I finally went to see A Minecraft Movie today! As a close friend of a lifelong Minecraft fan, I’ve been hearing non-stop about the game for years, and so I’m familiar with all the invented terms and understood every single reference in the movie.

However, while I was watching I realised that for the uninitiated, Minecraft vocabulary can sound like a foreign language. In reality, the game developers have created a rich set of new words only relevant to the Minecraft world, as well as repurposing existing words. Both of these types of words are known as neologisms, and it’s important to have a good grasp of them if you want to understand the world of Minecraft.

So, if you’re going to see the movie soon and want to brush up on your Minecraft speech, keep reading!

Mob

Mob stands for ‘mobile object’, and refers to all the different non-player characters in the game. Some of the most common mobs include creepers, zombies, villagers and animals - we’ll be looking at a few of them further on in this post.

Ghast

Ghasts are huge mobs which look a bit like ghosts with tentacles. Even though they’re usually hostile, Minecraft recently introduced a happy ghast, which you can see below. This is probably my favourite Minecraft word, maybe because what it refers to is so cute!

Piglin

Piglins are pig-like mobs that live in the Nether (basically Minecraft’s version of hell). They’re obsessed with gold, and if they go above ground to the Overworld (where most people play in Minecraft), they turn into zombified piglins.

Spawn

This is an example of an existing word reused for gaming and given a new meaning. When players enter the game and appear in their Minecraft world, they ‘spawn’. At first, they spawn in random places, but eventually they can set up a bed as a base and spawn there.

Mod

Not to be confused with mobs, mods are modifications or changes that players can make to the game. To create a mod, you need some knowledge of the code on which the game is built, in order to change it and introduce a mod. Popular mods include Chisel & Bits, the Aether, the Create Mod and the Axiom Mod.

Skin

Skins are essentially the appearance of the player’s character within the game. The default skin is Steve (Jack Black’s character from A Minecraft Movie), but players can customise theirs in pretty much every way. If I played Minecraft, mine would definitely be purple!

Vanilla

Nope, nothing to do with ice-cream flavours. Vanilla Minecraft is the basic bare bones Minecraft package, with no mods or added elements. Vanilla Minecraft is updated about once a year, but good news for Minecraft fans - the updates are getting more and more frequent!

This isn’t an exhaustive list of Minecraft terms - there’s loads more to learn by playing the game. If you liked this post, maybe Minecraft is for you!

Do you know your Mods from your Mobs? Minecraft Neologisms Explained

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