is 50 seconds or 1 000 ticks.
If you choose to increase the ticks setting, everything will happen faster: plants will grow faster, but the spread of fire, equipment deterioration, and hunger gauge will be adjusted accordingly. Increasing ticks also requires more work per second for the computer. Doing so can thus have negative consequences on the performance of the game and make the world unplayable. We advise you not to change the number of ticks in your Minecraft world.
Resource and Behavior Packs
The two tabs under the cheat settings tab relate to the use of resource packs and behavior packs in your world. These packs can be purchased with real money from the Minecraft Marketplace. There is a link that leads directly to the marketplace page in the resource packs tab.
Resource packs change the aesthetics and sometimes the names of blocks, while behavior packs change the behaviors of certain creatures.
Experimental parameters
The last tab on the left menu allows you to enable experimental settings in your Minecraft world. These settings are features that the developers are currently working on and features that are useful to people who create packs and add-ons for the game. Unless you are creating Minecraft packs or mods, we do not recommend enabling these settings.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Minecraft is a game that allows a lot of customization, both with its game mechanics and with its many settings options. The interface of each tab is also designed to be easy to navigate and to give clear information about each feature.
