It took me years to realize Minecraft is a sandbox game and i can do whatever i want.

This is a kind of long text of me talking about my minecraft journey over the past 15 years so you can just ignore this post, i just wanted to say this somewhere lol.

I have been playing Minecraft since i was 5 or 6 years old, so since 2010 or 2011, i still remember my brother finding a cracked version of the game, idk what the crack was i just remember it had a Chicken Jockey as like a picture I had NO idea how to play the game, my young brain was confused all the time, i started grabbing random items and putting them in a crafting table thinking it would make something, to my dismay that didn’t work. I saw my brother had snow golems so i tried making them and was so happy when it worked. I barely knew english so i just made worlds and hoped to somehow be in creative, which of course didn’t work. I remember one of my first worlds was in a village and i made houses for my friends out of wood thinking they could just magically join my Minecraft world, i also strictly built the houses with wooded because i didn’t know i needed a pickaxe to mine cobblestone, and i remember being mad that when i took what felt like hours breaking the stone with my hand, it still didn’t drop anything. Eventually i started watching Minecraft youtube channels and became obsessed. The oldest YouTubers i watched were ChimneySwift and Dadsrfunny, later on i also watched DanTDM and Stampy. Around 2nd or 3rd grade me and my friend started playing Minecraft pocked edition and we had a ton of fun. We would spend hours playing after school making shitty builds we both loved. I also played single player. I had this one world where i had made a big garden with glowstone (by copying a youtube tutorial) in a flat world, and after that i just bombed it. Idk why but seeing the remaining part of the garden, and the big crater i have made, inspired me to make that my main world. I would build everything there (all in creative) i had treehouses, mansions, random pixel art, big statues of my skin, yet i lived in a small dirt shack, that was in the middle of the crater, because i would get in survival and pretend i was some kind of fallout survivor. This phase of my life was until 5th grade so basically until i was 11. In 2016, basically when i started 6th grade i had a really shitty period in my life, i had no classes with my friends, and i was bullied. 2016-2018 were bad periods in my life even though i was really young, i was a shy gay closeted middle school kid, this was also around the time i stopped playing much Minecraft because it was seen as “uncool” it was the time Fortnite became really popular. I would still play Minecraft from time to time, but it was usually with my friends who were in an another school, never single player. I did try single player but it got really boring. At the end of 2018 things got better, but i still felt bored from single player Minecraft, my creativity was at an all time low, so i just continued playing with several friends. By 2020 basically everybody stopped playing Minecraft, i had my occasional 2 week phases, but they amounted to nothing. I would basically build a basic starter houses in the way that everyone builds, get diamond stuff and basically just log off. In 2022 i started playing again but with a new friend group, but i just didn’t feel the same thrill i used to have with Minecraft, even though i still felt attached to it. In 2023 i tried recreating the emotion that that flat world gave me, and started building in a flat world, while that was fun, i started watching a ton of building tutorials, and i was always looking to improve. The Minecraft world that was for my eyes only became a burden to me. I had more fun making shitty dumb builds that were an eye sore, than the big buildings that took hours but were really beautiful. Whenever i did build stupid stuff i felt like i was wasting my time, like i had to make something to show for the fact that i have been playing for so long. I stopped playing in that world and started the loop of 2 week Minecraft phases all over again. In 2024 i started seeing a lot of videos about beta 1.7.3, which might have been mostly nostalgia bait, but i fell for it! Created a survival world in beta 1.7.3 and had an absolute blast, i was making stuff just to make it, there was less to do back then so i didn’t feel the need to make something grand, just say fuck it and play, eventually i got bored of that though, so i decided to update the game to 1.0 and get more blocks, and even beat the ender dragon. Gradually this mindset led me to the current version. I basically set a goal for myself, if i do that and that then i get update the version (the goal was usually to collect all the blocks in current version so i can update it though lol) around this time a lot of people started talking about forever worlds, so i decided to stop starting over every time i got bored. I just used this world, i did get bored by my current place, so i just left my items in a chest and moved 1000 blocks away, and started building from scratch, which was also a lot of fun. I again had ideas for big projects, but i didn’t feel like collecting the blocks, so i got in creative and started making big builds somewhere. I also wanted to do stuff i used to do before, so at the spawn area i made a big area for waypoints in my world using command blocks. This was the most fun i’ve had in Minecraft for years and i had no plans of stopping, eventually though i did start overthinking my builds, i used to see builds i was proud of and now i looked at them like i needed to make them better, because this was my forever worlds, i have 500+ days in it, it needs to look like i actually put time into it. This mindset made the game suck again, i was torturing myself about something that only i would see, like i was expecting an audience at any second and they would look at me with disgust for making random shit. I also had college so i just stopped playing. Now i am back in the world, i started building stuff again. And i just thought to myself. Why am i thinking so much over this? It’s a sandbox game, i can literally do whatever i want. Whatever i build it’s just for me, whether big and extravagant or small and dumb, as long as it brings me joy thats what matters! If you were to see my world now it is a mesh of complete randomness, i have some themed areas, but if i have a medieval town, near it theres is a giant eye of Cathulu from terraria looming over it. It is complete and utter chaos and i love it, it makes no sense and it is perfect to me. Idk if anyone is going to read this, i’m writing this for myself so i can express myself somewhere (honestly i don’t think my friends want to hear me talk about my history with Minecraft) but if you did read this whole thing, thank you. If you are in anyway relating to this, and feel like you will never escape this rot, remember this is your hobby and whatever you do is correct and only do what makes you happy! I feel like most people forget that Minecraft is a sandbox game and can be played however anyone wants, i suck at pvp and still have no clue how redstone works, but does that stop me from trying dying and failing? Nope! But thats what makes it fun!