How to start out in Minecraft

Ah, so you have made your way into your first game of Minecraft. You look around, admiring the beautiful trees, impressive mountains, and barren deserts. You get so caught up in the amazingness that you get killed by a creeper. Don’t get killed by a creeper. Read this and find out the basics to get your Minecraft career of on a good foot.

Firstly, it IS a good thing to take a quick look around and get a feel for your surroundings. Make note of any trees if you aren’t in a forest where trees are abundant. Also make note of coal around you. Coal looks like this:

After you took that quick look around, (that should have only taken you about 45-60 seconds) punch down a tree or two. When you have around 10 logs, put them in your CRAFTING box in your inventory page. That will look like this:

What you see on the right of the logs are called wooden planks. These are used to make your very first tools, but first we have to make a crafting table. To do so put a wooden plank in each square of your crafting menu. On the right this time will be a crafting table. Drag that into your hot bar and escape your inventory menu. Highlight the crafting table and place it down using right click. Right click it once more and an even bigger crafting menu will pop up. This is what you will use to make most of your tools and items. We are now going to make our basic tools. We will make a pickaxe, an axe, a shovel, and a sword. First, we will make 8 sticks. 8 sticks are made when you put one wooden plank on top of another in you crafting menu. After you make your sticks, craft them in these ways to get your tools:

Now that you have your tools, try to mine some coal and stone, chop some wood, dig some dirt if the other resources aren’t coming your way, and kill some pigs, cows, or chickens to get some meat. Make a house by placing down blocks. Place them down like you placed down your crafting bench (right-click). Here is a simple house that I made:

Well, as you can see in the background of that picture, its getting late in Minecraftia. Time to snuggle up in the house and create more tools, including stone ones now that we have resources. Keep in mind that tools can be made out of diamonds, iron, gold, stone, and wood. Never be content with what you have until you have the best. Other things you can make are torches, beds, doors, furnaces, etc. All of these and much, much, more can be four with their recipes on the Minecraft Wiki at: