How to play in your browser
There is nothing to download and nothing to install: open the page, create a world, and you are in. This guide covers what you need to know on day one.
What you need
A reasonably recent desktop or mobile browser with WebGL2 support, which is the technology the 3D world is drawn with. Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all ship with it enabled. If you get a black screen or a graphics error, it is almost always because the browser is out of date or because hardware acceleration has been switched off in its settings.
It also helps to have free disk space: worlds are saved inside the browser, on your own machine, and a thoroughly explored world can take up quite a lot.
Creating your first world
From the main menu, go into singleplayer and create a new world. You get to choose the game version it is generated with: the client supports a wide range, from 1.8 up to 1.21.x. If you have no preference, stick with the one selected by default, which is the most tested.
Terrain generation and all of the world logic happen on your own device. There is no server in the middle, and you need no account or sign-up to play on your own.
Keyboard controls
They are the usual ones for the genre, so if you are coming from a similar game there is nothing to relearn. Every key can be remapped in the settings.
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Move | W A S D |
| Jump | Space |
| Sneak | Shift |
| Inventory | E |
| Drop item | Q |
| Swap hands | F |
| Chat | T or Enter |
| Zoom | C |
| Change view | F5 |
| Debug info | F3 |
| Pause menu | Esc |
To look around, the game captures the mouse pointer when you click on the window. Press Esc to release it and get your system cursor back.
Controls on phones and tablets
On touch screens the interface adapts by itself: a virtual joystick appears for movement, the rest of the screen turns the camera, and a row of buttons covers the actions that take a key on a keyboard. The block picker, the player list, chat, the pause menu and the debug info are there by default.
It plays best in landscape and with the phone plugged in: a 3D game works the GPU hard and gets through battery at a fair rate.
How worlds are saved
Worlds live in the browser's own storage (IndexedDB), not on a server of ours. That has one important consequence worth understanding from the start: they are browser data, and if you clear the site's browsing data, or play in a private window, they disappear with it.
The page asks for persistent storage permission so the browser will not discard them on its own when it needs space. Allow it when you are asked.
Back up your worlds. A world you care about should not exist only inside a browser. Export it now and then and keep the file wherever you keep the rest of your things.
Exporting and importing
From the world list you can export in either of two ways: by picking a folder on your machine for the files to be written into (the recommended option, available in browsers that support file system access), or by downloading a ZIP, which works everywhere.
Importing works the same way round: you can open a world from a ZIP or from a folder, and you can even drag them onto the window. The format is the standard save format, so a world exported from here can still be played elsewhere, and the other way around.
If it feels slow
The first thing to turn down is the render distance, in the video settings: by some margin it is what costs the most. Closing other heavy tabs makes a difference too, since they all share the same GPU. And if hardware acceleration is disabled in your browser, the game will try to draw in software and the experience will be poor on any machine.