Tutorials/The second day

This guide is intended for those who are unfamiliar for surviving the night beyond the first day.

It will be most beneficial for those who have read the beginner's guide first.

This guide was written on Minecraft Beta 1.3_01 in Normal difficulty setting. Updated to be 1.7 accurate by Dragonrider7225

A brief picture of a second day house is shown on the right.

Intro: Second Day
If you read the beginner's guide, you should have a small dirt house with about 2 torches, a workbench and a half broken wooden pickaxe. This tutorial help will guide you in making a cobblestone house with a door, bed and crafting table.

Back to mining
The foundation of everything is mining. Begin by mining some Stone with your Pickaxe. When you extract a stone block, it should drop a crumbly block called Cobblestone. This is what you can use to make your house. It has an explosion resistance of 30, which isn't enough to stop a Creeper's explosion but it will do for the Second Day. You can also use cobblestone to make stone weapons and tools. These last longer, with 132 uses. You can make a Stone Pickaxe by replacing the wooden planks with cobblestone when making a pickaxe. After making a Stone Pickaxe, collect approximately 50-80 pieces of cobblestone.

The three most important resources you will get from mining, are probably coal, iron, and gold. You need coal to make torches, and although it isn't the best furnace fuel, it does work well if you've got a lot of blocks to cook, because one piece of coal will cook eight blocks. Iron has a vast number of different uses. Tools, armor, minecart tracks, flint+steels, buckets. Gold is more important these days than it used to be as well, for powered rails, if you're wanting to build minecarts.

Diamond is truthfully overrated, but you will want it for cutting up obsidian. Obsidian is necessary for making Nether portals, but it is also a very nice material for base construction, as it is totally impervious to explosions. Redstone is another ore you will find, which also has a lot of uses, but you will likely find much more of that than you will ever need.

Construction
By now it should be the middle of the day. Build a three block high wall that is about 5x4. Then you can seal it over with cobblestone as a roof, or you can make a lip on the top to prevent spiders coming in. Also, leave a 1x2 gap so you can walk in and out.

Doors
With the wooden planks you have (if you don't have any, chop down a tree and craft some) and craft a Door. You can do this by filling up the crafting table with wooden planks in the first two columns from the left (it works from the right too). Collect the wooden door and place it in the gap of your house. Clicking on it will open it. Clicking it again will close it. Mobs cannot pass through these doors, but can attack you if you place the door from the inside, such as the Skeleton which can fire arrows. To prevent this, go outside of your house and place the door in the doorway. This will be an outward facing door and prevents attacks. As of 1.7 it is not possible to attack through doors from either side.

Stone Sword
In your crafting table, put a stick in the bottom center square, and place two cobblestone blocks in the two spaces above it. When you are done, you should have a Stone Sword. Put this in your toolbar. This can be used as a self-defence mechanism to attack intruding Mobs. Stone Swords deal 3.5 hearts of damage compared to the 1 heart by bare fists. So you can kill most mobs in 3 hits.

Bed
Now you'll use the wool you collected earlier to make a bed. Line the bottom of the 3x3 crafting square with wooden planks, and place a wool in each space in the middle row. Now you have a bed. Go back to your house and place it inside. Preferably, don't place a bed next to a one block thick wall, because if a hostile mob can get within 2 blocks of the bed, even if the blocks are separated by a wall, you will be awakened with the hostile mob standing next to you. If you want, you can also place a bed next to another bed, what makes it a double-bed. (It has the same function like the single bed, but sometimes looks really nice.) Click on your bed and drift off to sleep. You will then wake up the next morning at dawn.

If somehow a mob comes in during your sleep, use your Stone Sword to kill it. If it is a green tall creature without arms, this is a Creeper. The best thing to do is to run away and set up a makeshift shelter out of torches in the side of a hill, and survive there for the night. Creepers can blow up and can deliver serious damage to you and your building. So your house might be gone. Don't worry, you can rebuild later, either in your makeshift house or where it originally was. Since this tutorial is based on Normal mode, Creepers will deal 10 hearts of damage or 10 1/2 hearts of damage at point-blank range in Hard difficulty, which is fatal if you don't have any armor equipped.

Tips

 * Can't get your head around a Crafting Table? See Crafting for everything you need to know about Crafting Tables, including recipes.


 * Never under any circumstances dig down, this is what kills even the most experienced players.
 * If you are low on health, kill a pig or do something else to get food (see Fishing Rod). The easiest food to find would have to be pork, which is dropped by pigs. Eating it raw will restore 1.5 hearts. If a furnace is nearby, cook your food and it will restore more. As a last resort, you can set your Difficulty to Peaceful. If you do, no monsters will spawn and your health will regenerate at a quick rate.
 * Can't find any coal? Smelt a log to make Charcoal. You can use this in place of Coal and it has the same properties and uses.
 * Bed not working? Make sure it's night first. Then click on the pillow. Get close enough to the bed before clicking on it, otherwise nothing will happen. Don't forget to place your bed at least 2 blocks from the walls, or monsters could wake you up. You should drift off to sleep. For more help, talk on the discussion page for more help from fellow Minecrafters.
 * NEVER EVER mine a block which looks like coal but is a different color unless you use a pickaxe better than wood. Destroying this kind of block with a pickaxe that isn't of the right type will prevent it from dropping an object. Check the Ores for more information regarding the different types of ores and the tools required. You will most likely run into a orange-colored ore on the Second Day, which is Iron. You must use a stone pickaxe to mine this or higher.

Tutoriels/Le deuxième jour