The Minecraft Heads-Up Display (HUD) - For Dummies

The little arrangement at the bottom of the Minecraft screen is known as the Heads-Up Display, or HUD. To show the important details of your character, the HUD features the five sections described in the following list, as shown.

• Health bar: These ten hearts monitor the health of your avatar. As your avatar incurs damage, the hearts disappear. After all ten are depleted, your avatar dies and reappears at its spawn point, a position that can be changed by sleeping in a bed.

  Your avatar can take damage by falling from ledges 4 blocks tall, colliding with harmful blocks or entities, or succumbing to other dangers, such as drowning. When you equip yourself with armor, the Armor bar appears over the Health bar, indicating the protective value of your armor.

• Hunger bar: This bar represents the food supply. The emptier the bar, the hungrier you are. Hunger is an important concept to understand.

• Experience: The green Experience bar fills up when you collect experience orbs. These orbs appear naturally whenever you defeat monsters, smelt items in a furnace, breed animals, or mine any ore except iron or gold. When the bar is full, a number appears or increases over it, indicating your experience level. You can spend levels with Anvils or enchantment tables, but you will lose them if you die.

• Inventory: These nine squares, at the base of the HUD, contain items you’ve collected, and they’re the only squares in the inventory that you can access without pressing E. You can use the 1–9 keys or the scroll wheel to select items, and right-click to use them. If you’re using a sword or a tool for breaking blocks faster (such as an axe), the item automatically functions when you left-click.

• Breath: When your avatar’s head goes underwater, ten bubbles appear just above the Hunger bar and begin to pop, one by one. They signify how long you can hold your breath; if all the bubbles are gone and you’re still underwater, the Health bar begins to deplete.

  

Carefully monitor the Health and Hunger bars, and organize the inventory slots for easy access.