It’s hard to overstate the popularity of Minecraft on YouTube. The video-sharing platform is a home to tens of thousands of gamers who upload their escapades to be enjoyed by a wider community. Around the middle of 2014, those videos had been viewed a grand total of 31 billion times. Wowsers. As with any community, there are superstars who’ve gathered a huge audience. They have hundreds of thousands of fans, and with the money they earn from their channel, a lucky few are even able to quit their jobs and play Minecraft for a living.

If you want to join those hallowed ranks, we’ve gathered together some advice for you from the very best in . You’ll learn from Minecraft superstars about the technical and artistic principles necessary to create a brilliant Minecraft YouTube channel. Just don’t forget us when you’re raking in the cash and adulation of your legions of fans, yeah?

As a sneak peak here's our chat with Redstone expert and rising YouTube star . Join us as he natters about Minecraft in schools, the fundamentals of circuitry and how YouTube made Mojang’s finest what it is today...

Going back, can you remember your first experience of Minecraft, and can you tell us what it was like? I remember it because some people at my school were talking about Minecraft and they were chatting about this game and saying it looks like Lego. You know what: I quite like Lego! So I hopped onto the computer. I asked my mum’s permission to buy it, because I was a little bit younger at the time. I got it and I was up till about 4am working on my first hut. It was made entirely out of dirt. It had holes in the roof for the torches and I remember on the first night I tried to sleep and just immediately got blown up. That was one of my first experiences of Minecraft. I’m glad I kept it up, but that could have been the end, almost!

Did you have any idea then how big the game would eventually become? Oh, no, definitely not. I got it in the Alpha stage. Back then you’d tell people: ‘I play Minecraft’ and they’d be confused. They’d be like: ‘the graphics are awful!’ They’d talk about how terrible it looked compared to all the other games…

What makes Minecraft such an enticing prospect for you? It’s just raw creativity. You make the fun in the game. It’s not like Call Of Duty or something like that. You have a very defined role in Call Of Duty where you have to go along and kill the other team. It’s great fun, but as far as Minecraft is concerned, there are no real instructions. There’s no real goal or motive. I mean technically you don’t have to do anything in the game. You can just walk around and punch trees! But you make your own little journey. It’s great fun messing around with what’s possible in this world, like I do with redstone, to see what I can do there.There are plenty of possibilities, for example, in building and things. You can build a giant castle. Nobody needs to build a giant castle! It’s not one of the aims of the game at all, but it’s just one of those things you can do if you want to.

The castle is pretty much the go to for everyone, right? Funny that! Yeah!

Do you think Minecraft should be held up as an educational resource for younger kids? I guess so yes. It requires quite a lot of logical thought and it forces you to be a lot more creative than other things in the market. If people are getting into redstone, it teaches you some of the fundamental things about Boolean logic, which is to say the fundamentals of computing. That’s a pretty big deal. Outside of that, it forces you to be creative and use your brain and assess what you’re doing and better whatever it is that you’re working on.

And then there’s the community aspect as well. Are you proud to be a member of the wider Minecraft community? It’s one of the more friendly communities I can think of on the internet. It was extremely welcoming. When I started out on YouTube, everyone who’s a similar size to you will help you out. Everyone seems to have a common interest in Minecraft, and obviously you get involved in your own little communities. If you’re all working together, as a team, it allows you to build friendships quite easily. There are plenty of little servers that are people from all over the world working together as a little group on their various projects and things. I’ve experienced that, and it’s something you see right the way throughout the community.

What makes Minecraft perfect for crafting videos around? It comes back to the fact that the person who’s creating the video has full control over the content they’re producing. In other games it relies on being extremely good at one aspect. Here you can just have fun with friends on a server, and that will make a good video because you’re clearly having fun! Other than that there’s the whole tutorial aspect. You can show people various bits, how to do the technical elements, and also you have the full Let’s Play. It’s essentially limitless. there’s not a set achievement structure. Let’s Plays can run on for hundreds of episodes without running out of content. That’s one of the main things that’s kept it going so well in terms of YouTube. Obviously you have the whole modding side, there’s always content available.

How important is YouTube for Minecraft? It’s very important because without it I don’t think Minecraft would be where it is today. That’s my own personal opinion. The reason a lot of my friends found out about Minecraft is because some of the YouTubers that they were watching originally started playing Minecraft. They saw it and they thought… well first they thought it looked rubbish, but when they saw the creative elements and all the things that you could do with it they got into it. It’s one of those games that blew up on YouTube pretty quickly, and suddenly it was in all of everyone’s sub boxes and feeds, and people were looking into it and wondering ‘what on earth is this thing?’ That’s the sort of thing that I don’t think Minecraft could have achieved through traditional advertising. If you showed me an advert on the TV, and it was like: ‘It’s building. With blocks.’ I’d just be like: ‘that doesn’t seem like anything I’d be interested in’. YouTube was a huge element for Minecraft’s success. And I know that’s biased from a YouTuber!

If you had the keys to YouTube is there anything you would change? There’d be a few things in terms of the YouTube side of things. Like if they were a lot better at pushing videos to people that were subscribed to you. That seems to be something that YouTube are phasing out. It seems odd to me. That’s the one thing I’d change. But it works as it is. It probably isn’t perfect, but it does function well. And I’m yet to find myself looking for an alternative. Currently I’m perfectly happy on YouTube. It suits me down to the ground. A few little tiny problems, but other than that it’s running smoothly.

And if you had the keys to Minecraft, what would you change there? I think there would be a few little bits. It wouldn’t be the hardcore elements of the game. They work perfectly fine. But in terms of my own little niche of redstone, there are a few little elements I wouldn’t mind adding. Cogs, pulleys, things like that. That would be really good fun and would add a whole new area of the world. Other than that, it’s probably not perfect. There are plenty of bugs in Minecraft and there are things people like to complain about, but you forget that it’s a game that functions perfectly well. I’ve played Minecraft for five years now. I paid 13 pounds for it, the best 13 pounds I’ve spent in my life. I’m in no position to complain!

What is your favourite build? Aw blimey. This is going to be a tough one. I could take this a couple of routes. I could go for my first ever redstone contraption which was a 2x2 door that was using just wooden doors. That was one of my first ones so you could say it was one of my favourites. Phoar… I’ve… There’s a lot of them. I don’t know why but I’ve got a fond memory of the armour stand jump scare device. It’s funny because it’s so very pointless. It was when flying blocks were first introduced, and we had the ability to launch entities at great speed. So I placed an armour stand behind the door and a flying block behind the armour stand. If you walked past it would just launch out at you, and I’ve always liked that contraption just because it was very silly.

What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do with redstone? I’d almost go back to my first redstone project again! Oh, I don’t know. I’ve worked on some things that have never come together, and I’ve worked on them for hours and hours on end. I know I say don’t give up, but, when things go so wrong, you have to know when to stop! Looking back, they’re getting on, but there was an infinitely expandable 5x5 door. Back then it required a lot of piston action, that was getting on two-and-a-half, maybe three years ago. That was my first proper large scale redstone project. That took a lot of work!