Minecraft Alpha (survival mode) - Getting Started Guide

Accurate as of alpha release 1.0.4

Introduction

This guide assumes you’re familiar with the basics of the Minecraft interface and takes you through the first day and night. Beyond this the reader should be able comfortable to explore the world on their own and with the aid of the Minecraft wiki and other resources.

The first thing you need to be aware of is the day and night cycle. Day and night last about 10 minutes each and it’s particularly important you have some place to hide at night, as that’s when the monsters come out.

Your first day should be spent finding a suitable base and preparing it for use that night. My personal preference is a small plateau, but you can use a small cave or some other hole or hollow. The important thing is that it’s small, so you can manage it with your initial meagre resource and there’s little chance of a monster spawning inside your defences. Also your base should be within view of your spawn point or at least easily accessible from there. If you’re killed you'll re-spawn in the same place you did to begin with and you'll need to be able to find your way back to your base and items you dropped when you died.

Gathering

To begin with you’ll need at the very least to collect some earth and wood. Ideally you should also collect some coal, stone, wool from sheep and meat from pigs. You won’t be able to collect coal or stone initially, but I’ll go over that in a later section.

Wood is an important building and crafting material, earth can be used for temporary defence building to get your through the night. Wool can be grafted into basic armour and meat restores your health. Coal is used to create torches, which will allow you see at night and in caves. Stone will be used to create a furnace and improved tools.

Building

Your chosen hiding place for the night must be defensible and only really requires enough space for you and a couple of crafting blocks initially. I’d recommend you just use earth blocks for building the defences initially.

If you’ve chosen a plateau make sure its tricky to climb up to and build a wall around the perimeter so monsters can’t get line of sight on you from below. If you’ve chosen a cave, hole or hollow then block off any entrances. But make sure there is some way for you to see the sky so you know when night as passed. You can leave one block open, but make sure it’s higher than two blocks so monsters can’t jump in or see you through it (one monster can explode if it knows you're there and is close enough, taking your defences with it).

Crafting

Crafting in Minecraft has an unusual twist in that it’s not just the materials you use but also the way in which you position them. But first of all you need to convert your raw wood blocks into plank blocks. Open you inventory and move all your wood blocks into one space of the 2x2 crafting grid next to your character portrait. Each wood block will give you four plank blocks, so it’s a more use efficient of your gathering time. And also plank blocks have more uses. Convert all your wood to planks.

Now you have planks you can start crafting proper. Place two plank blocks in your inventory crafting area, one above the other. This will give you some sticks which will be used shortly. Don’t convert all your planks to sticks just yet. Secondly fill all four spaces on your crafting grid with planks. This will give you a crafting table, which you can place in your base and will provide you with a much more useful 3x3 crafting grid. Place and use the crafting table. Fill the top row with plank blocks and the centre and middle bottom space with stick blocks. This will give you a wooden pickaxe, with which you can mine stone and coal (the blocks can be destroyed if you don’t use a tool but they don’t drop anything). You may notice that the shape in the crafting grid resembled the final product. This is the basis for the crafting system.

Now you have a pickaxe go and get some stone and coal. If you manage to do all this before nightfall of your first day you’re doing very well. If it's your first go just focus on the essentials and if necessary wait out the night in your base and continue the next day. Or you can change the difficulty to Peaceful, which removes all the monsters and try gathering at night. But there are other dangers in the darkness, falling to your death down an unseen hole will likely end in you losing all your hard earned items.

Night Activities

As you're essentially trapped inside at night it'd be best to put off as many of your crafting activities as you can until then. Once safely ensconced start with some torches. In either crafting grid place a stick block and then a coal block above it. Create as many torches as you can up to the maximum stack size of 64. You can place torches on the walls or floor, let there be light! If you have wool you can craft some armour using the crafting table. Try guessing at the shapes or refer to the link below. If you have stone you can make a stone pickaxe, or other tools, by replacing the plank blocks with stone blocks. You should also build a furnace, which can be fuelled by wood, planks or coal, and will smelt ores, cook food and produce glass from sand. Lastly you'll need a storage chest. All of the recipes for these items are found in the Minecraft wiki here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting

Monsters

Monsters spawn in the dark, either outside at night or in dark caves. So it’s important to keep caves you’ve explored and want to return to well lit. For more information on monsters and other mobs go here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mob

Conclusion

Once you've survived the first day or so you should have enough material, items and confidence to continue to explore. You can either venture out and look for the entrances to caves on the surface, and go spelunking, or just start mining from your base location. Try not to get lost. On the surface you can build tall markers over your base or places of interest. Underground you can follow your trail of torches back home, in theory. Try to return to base at night, if you're on the surface. If you're underground night doesn't matter, but you can run into monsters at any time of day in the dark tunnels.