How Minecraft Works

This page will be dedicated to explaining how the world of Minecraft works, because it would be very confused for a first-time player.
Basically, Minecraft is a survival/adventure/building game in which everything is made out of blocks or block themed shapes. You can use blocks with other blocks, create new blocks, destroy blocks, and do other block-related things.
First of all, there are natural blocks, which are pretty much just the general terrain of the game, which cannot be manufactured. These blocks could be grass, stone, wood, leaves, sand, diamond, iron etc.

Grass block

Next there are the raw materials. You obtain these from breaking/mining/chopping specific natural blocks. Once you have broken a natural block, it disappears and a raw material will pop out. Another way to obtain raw materials is to kill an animal or harvest a crop. The kind of raw material you receive will always be dependent on what kind of block/animal/crop you are breaking/killing/harvesting. For example, it is not possible to obtain leather from killing a chicken, or wheat from mining a diamond block. Raw materials could be diamonds, coal, flint, leather, feathers, sugar cane, wheat, etc.

Diamond

Now that we have the block concept down, we can move onto crafting, a fundamental part of the game. With all these blocks and raw materials, we need something to do with them, so we craft them. To craft something, you will need a Crafting Table. This is made by placing wood in your 2x2 crafting inventory to make planks. Once you have the planks, you can place 4 of them in a square to make a crafting table.

Making the Crafting Table

Once you have obtained the crafting table you can place it down on the world and right click it to open up the crafting interface. Once there, you can place items either raw or natural into the 3x3 interface, and by using certain combinations, create new items. These new items could be blocks, tools, armour, miscellaneous items, weapons, food, etc.

Making a Wood Pickaxe in the Crafting Table

Making a Map in the Crafting Table

Once you have all the items you need, you can go out slay mobs! Mobs are living, moving, game entities. For the most part, all mobs are affected by the environment in the same way as you are, so they can get hurt by fire, falling, other mobs, attacked by weapons, etc. There are two types of mobs, passive and aggressive. Passive mobs do not attack you when you come near them, and are usually friendly animals (ex. cows, pigs, horses). Aggressive mobs try to attack you when you come into their range, and will keep trying to hurt you until they are either killed, out of range, or succeeded in killing you. Aggressive mobs are usually scary monsters (ex. skeletons, creepers, ghasts). Mobs also drop items when killed that are called mob drops. These drops are all dependant on what mob you are killing. For example, you cannot receive pork chops from killing a zombie. You can use these drops to aid in your crafting recipes.

A Creeper

An Enderman

Now that you know the basics of Minecraft, start a world and explore!