Surviving your first night in Minecraft can be extremely demanding if not done properly. Here, we will attempt to guide you through your first night and onward. In Minecraft you have the option of having a bonus chest enabled when you are first placed in the world, though in this guide, we will lay out a strategy assuming there is no bonus chest, the difficulty set to normal, and all host options disabled.
1. The first thing you are going to want to do is to look around your starting location, get your bearings, and find the nearest-tallest tree, hill, or mountain that you can quickly but carefully scale.
2. When you are at the highest part of the tree, hill, or mountain you are going to want to look around and study what types of biomes are around your present location. Possible biomes could be anything from sprawling deserts to vast-dense jungles. We will assume you are in a basic forest biome.
3. Carefully descend from where you are and find the nearest tree. You are going to want to gather all the wood from at least three to five trees. As you are chopping your first few trees down, look around the ground for tree saplings and apples that may fall. Note, if you scaled a tree rather than a hill or mountain, chop the tree from the top of it downwards, making your descent a safe endeavor.
4. Once you have chopped and gathered wood from at least three to five trees, you are now going to want to build a crafting table. Find a suitable location around you and place the crafting table on the ground. Don’t worry about finding shelter, we will get to that latter.
5. Once the crafting table is built, begin by creating wood planks out of all the wood that you chopped earlier.
6. After you have created as much wood planks from all the wood you chopped, you are going to want to build enough sticks to create an axe, hoe, pick axe, shovel, and sword.
7. When you have created those five tools, create a few more sticks to use as torches latter on, and “chop” the crafting table and move over its location to pick it up and carry it with you to place and use again somewhere else.
8. Your next goal, if you still have daylight left, is to find a nearby mountain and mine some cobblestone. If there is no mountain nearby, dig around your position using the shovel (do not dig directly below you) slowly digging down, eventually hitting cobblestone. If you are making your way towards a mountain, chop and pick up additional resources around you such as flowers and mushrooms to craft useful items. You are also going to want to kill any animals you see to cook for food and replenish your health. If you kill any cows, you can use their leather to create basic leather armor.
9. Use your pickaxe and begin mining as much cobblestone as you can before night time sets in.
10. Night time should be setting in now. If you could not find a mountain in step 8, you are going to want to seal off the to ground level above you from where you descended from, to prevent any mobs from finding your location.
11. If you were in a mountain mining cobblestone, seal off the opening from top to bottom to prevent any mobs from finding your location. You could leave one empty space to see out of, however there is a chance a skeleton could fire arrows into your newly formed cave.
12. Once safely in your new dwelling, go into your inventory and use the cobblestone you mined and create a furnace, placing the furnace and the crafting table side by side next to each other.
13. If you were lucky enough to find coal, you could put coal and wood into the furnace to create charcoal, which allows you to create brighter, “charcoal torches.”
14. If you found coal, but do not want to use up wood to create charcoal torches, you could still create “coal torches” they just won’t be as bright as the charcoal torches would be.
15. If you did not find coal, but still want to make charcoal, place wood into both slots of the furnace to create charcoal. You should also be cooking up some of the animals you killed, if you found any, to consume for food and replenish your health if it is low.
16. Now begin creating a few torches using either sticks and coal, or sticks and charcoal. Place the torches around your location to prevent any mobs from spawning around you, and to enable you to see better in the darker lighting conditions.
17. If you’ve found iron, which by now you should have. If not, keep digging deeper and further and you should run into some. Once you’ve found iron, you are going to want to mine it using a stone pick axe.
18. Now is a good time, to upgrade your tools to stone tools, which enable you to get more efficient use out of the item.
19. Find your crafting table you placed on the ground next to your furnace and create stone tools using sticks and cobblestone.
20. It should be approaching dawn soon. You are now able to mine iron and create even better tools and armor, and are on your way to a prosperous start by surviving your first night in Minecraft.
Discussion Topic: Minecraft – First Night Survival Strategy
