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Apr 11, 2024 · By following the tips and tricks provided in this beginner’s guide to flying in Minecraft, you’ll be able to master the art of flight in no time. Whether you choose to fly in creative mode, utilize elytra wings, or install jetpack mods, practice and experimentation are key to honing your flying skills.
Playing Minecraft for the first time? Before you explore, parents and players can get tips on how to play Minecraft, in-game safety features, and more.
Mar 21, 2013 · There are essentially three different gaming platforms where you kids can play Minecraft: on a mobile gadget (iOS/Android), XBOX, and on a PC/Mac. All of them allow your kids to play the game a bit differently, so take a peek at these tips before you decide which one you want to commit to.
Feb 23, 2017 · We know Minecraft can be intimidating to newcomers so we've assembled this simple guide to get you started. Trust us, you'll be a miner expert in no time! We'd recommend starting this guide with Starting Out and Survival Tips. But however you choose to play Minecraft is the right way to play.
- Overview
- Controls and interface
- Play-by-play Getting started A player begins the game standing in a landscape somewhere. This is the general area in which a player reappears (respawns) upon death. If you have slept in a bed (and the bed's still there) you respawn next to that. This is the start of a new Minecraft world. This tutorial is intended to teach you the skills needed to survive in this world and eventually be able to do just about anything you desire. You can do the different sections below in any order you desire, but many sections require you to first complete other tasks first. The tasks listed on this page (except those noted as optional) should all be completed before moving on to the second day tutorial, even if it takes you multiple days to complete all of the tutorials. No matter what, your goal for the first day should be creating a bed or shelter so you can survive the night. The other tasks are also important and can all be completed along with the main objectives while leaving you with extra time. See the first section of this guide for information about controls and getting around in the world. You need to master those skills in order to complete the following tasks. Again, the game starts at noon, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. Your overarching goal here is to acquire basic equipment and a simple shelter in that time. You do have some time to practice your basic skills and learn about your inventory, but don't take too much time at that. If night falls and you still don't have any shelter or basic equipment, it is fair (for your first game) to switch the game to Peaceful mode for the night. While following the steps below, break any tall grass you see and collect any seeds that drop. They become useful later. In fact, collect any loose items you come across; almost everything can be potentially useful. Also keep an eye out for orange pumpkin blocks and (if you happen to be in a jungle) green melon blocks. If you find any, break some of them and take the results with you for later farming. Also watch out for sweet berry bushes. "Using" them can provide berries for a bit of food, but actually stepping into them hurts! Biomes Main article: Biome The Minecraft world is divided into different areas called "biomes". Different biomes contain different blocks and plants and change how the land is shaped. There is an advancement that includes finding all the biomes; this is better explained on the advancements page. Biomes affect you, especially at the beginning of the game, but you need not worry about specific biomes until you have learned how to play the game. If you are curious, you may want to read more about biomes on the biomes page. That said, there are a few cases you should worry about: You start on a small island in the ocean: Go to the highest point on the island and look around for other land. If you see a reasonably-sized continent with trees and animals, swim there. If you see no large land and no animals in sight, you have an "ocean spawn". For a player's first game, it is entirely reasonable to exit this world and try again with a different seed. You are standing on sand, with no trees or water nearby. You are in a desert. Again, go to high ground and look around for trees and green grass. If you see some, go there before continuing with this guide. If there's no green in sight, this is another situation where you can reasonably toss the world and try again. Deserts are much easier when encountered from outside, but they are missing important things like dirt, wood, and accessible stone, all of which you really do need to start off the game. You are in a dark forest with thick trees, a thick leaf canopy, and giant mushrooms scattered around. This is a particularly unsafe place for a starting character and a beginning player, because the canopy can create areas dark enough for hostile mobs to spawn in daytime. However, if you move quickly, you can probably make it to more open ground in a reasonable amount of time, and start setting up in a more reasonable biome. Don't leave the dark forest behind completely, though — once you have basic armor and weapons, it's a resource-rich area. Grab some of that plentiful wood once you reach the edge! The giant mushrooms also offer a plentiful source of food, so don't forget to grab some of those! There is a rare chance for a woodland mansion to generate in this biome. They are dangerous, but provide you a lot of good resources, so make a note where it is! The land around you is greyish-purple, with dusty particles, giant mushrooms, and red "cows": Rejoice, for you have received a miracle: a spawn in a mushroom fields biome, where hostile creatures cannot appear (except for underground dungeons). You do need to go elsewhere to find wood, crop seeds, and some other resources, but otherwise, you've gotten into a golden situation here. Once you have even a bit of wood, you can get unlimited food from the mooshrooms, and you have a large area in which you barely need to worry about your safety even at night, a great place to set up your long-term base. Villages If you see houses and other buildings nearby, this is not exactly a biome, but it means that you are near a village, which is a good thing. In fact, a village lets you skip past much of the first and second-day activities (due to ready-made shelter and beds) but it requires a bit of care. It's worth exploring the village and looting any chests you find; if you happen to find any emeralds, you might even be able to buy some useful items from the villagers. Besides providing equipment, food and other resources, a village also lets you collect the seeds for all four of the basic crops up front, from their farms, and you can also take one of their beds with you when you leave. You can even grab a few blocks of wood or stone from their houses, but try not to damage the village too much -- your best bet may be to disassemble one of the smaller houses and move its bed to one of the intact houses. (Don't bother doing this in a desert village, the sandstone is pretty but fragile, and you can't make tools out of it.) If you see an iron golem trundling around, be careful — If you attack it or the villagers, it becomes hostile to you! Right-click (use) on the villagers to open the trading interface. Do not left-click (attack) on them as they become upset, raising their prices... and if an iron golem notices, you're in trouble. As you originally encounter them, villagers can sell useful early-game items like iron tools, armor and weapons, but remember that eventually you can mine for your own iron and such. Don't bother buying stone tools unless you're in a desert, and maybe not even then. You can also harvest wheat and vegetables from village farms, but be sure to replant them afterward, they don't look like much newly planted, but they grow back over time. You can even sell the crops you harvested back to the farmers. You can also harvest any hay bales from the vicinity and craft them back into wheat, and sell the wheat to any farmer you find (or make bread out of it for yourself). Any time you are near a village, you can sleep in one of their beds overnight, as soon as night falls. Trying to stay up overnight can expose the village to attacks by monsters, which can easily wipe out the villagers. It's okay if a villager has already claimed the bed — trying to use the bed the first time simply kicks the villager out, and then you can use the bed again for yourself. If you have a village, you should probably travel some distance from it (say, fifty or a hundred or so blocks from the edge) to make your own lair, to avoid having monsters appear overnight due to your presence. If monsters (such as illagers) do appear during the day, your best bet at this point is to ring one of the bells in the village, and hope that the village's iron golem can deal with the invasion. It is difficult to repopulate a village that has been wiped out. Certainly remember where the village was, because as you accumulate more resources, the trading becomes more exploitable. For the first day, the most obvious tricks are: Take any food or other resources from the chests. Some items like obsidian or horse armor may not be immediately useful, so you can leave those for later. Collect any hay bales and harvest any crops that are ripe,. Try to replant what you harvest, but make sure you keep seeds for each of the four crops (wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot). If there are pumpkins or melons around, collect samples of those. The hay bales can be turned into wheat, which, along with any harvested crops can be sold back to the farmers, or crafted into bread. If you have a fair bit of extra wood, and can find a Fletcher, you can turn the wood into sticks (see below) and sell those, getting 1 emerald for 2 logs' worth of wood. With those emeralds and any you find in the chests, you may be able to buy a couple more useful items, most likely leather armor or iron tools. If you really need wood or stone, try harvesting a few logs or cobblestone from above head height in the houses, so as to minimize the damage. Sleep in a bed overnight, and take it with you when you go. Getting Logs Main articles: Wood and Log Wood is the most basic resource in Minecraft, and you need to collect some up front. The usual and most plentiful wood source are logs from trees, which are available in most biomes. Logs are one of many items that can be collected without the use of a tool. All you have to do is mine any log of the tree with your hand or any item. Each block drops as an item that you can pick up and put in your inventory by approaching it. You should start by collecting 6-8 logs for your first tools. There are many different types of trees in Minecraft, each having its own individual name and look. Each kind of log can easily be crafted into a matching type of planks. All logs and planks work for any recipe requiring logs or planks respectively, but a few recipes require that all the wood you use be the same type (for example, when making a boat, you can't mix oak and spruce planks). If you mine all the wood from a tree, the leaf blocks atop it start decaying (you can also break them yourself), dropping sticks, saplings, and perhaps apples. For your first day, don't wait around for leaves to decay, but as usual, pick up any items they do drop and save them for later. Once you get to making axes, harvesting wood becomes much faster! A rarer source of wood is sunken ships, which are made of logs and planks and are found in ocean biomes, but dealing with these is probably best saved for later. Abandoned mineshafts (found on the surface in a few biomes) also contain planks, but these are definitely better saved for later. Your Recipe Book provides an assortment of useful recipes for wood, including each type of wood as you encounter it. In order to obtain better materials at faster speeds, the player needs tools. Tools are items that allow the player to complete tasks other than placing blocks at faster speeds than normal. Most tools can be made out of different materials each better than the last. Using a tool to mine the blocks for it is intended mines the blocks more quickly than normal. Tools lose durability upon each use, even if the use was to hit an entity. In fact, using tools as weapons generally wears them out more quickly. Enough damage to a tool eventually causes the tool to break. Different tools have different properties and abilities. If you are using a tool on a block and it seems to be taking an unexpectedly long time, you may be using the wrong tool for that block. Stop to look at the block and reconsider your approach. Having acquired wood and made a crafting table, the first tool to craft is a wooden pickaxe. This starts by crafting a couple of logs into planks, and then at two of those planks into sticks. The planks required for a wooden tool can be any combination of planks, as shown below. 44444444444 4 You probably don't need to craft any other tools out of wood, because you can soon start upgrading to stone, but if you're starting in a forest, making a crafting table and wooden axe from your first three logs can help you get more wood quickly. The basic tools are: Pickaxe: used to break and gather stone, metal, and related materials such as ores. Axe: used to collect wooden materials more quickly. Shovel: used to gather dirt-type blocks: dirt, sand, gravel, clay block, and their variations."Grass blocks" are a variation of dirt. Hoe: used to break some lightweight blocks such as leaves, but its main use is to turn dirt or grass blocks into farmland. Sword: in addition to breaking cobwebss, a sword is used to attack animals or monsters. See the overview above for tool crafting recipes, but the reader may have noticed that in order to craft a basic tool, they more or less draw it with its components in the crafting grid. Other items are crafted in a similar fashion. Entering the Stone Age Cave entrances usually expose stone, but be cautious about going into the depths! Once the player has crafted a pickaxe, they can successfully acquire cobblestone to make better tools. Cobblestone is collected by finding stone, then mining it with any pickaxe. Stone mined with any pickaxe drops as a cobblestone item. Besides the "original" gray stone, there are three other kinds of rock you can find, which are good for building, but you cannot use them to craft tools. White diorite and reddish granite are fairly obvious, but andesite is also gray, and can easily be mistaken for proper stone; when you start mining, check the block that you get in your inventory to make sure it's actually cobblestone instead of an andesite block. If no stone appears above ground near the player, stone can also be found by digging into the ground. The stone layer usually appears within 5 blocks under dirt and grass, or within 8 blocks under sand and sandstone. Remember to never mine out the block you are standing on, unless you know that what's below that block isn't a long fall, lava, or other dangers! Another warning here: Unlike most blocks, sand and gravel can fall, and if they fall on you they can suffocate you. If that happens, don't panic, just dig yourself out as quickly as you can. Most players should gather at least 19 pieces of cobblestone in total, which is enough to make a furnace and all the basic stone tools including the sword and hoe. Taking extra cobblestone is good in case you use up some of your tools and need to replace them. At your crafting table, you should have all the recipes you need for a full set of stone tools. At this point, you have a set of basic tools and both of the basic crafting blocks. And while you're not really prepared for a fight, you at least have a basic weapon to defend yourself or hunt animals for food. Your options for "what to do next" have opened up: The top priority is to arrange for a shelter for the night, a bed to sleep in, or both... but you should also have at least some time left to gather more resources (especially light and food) as you explore and/or build. These extra resources can give you a solid head start for the next day and the remainder of the game. Read the following sections, and attend to them according to what you find in the world around you. Coal ore exposed on the surface. A good start is to take your axe, and cut down some more trees for logs, trying to accumulate at least 10 or even 20 logs. Although some trees may look different than others, all logs work the same. However, different kinds of logs don't stack together, and likewise for their planks. While you cut down trees, try to gather the saplings, sticks, and perhaps apples that drop from the leaves. While doing this, explore the immediate area (making sure you don't get lost), to try and find some coal ore. Coal is a key resource for making torches and smelting materials, but if you can't get it, you can fill in with charcoal, which is smelted from logs. If you get some, craft a few torches up front, but don't use up all your coal -- save some for later smelting. If you happen across a similar ore with tan specks in place of the black ones, you have found iron ore. Iron is extremely useful for most of your Minecraft career, and if it's within easy reach, go ahead and gather it (a stone pickaxe is required). However, if it's in a difficult-to-reach place, just note its location and save it for later. Along the way, keep an eye out for useful plants. Keep breaking grass for seeds as you pass it, and grab a few of other plant types that you encounter, except perhaps for flowers. Flowers are not useful yet (though dandelions might be helpful for catching rabbits), but more useful finds (depending on where you are) include pumpkins, sugar cane, melons, cactus, and sweet berry bushes. If you find any of these, break some of them and take the results with you for later farming. Be careful with cactus and berry bushes, as they harm you if you touch them! "Using" a berry bush can drop the berries without breaking the bush, but the bushes are common (not to mention hazardous), and if you do want more bushes, you can just plant the berries. Basic necessities Providing light Main article: Light Players are greatly affected by light in Minecraft. Any underground space is dark, and half of the time the game is at night. It is possible to see a little better by altering the same settings to raise the brightness level of the display, but it's not just about visibility; monsters spawn in the darkness. Specifically, any space further than 24 blocks from a player without any light is a potential spawning ground for monsters. Accordingly, a player "claims" territory by lighting it up so that monsters cannot spawn. From the first day, a player can create torches, a basic light source that remains useful throughout the game. Torches (and any other light source) need to be placed in the world to give off light. They can be placed on the side or top of any solid block, and some that aren't entirely solid (for example, you can put a torch on top of a fence). Unlike in real life, a torch remains lit forever, allowing the player to use torches as a cheap and permanent light source. One stick plus one coal or charcoal crafts into 4 torches. At the beginning of the game, you should make torches 4 at a time as you need them, once you have a reasonable supply of coal and/or charcoal you can keep a stack of torches handy. 4 The most important places to light up are a player's home or base, caves explored, the outside around the player's home, and anywhere the player is often at or near that is dark. Torches are also useful to prevent getting lost in caves as well as to prevent monsters from spawning in them. On the way into a cave, for example, a player can place torches on the left side wall (especially near where tunnels branch, and then the player knows that to find the way out, the torches should be on the right. Getting food Main articles: Hunger and Food Even though you probably aren't hungry yet, collecting some food up front, and arranging for more, is a good thing. Just now, there are three things you can do about that: You can find apples and sweet berries, which are immediately edible, but these are not good food, and also don't warrant much further discussion. Grab them as you find them, eat them if you need to. You can start a crude farm, which does not provide food immediately, but it pays off well later, as a head start toward a permanent food supply. You can kill animals and cook their meat, to get some high-quality food for your first few days of the game. You can kill spiders to get string, from which you can craft a fishing rod to catch fish, which you can cook for good food. As with your health bar, you start with a full hunger bar, with 10 icons ("shanks") representing 20 hunger points. After you have been moving around (and perhaps fighting) for a while, the hunger bar begins rippling and start decreasing. If the hunger bar drops below 90% ( × 9), you cannot regenerate health, and if it gets to 30% (), you can't sprint. If the hunger bar goes down to empty, you begin losing health. Unless you are in Hard mode (and a beginning player shouldn't be), you can't actually starve to death, but your health declines 1 health point () in Normal mode, or half the health bar ( in Easy mode), which leaves you quite vulnerable. If you are playing in Peaceful mode, you do not have to deal with hunger at all. The primary drain on hunger is from healing damage, and for quite some time eating is your only way to heal damage! Fighting (even before healing damage), sprinting, and jumping are all food-intensive as well. (That includes going uphill with auto-jump.) You have a little grace period (see "saturation") when starting the game and after eating, but when that's exhausted, your food bar starts to ripple, after which healing damage or getting too athletic starts to drain your hunger bar. See the Second Day guide for slightly more detail, or the Hunger page for the whole story. If you are staying at full health, and not fighting, sprinting, jumping, swimming long distances, or mining many blocks, then you use almost no food. Walking at normal speed does not use up food. Neither does rowing a boat. Thus, if your character has a secure place to stay, you can just stay put to conserve food while waiting out the night, a storm, or crop/animal growth. First farming Previously, you learned to break tall grass and collect the seeds. Now you have a chance to use those. Look for any water (pond, river, ocean) with dirt or grass nearby at the water level. Use your hoe on the dirt or grass, within 4 blocks of the water itself (diagonals count). Wait a moment to make sure the new farmland darkens instead of reverting back to dirt, then plant your seeds, one per block (save one or two seeds for possible chicken-wrangling, below). Later you can make a more organized farm, but for now, you have just gotten a head start on a permanent food supply. When you come back here tomorrow or the next day, the seeds may have grown into wheat, which you can use to make bread or to lure and breed cows (see "animals", below). You also get extra seeds from harvesting the wheat, which you can use to plant more wheat, or to lure and breed chickens. Pro tip: If you have any torches, place one to light the field overnight. If you have found a village, it should have farms that may include any of the four food crops: Wheat, carrots, potatoes, and beetroot. See their respective pages to see how to recognize the mature plants, and how to prepare each of these for eating. Having done so, you can harvest any mature plants you find and replant the crop afterward, with a seed (wheat or beetroot) or one of the several carrots or potatoes you just harvested. Be sure to save some seeds, and extra carrots and potatoes, for your own later farms. If you're doing this in a village and don't want to plant the seeds yourself, you can give them to a farmer to plant for you. Animals Main article: Mob § List of mobs Those creatures in Minecraft that are not immediately hostile to the player, are known as passive and neutral mobs ("mobs" for "mobile", this is a common term on this wiki). Many passive mobs can be killed for meat. Raw meat is not as nourishing as cooked meat. See "Smelting" below for details on how to cook food. Passive mobs never attempt to harm the player. The majority of passive mobs are traditional domesticated farm animals that usually ignore the player. If harmed, they flee for a short time. Some animals (such as rabbits or foxes) run straight away from players who get too near. If a passive mob is killed, it may drop resources such as raw meat. Most passive mobs at least drop a few experience orbs if killed by the player, but baby animals never drop anything. These passive mobs include the several meat animals... and now you've got a new stone sword! Look for sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs, use your sword to kill a few and collect the meat and other drops. In particular look for sheep, and try to kill at least 3 of them for their wool. That said, don't slaughter everything you see. Try to leave at least two of each kind alive for later breeding. If you have sufficient wood and are doing well on time, you might even set up a small corral of wooden fences and fence gates, and use seeds to lure some chickens in there for later. Unless you found a village, you don't yet have the wheat you'd need to lure cows and sheep, nor the root vegetables that pigs prefer, but you might perhaps be able to use dandelions to lure rabbits into a secure pen. Neutral mobs act similarly to passive mobs except that they harm the player if provoked. {Wolves, polar bears, iron golems, llamas, dolphins, pandas, and bees attack the player if the player harms them. These creatures also attack other creatures that hurt them. A polar bear is hostile to the player if a bear cub is nearby, and bees attack if you molest their hive. Bees and wolves both attack as a group: if one of them attacks, all the others in the vicinity join in! For all of these, plus the passive horses, donkeys, and cats, just leave them be for now. They don't drop meat, and you don't have the means to tame or breed them yet. Endermen are a special case, because they are angered not only by being attacked, but simply by looking at them. For more information on breeding, see the page Breeding. Taming mobs is more complex, but you might look at the pages for wolves, cats, horses, and llamas. You may also see fish in nearby rivers, and you can go into the water to kill them with your sword. Cod and salmon are edible, but you should cook them like other meat. Be careful about playing in the water. Aside from the risk of drowning in deep water, there may be monsters in there like drowned, and pufferfish can hurt you badly if you approach them. Then too, moving in water is slow, and you don't want to spend too much time there. Smelting Main article: Smelting To progress in the game, the player needs to know how to use a furnace. A furnace is used to cook food, turn raw iron and raw gold into metal, and create other specific items such as charcoal, all of which are collectively called "smelting". To use a furnace, the player must first have one. This is the crafting recipe: Just like the crafting table, the player uses the furnace by first placing it down in the world then clicking on it with the use button. The furnace itself counts as a stone-type block, so to pick it back up you need to break it with a pickaxe. The furnace GUI has only three slots and includes two icons to indicate time. The top left slot ("input") is where items to smelt are placed. The items are moved from this slot one by one as they are cooked and the products are placed in the right slot ("output"). To smelt items, the furnace requires fuel, which is placed in the fuel slot at the bottom left. (The example below shows how to smelt 3 logs into charcoal.) The "fire" icon burns down to show how much of the current fuel item is left, while the arrow shows how far along the smelting of the current item is. An item cannot be partly-smelted: If smelting is interrupted (you pulled the item out of the input, the fuel ran out, or you broke the furnace), the input item remains unchanged. 33333333 2222222222 3 Smelting takes some time, but you don't need to stay in the GUI, as the process continues while you go do something else. A furnace automatically uses fuel (one item at a time) from the fuel slot as needed, until either all of the items in the input are smelted or all of the fuel runs out. If the input items run out before the fuel, the furnace stays lit until the current fuel item is used up. You can put in more items to use up the rest of the burn time. While the furnace is lit, the furnace block becomes a temporary light source, displaying fire particles and making popping sounds. It takes 10 seconds for each item to be smelted. Different fuel items burn for different amounts of time; most items made from wood can be used as fuel, but coal or charcoal are more efficient, and other fuels may become available later in the game. Some common fuels: Any wooden tool (or sword) can smelt one item; a wooden plank can smelt 1.5 items (that is, 2 planks smelt 3 items, as shown above), and a piece of coal or charcoal smelts 8 items. Don't use logs directly as fuel; the log burns no longer than each of the four planks you could make from it. In Java Edition, an efficient fuel is charcoal produced by smelting logs using planks as fuel. In Bedrock Edition, slabs smelt twice as many items as the planks they were made from -- this means that smelting items from slabs is actually more efficient than making charcoal from the wood. (You may still need charcoal to make torches.) For the first day (or the night afterward), you should start by cooking any raw meat you have, and smelt some logs into charcoal if needed. If you have a bit of extra coal or charcoal, you may want to make a campfire, which burns indefinitely and can cook food without using fuel. Be careful around a campfire, it also burns you if you walk on it! Unlike most things you make, if you break a campfire it does not drop itself, but you at least get a piece of charcoal back. If you got any raw iron, smelt that too, and craft items according to how many ingots you have: In order, start with a shield, then an iron pickaxe, iron sword, and a bucket. (More details can be found in the "second day" guide.) For fuel, start with any wood tools the player has replaced with stone tools, and planks (2 at a time, in Bedrock use slabs instead) to smelt a little meat and/or your first charcoal, then move on to coal and/or charcoal for larger jobs. Note that charcoal is a more efficient fuel source than planks, as it keeps the furnace lit longer than the wood that went into it would have. Smelting items in a furnace also produces experience, which is automatically awarded to the player upon removing any smelted item out of the furnace. Safety (sleep and shelter) Sleeping on beds Main article: Bed To make it through the first night, the player can do either (or both) of two options: build a shelter, or get hold of a bed. If you have to choose, the bed is likely easier and safer... if you can find those precious three blocks of wool. If you were lucky enough to run into a village, you can sleep in one of their beds, and probably swipe it afterward. A bed is a special block with an unusual shape: It takes up two blocks of floor space, but is only about half a block tall. When crafting a bed, the three wool must be the same color, which becomes the color of the bed. However, the planks need not match. Wool is obtained from sheep}}; for now you need to kill them for it, but later in the game you can shear sheep to get a steady supply of wool without harming them. Sometimes you may find wool lying on the ground, especially in a forest; this wool comes from sheep that were killed by wolves or by other players. If there are no sheep to be found at all, you can eventually collect string from killed spiders, and craft wool from the string. With a bed, the night is easy to survive. All you need to do to do is place the bed somewhere suitable (see below, but almost any open ground works) and use it (sleep in it) whenever night falls. If you try using it as sundown approaches but are told "you can only sleep at night or during a thunderstorm...", just wait a few seconds and try again, it works once sundown has properly begun. You also cannot use a bed when hostile monsters are within 10 blocks, or you get the message "you can't sleep now, there are monsters nearby". On successfully using a bed, you change to lying position on the bed without the ability to move – not even looking around. It takes a few seconds after getting into bed before the game skips the night, giving you a chance to change your mind. A bed allows you to do three important things: It lets you skip past the night (or a thunderstorm, which can also be a fairly dangerous situation for a new player). No time passes in the world: crops do not grow, furnaces do not smelt, etc., but the game time advances to dawn, upon which monsters stop spawning on the surface and any skeletons or zombies caught in the sudden sunlight burst into flame. If you are in a multiplayer game, all other players must also use a bed before night is skipped, though various game mods can alter that rule. Using a bed sets your spawn point, that is the location you respawn in if you die. Without a set spawn point, after dying you reappear somewhere, without your possessions, within 20 blocks of the world spawn point (usually outdoors), and if it was night time, it's still night when you respawn. This is not a pleasant situation! In current versions (1.17 or newer) of Java Edition, using the bed during daytime sets your spawn point even if you can't sleep yet. If you have not slept (or died) within the last three days or so, phantoms can spawn at night and even during thunderstorms. If you go outside, these swoop down from the sky to attack. Sleeping in a bed prevents this not-so-minor inconvenience. Phantoms burn like other undead monsters after the sun rises. Luckily, this is only your first day. A few warnings about using beds for a spawn point: To actually respawn at the new spawn point, the bed needs to stay put! If you pick up the bed to take with you, then if you die the bed is counted as "missing", and it's back to somewhere near the world spawn. You also need to have some open space next to the bed, on the same level or the level below -- someplace where you could stand when you respawn. This has to be a solid, opaque block to stand on; glass, slabs, fences, or other non-solid blocks do not count. If there is no such space when you die, the bed is considered "obstructed", and again, it's back to the world spawn. However, your spawn point still defaults to the bed, if you clear the area out later. In multi-player, if another player has since used the same bed, your spawn point is also lost. These limitations are why the best option is to have a secure shelter of your own, with a bed permanently installed inside it. That way, after death you come back safe at home. If it's still night or storming, you can go back to bed and sleep through to daylight, before you go back in search of your fallen possessions. Building your shelter
- Dawn
- Tutorial videos
This starter guide provides advice for players who do not know how to begin their Minecraft journey. It mainly teaches you what to do on your first day, so you can safely survive the first night.
Before reading this page, it's expected that you have already bought and downloaded the game. You must create a new world before starting the tutorial.
Minecraft is a sandbox game in which your character wanders around in a world, collecting resources and utilizing them to craft various items. To gain an advantage, you need to understand all the different techniques and abilities of the control system. If you are having trouble, you may want to start with a Peaceful Mode world to practice and, if necessary, change the keyboard bindings. The world in Minecraft is composed of blocks, mostly cubical and of various shapes, giving everything a blocky and pixelated appearance. These blocks not only represent objects in the game but also serve as a standard measure of distance, with each block being officially defined as a one-meter cube. Your character can occupy a single block's space and stands a little less than two blocks tall.
Time passes within this world, and a game day lasts for 20 real-world minutes. Nighttime is much more dangerous than daytime: the game starts at dawn, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. The primary purpose of this guide is to help you "find your feet," acquire basic equipment, and build shelter before nightfall. Hostile or neutral mobs spawn when night falls, and most of these mobs are dangerous, trying to attack you. It's essential to craft a bed so that you can sleep through the night and quickly transition from nighttime to daytime.
This article mostly assumes you are playing on Java Edition or desktop versions of Bedrock Edition, where you use your keyboard and mouse to interact with the game. The Controls page gives you a complete overview of all the controls and every control that does a action, or shows up a certain GUI.
This and other articles generally refer to controls by their default bindings. Most of the controls can be changed in the game's options menu, by clicking on the one you want to change, and then pressing the key you want to use for that control. If you are already using that key for something else, then it turns red.
In Java Edition, when you start the game for the first time, a short in-game tutorial appears to explain the basics of how to move and look around in the corner of the screen.
When moving around the world and dealing with blocks and creatures in the world, there are four basic operations, each discussed below:
Getting started
A player begins the game standing in a landscape somewhere. This is the general area in which a player reappears (respawns) upon death. If you have slept in a bed (and the bed's still there) you respawn next to that. This is the start of a new Minecraft world. This tutorial is intended to teach you the skills needed to survive in this world and eventually be able to do just about anything you desire. You can do the different sections below in any order you desire, but many sections require you to first complete other tasks first. The tasks listed on this page (except those noted as optional) should all be completed before moving on to the second day tutorial, even if it takes you multiple days to complete all of the tutorials. No matter what, your goal for the first day should be creating a bed or shelter so you can survive the night. The other tasks are also important and can all be completed along with the main objectives while leaving you with extra time. See the first section of this guide for information about controls and getting around in the world. You need to master those skills in order to complete the following tasks. Again, the game starts at noon, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. Your overarching goal here is to acquire basic equipment and a simple shelter in that time. You do have some time to practice your basic skills and learn about your inventory, but don't take too much time at that. If night falls and you still don't have any shelter or basic equipment, it is fair (for your first game) to switch the game to Peaceful mode for the night. While following the steps below, break any tall grass you see and collect any seeds that drop. They become useful later. In fact, collect any loose items you come across; almost everything can be potentially useful. Also keep an eye out for orange pumpkin blocks and (if you happen to be in a jungle) green melon blocks. If you find any, break some of them and take the results with you for later farming. Also watch out for sweet berry bushes. "Using" them can provide berries for a bit of food, but actually stepping into them hurts!
Biomes
The Minecraft world is divided into different areas called "biomes". Different biomes contain different blocks and plants and change how the land is shaped. There is an advancement that includes finding all the biomes; this is better explained on the advancements page. Biomes affect you, especially at the beginning of the game, but you need not worry about specific biomes until you have learned how to play the game. If you are curious, you may want to read more about biomes on the biomes page. That said, there are a few cases you should worry about: •You start on a small island in the ocean: Go to the highest point on the island and look around for other land. If you see a reasonably-sized continent with trees and animals, swim there. If you see no large land and no animals in sight, you have an "ocean spawn". For a player's first game, it is entirely reasonable to exit this world and try again with a different seed. •You are standing on sand, with no trees or water nearby. You are in a desert. Again, go to high ground and look around for trees and green grass. If you see some, go there before continuing with this guide. If there's no green in sight, this is another situation where you can reasonably toss the world and try again. Deserts are much easier when encountered from outside, but they are missing important things like dirt, wood, and accessible stone, all of which you really do need to start off the game. •You are in a dark forest with thick trees, a thick leaf canopy, and giant mushrooms scattered around. This is a particularly unsafe place for a starting character and a beginning player, because the canopy can create areas dark enough for hostile mobs to spawn in daytime. However, if you move quickly, you can probably make it to more open ground in a reasonable amount of time, and start setting up in a more reasonable biome. Don't leave the dark forest behind completely, though — once you have basic armor and weapons, it's a resource-rich area. Grab some of that plentiful wood once you reach the edge! The giant mushrooms also offer a plentiful source of food, so don't forget to grab some of those! There is a rare chance for a woodland mansion to generate in this biome. They are dangerous, but provide you a lot of good resources, so make a note where it is! •The land around you is greyish-purple, with dusty particles, giant mushrooms, and red "cows": Rejoice, for you have received a miracle: a spawn in a mushroom fields biome, where hostile creatures cannot appear (except for underground dungeons). You do need to go elsewhere to find wood, crop seeds, and some other resources, but otherwise, you've gotten into a golden situation here. Once you have even a bit of wood, you can get unlimited food from the mooshrooms, and you have a large area in which you barely need to worry about your safety even at night, a great place to set up your long-term base.
Getting Logs
Wood is the most basic resource in Minecraft, and you need to collect some up front. The usual and most plentiful wood source are logs from trees, which are available in most biomes. Logs are one of many items that can be collected without the use of a tool. All you have to do is mine any log of the tree with your hand or any item. Each block drops as an item that you can pick up and put in your inventory by approaching it. You should start by collecting 6-8 logs for your first tools. There are many different types of trees in Minecraft, each having its own individual name and look. Each kind of log can easily be crafted into a matching type of planks. All logs and planks work for any recipe requiring logs or planks respectively, but a few recipes require that all the wood you use be the same type (for example, when making a boat, you can't mix oak and spruce planks). If you mine all the wood from a tree, the leaf blocks atop it start decaying (you can also break them yourself), dropping sticks, saplings, and perhaps apples. For your first day, don't wait around for leaves to decay, but as usual, pick up any items they do drop and save them for later. Once you get to making axes, harvesting wood becomes much faster! A rarer source of wood is sunken ships, which are made of logs and planks and are found in ocean biomes, but dealing with these is probably best saved for later. Abandoned mineshafts (found on the surface in a few biomes) also contain planks, but these are definitely better saved for later. Your Recipe Book provides an assortment of useful recipes for wood, including each type of wood as you encounter it. In order to obtain better materials at faster speeds, the player needs tools. Tools are items that allow the player to complete tasks other than placing blocks at faster speeds than normal. Most tools can be made out of different materials each better than the last. Using a tool to mine the blocks for it is intended mines the blocks more quickly than normal. Tools lose durability upon each use, even if the use was to hit an entity. In fact, using tools as weapons generally wears them out more quickly. Enough damage to a tool eventually causes the tool to break. Different tools have different properties and abilities. If you are using a tool on a block and it seems to be taking an unexpectedly long time, you may be using the wrong tool for that block. Stop to look at the block and reconsider your approach. Having acquired wood and made a crafting table, the first tool to craft is a wooden pickaxe. This starts by crafting a couple of logs into planks, and then at two of those planks into sticks. The planks required for a wooden tool can be any combination of planks, as shown below. 44444444444 4 You probably don't need to craft any other tools out of wood, because you can soon start upgrading to stone, but if you're starting in a forest, making a crafting table and wooden axe from your first three logs can help you get more wood quickly. The basic tools are: •Pickaxe: used to break and gather stone, metal, and related materials such as ores. •Axe: used to collect wooden materials more quickly. •Shovel: used to gather dirt-type blocks: dirt, sand, gravel, clay block, and their variations."Grass blocks" are a variation of dirt. •Hoe: used to break some lightweight blocks such as leaves, but its main use is to turn dirt or grass blocks into farmland. •Sword: in addition to breaking cobwebss, a sword is used to attack animals or monsters.
When dawn comes, you should wait for undead creatures (zombie, skeleton) to start burning before you exit your shelter.
Once all zombies and skeletons have died, take out your sword and exit the shelter with caution.
Watch out for creepers. They don't burn in daylight. If you see a creeper, stay away from it, and let it despawn or wander off. You could also try killing it or making it explode in a safe way, but be careful not to get blown up; a creeper can kill you nearly instantly, as you have no armour.
Watch out for zombies and skeletons with helmets on (Normal+ difficulty) or in water, as they will attack you. Burning zombies can set you on fire (Normal+ difficulty). If this happens, go into water to put yourself out.
Tutorials
Introductory
•Menu screen
•Game terms
Newcomer survival
•The first day/beginner's guide
- 2 min
- 102
Sep 6, 2024 · Playing Minecraft as a beginner can seem pretty daunting. However, if you follow these handy tips, you'll be crafting like a pro in no time.
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