A Beginner's guide to Minecraft: The Basics

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Nubly

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Aug 19, 2013
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So, you've thought about buying Minecraft, eh? I'll have to admit, it is quite a fun game. It is a world in which you can build anything, almost anything, the only thing that you are limited by is your concept of imagination. (and possibly the unreleased items)

So, this is the beginner's guide to Minecraft, showing you the basics of survival and building.

After you've bought minecraft, download the launcher and log in. After you've obviously already clicked the 'Play' button, you should be greeted by a wonderful main menu with a grassy terrain floating around behind it.

Go ahead and click single player, create new world, and spawn in your new world.

Now you'll find yourself in a number of situations:
1)You're in a desert
2)You're in a plains biome
3)You're in a jungle biome
4)You're in a biome of any type other than those three

The same applies to all situations, the first step in playing survival Minecraft is to obtain Wood.

Wood will be one of your best friends through this journey, considering it will make up your storage units, most likely your way up and down a mine shaft, your source of light, and your basic tools. Not to mention it comes in different colors.

Now, once you've found a tree, you're going to want to go up to it, and start punching it. Keep punching the tree until a chunk comes out of it, and you should get the achievement 'Getting Wood'.
350px-MSG_Tut1_Punching_Wood.png


Once you've got that piece of wood, open up your inventory by pressing 'E', and grab the piece of wood with your mouse cursor.

With wood in cursor, place the wood into the 2x2 crafting segment of your inventory. You should get some wooden planks in the output. Now, take those Wooden Planks and put one in each corner of the 2x2 crafting menu,. and a crafting table will pop into the output. Take it.

When placed, the crafting table offers you not a 2x2 crafting grid, but a 3x3 crafting grid. This is what you will use to craft almost everything in Minecraft. Now, go ahead and punch some more wood out of that tree until it's out of wood to offer you.

Now that you've got more wood, it's time to make some tools. Enter your crafting table GUI and convert all of those wood blocks into wooden planks just like we did before. Now, instead of taking those wooden planks and making a 2x2 grid out of them,. you're going to want to put a single wooden plank on top of another wooden plank, anywhere in the grid. This will give you sticks, and that's what you're going to need.

Now that you've got sticks, time for tools. The first thing you'll want is an axe, to chop more trees.
Place two sticks in the middle and lower middle sections of the grid, and place 3 wooden planks in an upside-down 'L' shape in either upper corner of a grid. If you do it right, you should get a Wooden Axe in the output. Good job!

Go and chop some more trees with the wonderful axe you just made. It's much faster than punching.

Now that you have lots of wood, you probably won't need any for a while.

Time to make the other tools, the shovel, the pickaxe, and the sword.

To make the shovel, simply repeat your stick layout, but only place a single wooden plank above the sticks.

To make the pickaxe, repeat the stick pattern yet again, but place a solid line of wooden planks across the top of the crafting grid.
woodenpickaxe.png


To make the sword, only place one stick on the lower middle segment of the grid, and make a 2-long line of wooden planks upwards of the stick. As you're mining and wandering around, you'll encounter hostile creatures. This is what the sword is used for, slaying them with ease, and blocking their attacks. LMB to attack, RMB to block. :)

The shovel isn't quite necessary, as it is used only for digging up blocks that are fairly easy to break with your fist.

Now that you've got the tools, let's go mining!

Preferably at this point, you're going to walk around until you find a cave, but you could always dig a hole into the ground a few blocks too. What we're looking for is cobblestone and coal.

Cobblestone is always abundant in every Minecraft world, considering you obtain it when you mine stone. Cobblestone tools are the second tier of tools, so you could just make a wooden pickaxe and mine cobblestone until you have enough for all the tools to just about skip the wooden tools completely.

You're going to want to mine at least 8 blocks of stone for your journey ahead.

After a bit of digging/walking in a cave, you'll probably notice this black-striped stone. When you mine it, you'll get coal. Coal is used to make torches and power furnaces, which I'll both explain in one second. Here's some coal being mined.
MiningCoal.png


If you notice it getting dark, you're going to want to make some torches. Torches don't require a crafting table as they are just made by placing a piece of coal above a stick in a crafting GUI.
Doing so will give you 4 torches, go ahead and light things up!

Keep mining coal until you think you have enough, and go ahead and make some cobblestone tools by repeating the process we did earlier in the crafting table, but replacing the wooden planks with cobblestone.

As you've been digging coal up, you've probably noticed this tan-looking mineral in the walls. This is Iron. Having these cobblestone tools allows you to mine this mineral, giving you the ability to make the third tier of tools and the first opportunity to make armor out of a mineral :)
minecraft-features-ore.jpg


Once you've mined the iron, you have probably noticed that it doesn't come in a usable form. It comes in the form of ore. Now, take your ore with you to the crafting table and place 8 pieces of cobblestone around the edges of the crafting table, leaving a space in the middle. This will give you a furnace. Now, take that furnace and plop it down next to your crafting table and select it with the RMB. This will bring up another GUI in which you can smelt and cook things.
Here's an example of the furnace being used in early development versions of Minecraft.
furnace-minecraftmy-world--minecraft---the-best-sandbox-game-ever-tbxlttmf.png


Go ahead and put your iron ore in the top part of the input graph and your coal/wood (whatever you want to use for your fuel source) into the bottom section. Your iron will then begin to smelt, and when it has smelted, the iron will become ingots and become usable in a crafting table to make tools and armor.

To make a full set of armor, you'll need 24 pieces of iron.

To make a helmet, make an upside-down 'U' shape using 5 iron in the top of the crafting table.

To make a chestpiece, cover the whole crafting grid with iron, leaving one space in the upper middle slot.

To make leggings, make an up-side down 'U' shape using 7 iron in the crafting grid.

To make boots, place 2 iron, one on top of the other, on each side of the crafting grid. No iron in the middle.

Here's a papercraft of Steve, the default Minecraft player skin, wearing iron armor with an iron sword. :)
1347664634582.jpg


To make the tools, repeat the process that we did earlier with the wooden and cobblestone tools, but just with iron. :)

By now, you're probably hungry and it's probably getting dark. Before it gets dark, go find a pig/cow or two and kill them. They will drop raw beef/raw pork, which you can eat now, but will benefit you more if you cook it.

If you do not eat and let your hunger bar drain to 0, you will begin taking damage and possibly die, depending on difficulty.

By now, it's probably getting VERY dark. In this case, you'll probably want to dig a hole in the ground and cover yourself with a block of dirt or something to avoid mobs and wait until morning AFK. If you're really feeling committed though, you can go kill some sheep or make some shears by placing two iron in your crafting grid diagonally to get their wool. Obtaining the wool will allow you to make a bed, which when slept in, will take you immediately to dawn. The crafting recipe for a bed is a line of wool above a line of wooden planks in the crafting table.

When it's morning again, I suggest you get more food from nearby animals to eat later, because the odds are, you'll be mining for quite some time to find the best tier of tools/armor, diamond.

When mining for diamonds, you can take either of the two approaches, caving, or mining downwards. However, when mining downwards, NEVER, EVER dig straight down. When mining straight down to the lower levels of the world, lava is quite common and you don't want to be falling in it and burning all of your items.
MC38.jpg


To obtain diamonds, you're going to want to be about 12 blocks from the bottom of the world. To check this, you can hit F3 and looks at your 'y' coordinates.

Using either approach, you'll be able to come upon the cyan beauties themselves, diamonds. Obtain enough of these and you'll be able to craft the highest tier of tools and armor, not to mention you'd be rich.
minecraft_diamonds_by_jeremywindd30bw1l_64457.jpg

Diamonds!

Considering this tutorial is getting very long, I'm going to break it up into segments and continue on if there is popular demand. Thank you for reading my basic tutorial on how to play Minecraft, and build on!
 
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