Portfolio
Hello! My name is sartzava. I am a father in my late 30's who loves playing, and watching others play, Minecraft. I started playing Minecraft in 2012 when my oldest daughter expressed interest in the game. I got hooked, especially after watching some people on YouTube play.
I joined an adults-only server called WhoCraft a few years ago with the goal of playing on a vanilla server similar to the Mindcrack and Hermitcraft servers. I quickly fell in love with the community, and have enjoyed building both on my own and with the team in our well-developed world.
I started my YouTube channel with the goal of sharing some of my experiences and my fun with others. As you can see below, I am pretty picky about the kinds of YouTube channels I watch.
Because of that, I have designed my channel to be both safe for kids and interesting to adults. I keep the videos clean (even when playing with other people), and I try to make the content interesting so that adults can watch without being bored.
Minecraft is BIG on YouTube. In 2014 it was the second most searched for term on the site after Music. It is also touted (and not) as a great educational tool for kids.
Because I am so into Minecraft myself, other parents sometimes ask me which YouTubers I recommend for their kids. The problem is that there are many YouTubers that play Minecraft, but not all of them are, in my opinion, safe for kids. The problems I see with many YouTube channels are pretty broad, but I tend to stay away from those who:
I have been watching Minecraft videos on YouTube for a very long time, so I tend to be pretty picky about watching people who actually play the game well and have decent content. The following is a list of my favorite YouTube channels, with explanations of why I like them.
Etho: Etho is hands-down my favorite Minecrafter. He has been playing for a very long time, and he has a very solid understanding of the game mechanics. He is very good at building redstone machines, and has a very diverse building style. He plays both vanilla and modded, and both single-player and multi-player.
Subscribers: 1.8 million
Type: Vanilla and Modded
Direwolf20: For modded Minecraft, Direwolf20 is the person to watch. He is the unofficial spotlight creator for Feed the Beast (FTB) mods, and usually has the most in-depth mod spotlights available. He plays both single and multiplayer, but is well known for never playing vanilla. My only complaint about Direwolf is that he likes the magic mods more than I do, and he tends to play with them a lot in his videos. However, he is also really big into automation, and it is fun to see him find new ways to automate all the things.
Subscribers: 460,000
Type: Modded
Xisuma: I found Xisuma through a stroke of luck, and I am very glad that I did. He plays vanilla Minecraft almost exclusively, and he tends to take on massive builds that sometimes boggle the mind. Like Etho, he tends to have a focus on automating things in vanilla, which is always fun to watch. He does livestreams on Twitch and uploads them to his second YouTube channel.
Subscribers: 504,000
Type: Vanilla
TangoTek: Tango can be fun to watch sometimes. He plays on the Hermitcraft server with Xisuma and Etho, and has a pretty epic building style. He does a lot of automation, as well, and has created some very interesting mini-games that they play in their world.
Subscribers: 208,000
Type: Vanilla
There are lots of other players on YouTube beyond these, but not many I personally recommend. A few that you might want to also look at are PaulSoaresJr, The Diamond Minecart OMGchad, and MumboJumbo
There are also a lot of YouTube channels that are much more popular than the ones I have mentioned. However, the ones that are the most popular are also the ones that I as a father (and as an adult) find to be the most annoying. The three that immediately come to mind in this category are TheBajanCanadian, CaptainSparklez, and PewDiePie. Your mileage may vary, but be forewarned.