Despite Minecraft being out for almost a decade at this point and being one of the most popular games on the planet, it still sees thousands of newcomers every week. However, with so much to see and experience in the game, the early moments can become quite overwhelming.
It's important to know a handful of tips in regards to building, crafting, and surviving in the early day when you're simply trying to survive and figure out what's going on in the world around you. A bit of knowledge can go a long way in terms of paving the way to success in the early game. Here are our top tips for getting ahead.
10 Crafting: Make Wooden Tools
The moment you spawn into a Minecraft world you should start punching as many trees as you can and turning that raw wood into planks. Upon making planks you should then use four of them for a crafting table that allows you to build items in the 3x3 crafting menu, instead of the default 2x2 crafting grid.
Place that table down and use the rest of the planks to craft some sticks alongside the planks and turn all of that wood into a wooden sword, wooden pickaxe, wooden axe, and wooden shovel. The recipes are in your recipe book, should you need them.
9 Building: Find Or Build A Home
In the early game, you have one of two options when it comes to shelter. You can either build a makeshift home from the ground up out of wood or dirt and use that while you make your forever home, or you can find a naturally occurring cave or hole in the land. You can then turn this into a temporary home by simply adding a few walls to seal it away from the dangers that may be lurking in the dark.
Either way, you should always be looking towards making a more structured and custom home tailored to your needs as a player.
8 Survival: Get Familiar With Combat
Whenever someone starts a new game for the first time it can be pretty intimidating and scary to fight enemies in said game. The best way to go about it is to simply throw yourself in and learn on the go. If you've already made or found a home in Minecraft and built and slept in a bed, then your spawn point is saved. This means that if you die you'll respawn by this bed.
Put everything outside of a sword and armor in a chest and go out into the night and fight anything and everything you see. This practical on-the-job training method will quickly dissolve that fear and make the combat feel natural and normal.
7 Crafting: Make The Essentials (Furnace, Crafting Table, etc)
Out of the gate, you should have your eyes set on making or finding a makeshift home and filling it with the essentials of the early game in Minecraft. This includes a furnace to cook meat and smelt ore, a crafting table to build tools and armor, and a bed to set the time in-game to day and also mark a spawn point if you should die.
These three items may not seem like much, but they can put you as the player down a path where the game evolves and moves forward at an incredible pace.
6 Building: Build A Mineshaft
Building a mineshaft is critical to the acquisition of iron ore, diamonds, redstone, and much more. Sure you can just dig down and randomly try and find resources, but a well-crafted mineshaft can make things easier on you, especially as you dig more.
Not only can you keep track of the areas in which you've depleted pockets of resources, but with the use of well-placed torches, it can be a safe environment in which to explore and discover new parts of Minecraft you previously didn't know or understand fully.
5 Survival: Know Your Enemies
Earlier the idea of getting familiar with how combat works in Minecraft was brought up. Well, you can't be effective in combat if you don't know what you're fighting. Thankfully with something as popular as Minecraft its roster of enemies has somewhat permeated pop culture and toys in a major way.
Just knowing what an enemy looks like is half the battle, through actual combat you can learn exactly how these enemies attack and quickly figure out their weaknesses and shortcomings as threats to your overall progress.
4 Crafting: Upgrade As Soon As You Can
The first crafting tip on this list was to make a wooden set of tools as quickly as you can upon loading into said Minecraft world. The moment you have stone and/or iron in your possession it is in your best interests to upgrade.
Not only will the tools last longer during use, but their efficiency goes up as well when they're built from better and stronger materials. The game starts slow, but can quickly ramp up depending on how smart you are with using your resources as you gather them.
3 Building: Storage Room & Organization
There are certain types of people who love the idea of organizing things and making sure everything is in proper order. Creating and maintaining a storage room or building in Minecraft is crucial, even for those who are prone to chaos.
Your system of storage only needs to make sense to you. The idea of a storage room is so that way you know where specific ingredients or items are and can quickly access them depending on the crafting or building project they're trying to complete at the moment.
2 Survival: Keep Your Hunger Bar Full
An element of Minecraft that newcomers might find frustrating is the hunger bar in the game. When it is full it allows you to start healing back to full health, but if it is anything less than the healing threshold you'll stay at whatever damaged amount of health an enemy or mistake left you at.
Growing wheat on a man-made wheat farm and making bread, or catching and cooking fish will be the best way early on to satiate that hunger bar and make sure that you're always at full health.
1 It's The Early Game, Relax!
The most important thing above all else is to remember that you are in the early game. There will be plenty of mistakes that happen, and early on the big thing to focus on is learning.
Educate yourself on how the world of Minecraft works, the logic to crafting, how to build certain structures, and knowing the best way to navigate survival. Death is a bummer, but at the early stages it can be extremely beneficial and a key learning moment.