What's the difference between the different versions?

My brother recently got me interested in Minecraft, and I'm having a lot of fun playing it. The thing is, I've only ever played the Beta version. After I first played it, I found a whole bunch of pictures and videos online with stuff that wasn't in the version I was playing. So I was wondering: What are the main differences between all the different versions of the game?

Solution 1:

The differences are far too numerous to list here (Minecraft is still under heavy development), but the unofficial wiki has a detailed list of the significant changes in each release.

Roughly speaking, however, the different stages of development can be described as:

• Classic: proof of concept
• Indev: develop into a salable product
• Infdev: infinite world generation
• Alpha: downloadable client and offline play
• Beta: content and polish

Solution 2:

What you might have seen is someone playing with mods - extra code not written by Mojang - that allow players to do things not in the base game.

As Minecraft auto updates (you get prompted until you accept the update) you will always be playing the latest released version (even though it's still in Beta). This means that you can be sure that when playing multiplayer everyone is on the same version.

There have been removals of "stuff" but mostly it's tweaks to existing game play plus additions of new game play.