Minecraft is surprisingly deeper than I thought. Some videos on youtube show a virtual CPU that has been constructed and shows it operating. A simple search for minecraft CPU should do it.
Yeah, a lot of what some people think of minecraft is probably based on the (IMO) crap "classic" version, which is basically nothing more than a finite world where you can place blocks that have no actual purpose but aesthetics. It was a ALU created using 'redstone' in Minecraft that made me want to try out the paid variant.
As it stands now, there are a few significant parts of minecraft.
1. Exploration
This is pretty critical. And you are going to need to do at least some of this at the start to gather your beginning materials. The world is for practical purposes infinite, so getting more resources is merely a matter of exploring new areas, spelunking and searching the new cave systems you find, and so forth. This also lends itself to
2.Mechanisms
Having to come out of a deep, long mine with a fully loaded inventory on a constant basis can be a huge pain. You can use some of the resources you acquire to build things like minecart tracks; so you can either just ride a minecart home. Or, you could build it so that you can send a "chest cart" with your stuff back to your house, and at your house you could have various mechanisms that will redirect incoming chest carts into various stopping areas. Then when you come home you can grab their contents and place them into your "normal" stationary treasure chests.
In multiplayer, I find the most fulfilling use of mechanisms is in creating traps for people that are trying to steal my stuff. I made a secret room with a particular arrangement, and then purposely allowed a known "theif" player to follow me. (so he knew about my "secret" room.) Later, I used "sneak" mode (shift, which makes your nametag invisible to other players if there is a wall between you) to watch as he entered that room, clearly with the intent to steal the treasures he suspected I had there. The hallway eventually lead to a obsidian room, with an open iron door, (which requires redstone power to keep open). He was too distracted by what he perceived as a prize- a block of diamond, one of the rarest and most sought after materials in the game. By this time I had followed him and was now stood outside the door, and watched as he broke the diamond and collected it. This detached a Redstone torch (power source) that was attached to the rear of that block, which stopped the power flow to the door, closing it. That torch breaking also allowed a block of sand to fall, which held up another torch, which held up more sand, etc, causing a cascade reaction. The ceiling fell. He was safe. He turned around and saw me outside the door, which was now closed. I could almost hear the gears working in his head trying to figure out why the door would be closed. Until he looked up and saw the wall of lava that was now going to fall on his head. It was most gratifying watching them try to break the iron door in time to escape and fail miserably (since I machined the trap in such a way as to not allow that). Was totally worth the 9 diamond that I used to make the block.
Mechanisms can be made for nearly anything; semi-automatic wheat, melon, reed, and pumpkin farms, machines designed to kill enemies or make them easier for you to kill, such as the "blaze cone" idea which is used for killing one of the enemies added in a recent patch, the "Blaze" (
I made one of these 
.
At the moment it is one of the few games I've played consistently over the past year since I first bought it in Alpha.
