The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.
If memory serves, those things were added shortly after this was written, sometime after Microsoft purchased Minecraft.
Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”
> Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found.
That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.
