A Collection of Minecraft Spinoffs For Kids

Minecraft is a vast sandbox game that allows players to create and build anything their hearts desire within its sprawling world. It’s a great choice for kids who love to explore and experiment, but it’s also an excellent game for teaching coding skills and developing creative thinking. And if your kid gets bored of the vanilla game, our collection of spinoffs lets them take on unique challenges and test their skills in new ways.

Minecraft began life as a side project for Markus Persson, a Swedish games developer from a working-class family. Better known online as Notch, he was inspired by exploratory first-person titles such as Grand Theft Auto and Infiniminer. He spent a weekend developing the original version of Minecraft and posted it to a website for independent developers in May 2009. The game exploded into popularity after that, with its block-shaped worlds and rudimentary graphics becoming a hit with gamers around the world.

While the basic game has remained fairly constant, Minecraft has gone through numerous iterations and expansions over the years. It’s now available on PC, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox, as well as mobile devices and virtual reality headsets. And its player base is still growing.

There are various modes to the game, including creative and survival. In the former, you can’t die and every resource is immediately available to you, making it a perfect place to build huge projects. The latter mode, however, puts you in a hostile world filled with monsters that can kill you and resources you need to collect. Surviving can be challenging, but it’s a great way to test your resilience and resourcefulness.

The game is renowned for its mods, which allow the community to add features and changes to the core experience. For example, a mod might change the way a mob looks or alter a crafting recipe. Alternatively, it could add a whole new map to explore or a new boss fight. The modding community is so large that Minecraft has become an open world with almost endless possibilities.

In addition to mods, Minecraft has a number of built-in features that can help children learn more about computer science and programming. For example, the game is programmed using Java, which can be viewed and modified by players. This can give kids an opportunity to understand the code that makes the game run, and it can even help them develop further coding skills by de-bugging the program.

Minecraft has been the inspiration for a wide range of spinoffs, most of which have been developed by or with the support of Mojang. These include Minecraft: Story Mode, an episode and story-driven standalone title created by Telltale Games; Minecraft Dungeons, a dungeon crawler where up to four people can hack and slash their way through caves; and Minecraft Earth, which uses augmented reality to add a new dimension to the game’s gameplay. And there are many more.