Minecraft Forums

I think what it comes down to is how hard/challenging the game is for you.

For example, I'm very much of a newbie myself, but I have finding the basic ores dialed in pretty well. Drop us both in identical worlds, and I can probably get iron ore faster on Normal than a newer newbie like Coy could do on Peaceful, just because I've learned how to do it, and someone who really knows the game would do it easier than either of us. So would it be "cheap" for Coy to do something -- in this case, turn on the game's "training wheels" -- when it's still harder for him to accomplish the task than it is for someone with more experience?

The more you learn about how the game works, how the world works, heck, even how the toolbar works, the easier it is to do things. Changing the game difficulty from "Too Hard" to "I Can Do This" can be what you need to get past that hump of facing problems and not only not knowing how to solve them, but even if you did know what to do, not knowing how to do it. This is all stuff a player has to learn, and the game has settings to enable someone to learn it.

As a random example, a couple of weeks ago, when I started, lava practically made me panic. LAVA! It's gonna fry me! What do I do? Oh my God, what do I do? Run away! Run awaaaaaaay! I put blocks of dirt every so often in my mining tunnels in case I accidentally started a lavafall, etc. Now, of course, I just throw water on it, and get out my diamond pickaxe to mine the resulting obsidian. A couple of weeks ago, lava was an insurmountable barrier; now, it's a resource. That's part of learning about the game.

It would be ridiculous to tell a player that it's "cheating" to get information from other people, such as asking questions on the forums, reading the wiki, watching videos of how to do things, etc. But that's just another way of making the game easier. Imagine if we all had to figure it all out for ourselves (and I've been playing computer games since the 1980s, when we did; I remember the days of "guess the parser" text adventures, where you could know exactly what you wanted to do, but spend hours trying to guess what commands would actually do it, and there was no way to look it all up). In a sense, getting information from outside instead of figuring it all out for yourself is an "easy mode" all its own, and it's one that most of us use freely. (I'm a little weird that way because I don't generally ask questions; I look things up or experiment. It feels as though asking "How do I do thus-and-so?" is actually more of a "cheat" than changing the game mode while I figure it out for myself. Yes, I know I"m strange)

It's all about what is fun for you. It's your game, not mine or anybody else's. If a "survival island" map and hardcore mode is what trips your trigger, go for it. If you like exploring mineshafts on Peaceful, then do that, too. If you like switching modes as needed, the button for it is right there. If you want to look everything up before you try doing it, or only if you can't get anywhere with it for an hour or so, or never, no matter how stuck you are, that's your choice too. That's one of the primary things about Minecraft: there is no "right" way to play it, any more than there is a right way to play with a box of Lego bricks. You do what's fun for you. There are innumerable options, and don't let me or anyone else tell you the one you like is wrong.

Well, except the people who respond to someone posting a neat seed by asking "ware do i find dimends???" They're just lazy.