Minecraft Trivia Quiz: How Much Do You Know?

Trivia Quizzes Video Games

The first night is the actual tutorial. A new Minecraft world drops a player onto a randomly generated surface with an empty inventory, no objective text, no narrator and no explanation of any kind, and gives them roughly ten real-time minutes before the sun goes down and things start spawning in the dark. Everything a player does in that window, punching a tree for wood, turning the wood into planks and then into a crafting table, cutting stone, hiding in a hole they dug themselves, is learned by consequence rather than instruction. Markus Persson built the earliest version of the game in a few days in May 2009, borrowing the block-mining core from an obscure title called Infiniminer, and released it publicly while it was still visibly unfinished.

The creeper exists because of a mistake. Persson was modelling a pig, transposed the length and height values, and ended up with a tall, thin, faceless thing standing upright on four short legs, which he kept and gave a silent approach and a delayed detonation instead of the usual melee attack. It is now the most recognisable character in a game with no protagonist, and the accident produced something that reads as harmless right up until the hiss starts. Very little else in the game was planned much more carefully. Endermen came out of an attempt at a Slender Man reference and kept the rule that they turn hostile only when a player looks directly at them, which means most players learn the mechanic by triggering it accidentally.

Microsoft bought Mojang in September 2014 for 2.5 billion dollars, three years after Persson had already handed lead development to Jens Bergensten, and the price has aged well: sales have passed 300 million copies, ahead of every other game ever released. The consequences reach further than the sales figure suggests. Minecraft: Education Edition runs in classrooms as a teaching tool, and in 2020 Reporters Without Borders built the Uncensored Library inside the game, a server hosting banned journalism from countries where the articles were blocked but the game was not, on the reasoning that a censor watching for news sites would not think to watch a block-building game.

The systems themselves are deeper than the visuals imply. A Nether portal needs a frame of obsidian, which only forms where water meets lava or has to be mined with a diamond pickaxe, and the dimension behind it compresses distance at eight to one, so a rail line built through the Nether covers eight times the ground. The End is reached only by throwing eyes of ender to locate a buried stronghold portal, and it holds the Ender Dragon, the closest thing the game has to a scripted boss. Redstone dust carries a signal fifteen blocks before it needs a repeater, a limit tight enough that players have built working calculators and functioning replicas of early computers inside it. Netherite, added in the 1.16 update in 2020, finally displaced diamond at the top of the tool and armour hierarchy after eleven years.

Then there is Herobrine, a character that has never existed in any version of the game, invented in a 2010 forum post and sustained well enough that Mojang started listing “Removed Herobrine” in patch notes as a running joke. The questions reach across all of it, from mobs and dimensions to ownership history, and every one of them appears again with its correct answer under the quiz for anyone wanting to check which update they misplaced.