You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can.
I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine.
That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode.
Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house.
And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles.
Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.
There is only hardcore. No other mode exists. Large biomes... sometimes it drops you in a desert where there is no wood, and the only obtainable block is sand. You can't build a roof with sand. There is no way to obtain coal or charcoal, so you can't make torches to light the night sky and keep monsters at bay. No trees for kilometers. You see the beach, do you dare try swimming for it? The drowned zombies come out of nowhere, you swim too slow to dodge tridents. Maybe wood out there in some sunken ship, but wooden blocks are difficult to discern from slabs or stairs down deep. Iron, if you can figure out the correct way to get to the chest. If that chest is even there in a broken ship.
"Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.
A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft.
I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows).
My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in.
As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like.
There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works.
But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.
If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc.
If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode.
Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.
> Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored.
When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them.
That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.
Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic
Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game.
I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.
