Minecraft is the defining game of the decade. It’s one of the most popular video games in history and over 10 years after its initial release, it still dominates. In 2019, it was the most-watched video game on YouTube, with over 100 Billion gameplay views.
Minecraft’s allure is that it can be both simple and complex. At its most basic, it’s a blocky sandbox game where you explore a randomly generated world and try to survive by gathering resources and battling (or hiding from) monsters such as skeletons, zombies, spiders and creepers. At its most complex, it’s a highly involved game with nearly infinite extensibility through mods, maps, resource packs, and more.
You can thoroughly customize the look and feel of your character through Minecraft skins, downloadable costumes for your avatar. There are hundreds of thousands of skins available, covering every look imaginable.
We’ve collected some of the top Minecraft resources here to help you get the most out of the game.
Minecraft Maps
The heart of Minecraft is the map, or the space where you explore and interact with the game. In a standard default game, the map is randomly generated for you and you can play it in survival or creative mode (or a few variants of the two). Random maps are fun at first, but quickly become boring. Fortunately, the creative minds of the Minecraft community provide an endless supply of entertaining maps that you can play on. Some maps are just simple showcases of cool and interesting scenery. But some are full games-within-a-game, offering excitement, intrigue, and adventure.
- MinecraftMaps.com – a well-known and trusted resource for Minecraft map lovers.
- PlanetMinecraft – an exhaustive source of all things Minecraft. The “Projects” section holds all of the maps you’re looking for.
Minecraft Resource and Texture Packs
Texture packs (now called Resource Packs) change the look and feel of the individual “blocks” or graphics, in the game. These can be minor enhancements or complete and total changes to the look and feel of Minecraft.
Minecraft Skins
The default looks for your avatar in the game are Steve and Alex. But you’re not stuck with the default look. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of new “skins” that you can download to make your Minecraft character look new and different. You can even create your own!
The most popular source for Minecraft Skins is the Skindex, but there are many sites that list new and exciting skins to download.
