Tutorials/Flat survival

Flat survival beyond mere subsistence is particularly challenging in Bedrock Edition because there are no structures and no materials to start with except for unlimited dirt four layers deep with bedrock underneath.

Achievements and experience
Achievements cannot be earned in flat survival because all flat worlds in Bedrock Edition are forced to start out in Creative mode, disabling achievements. The world can be switched to Survival only after it is created.

You gain experience from killing mobs and doing other activities, but experience is not useful unless a mob happens to drop an item enchanted with Mending. It is highly unlikely for you to get enough iron to spare for an anvil, which requires experience to use.

Planning your approach
There are two ways to approach a flat survival game. One is with "minimal cheats" to give yourself some key resources before switching to Survival mode, and the other is to avoid any cheats and switch to Survival immediately, depending solely on the contents of a bonus chest.

Minimal cheats
Players attempting a flat survival game often begin by giving themselves some minimal amount of resources at the start of the game, just enough to keep things challenging:
 * Saplings are needed for wood. Oak and dark oak also provide apples, which can be eaten or saved for the possibility of curing a zombie villager much later.
 * Because stone is not available, a lava bucket and two water buckets allow you to make unlimited water and a cobblestone farm, allowing you to build a furnace (assuming you have trees for fuel) and solving nearly all building needs. A lava bucket is also your key to entering the Nether once you get dripstone from a wandering trader to create more lava in a cauldron, for making obsidian for a nether portal.
 * For a greater challenge, starting with just a sapling and a single cauldron to collect rain can be enough to start, if you collect enough iron ingots from killing zombies to make a water bucket.

Yes, these are cheats, but cheats are enabled anyway by default for flat worlds, because they must start in creative mode.

No cheats
Without buffing up your resources in creative first, create the world with a bonus chest and switch to Survival mode as soon as the world is created. Resist the urge to switch back to creative and play until you die or reach a lofty goal, such as creating a village.

Your bonus chest contains some resources, and this is all you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to survive and gain more resources.

At a minimum, your bonus chest must contain a sapling. If the saplings are dark oak or spruce, you need a minimum of four saplings to grow a tree. Oak or dark oak yield apples. Dark oak and spruce provide a lot of wood but dark oak involves a risk of not dropping enough saplings for another tree, which effectively terminates the game. This risk is even higher with jungle tree saplings. Spruce has more leaves than dark oak, which drop more saplings, but no apples, so you need at least two apples in the bonus chest for later curing of zombie villagers. Birch provides the least amount of wood on the average.

Birch and oak can also grow with bee nests (not that bees are particularly useful because you need a source of smoke to harvest anything from bees).

It is good if your bonus chest includes a hoe but you can make one yourself after harvesting wood from the first tree you grow.

With no cheats, there is no hope for getting lava, which would solve many of your problems, but lack of lava just adds to the challenge!

Building
Initially, your only building material is dirt. After you grow and harvest some trees, you can do many things with wood. After getting some wood, your priorities are:
 * One wooden hoe to make farmland
 * Wooden swords for killing mobs more efficiently
 * A bed to rest in, sleep on nights without rain to prevent phantoms from spawning
 * Wooden shovels for mining dirt and making dirt paths (which prevent mobs from spawning)
 * Fences and optionally a few fence gates for animal farms (you can also dig holes in the ground)
 * Trapdoors to make mob traps and grinders

Feeding yourself
Cooking your food is not an option.

Livestock animals are abundant in a flat world and replenish themselves as you kill them for food. Chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep can all be eaten raw, and drop other useful things like leather for armoring yourself and wool for making a bed.

In addition, you can farm crops from seeds and roots (carrots or potatoes) found in your bonus chest. Grow enough of these to breed animals as appropriate. Chickens require seeds harvested from wheat, cows and sheep like wheat, and pigs like carrots and beetroots.

Killing skeletons gives you bones, which you can craft into bone meal. Applying bone meal to the grass blocks all around you cause flowers and grass to grow. Breaking the grass can give you more seeds.

You need a hoe to convert grass or dirt blocks into farmland. Plant your crops, but growth is slow to nonexistent until the farmland is hydrated, and for that you must wait for rain.

Survival goals
There are several points at which you may decide you've had enough of this flat survival.

The first respectable goal is simply get to the point where you can feed yourself indefinitely, defend yourself, and survive. This is a hand-to-mouth existence. Once you accomplish this, you are well prepared for island survival or more challenging desert survival games.

A good second goal is to create an infinite water source, from which you can feed yourself with fish, create larger bodies of water for fishing up enchanted loot, and creating drowned farms. This goal itself involves a lot of hard work, including a "megaproject" of making a mob farm without water (see below).

An extremely challenging goal is to create a village. Doing this requires curing two zombie villagers and breeding them. Curing them requires golden apples and potions of Weakness. Gold can be obtained from zombified piglins converted from pigs struck by lightning (aided by a lightning rod made from copper obtained from drowned). A potion of Weakness cannot be obtained directly, but thrown at you by a witch with the zombie villager in the way, preferably with both trapped in boats.

Mob farm without water
There are two basic techniques to farm mobs without using water to guide them to their deaths.

The simplest is a ditch in the ground, 2 blocks deep, generally surrounding your home base. The ditch is lined with open trapdoors, which are treated by hostile mobs as solid surfaces even if they are open. When they pathfind to you, they fall into the ditch, where you can kill them with your sword.

A more labor-intensive way, but with greater yield after the initial effort, is to make an aerial farm. Mobs drop down from a spawning platform, taking enough fall damage that they can be killed in one punch. You don't want them to die by falling, because zombies drop iron ingots only if killed by the player.
 * Make sure your simulation distance is set to 4 (minimum). This causes mobs to despawn when they are more than 44 blocks away from you.
 * Build a pillar with ladders 21 blocks high. Or build a staircase out of blocks (such as slabs) that mobs cannot spawn on. 21 blocks of falling distance is required to inflict maximum fall damage on mobs without killing them.
 * At 20 blocks of height, build a platform using dirt and open trapdoors. You can use any pattern of dirt and trapdoors in approximately equal proportions. As long as you avoid creating 3×3 areas in your platform, you prevent spiders from spawning (and by this time you have likely killed enough spiders for all the string you could ever need). It doesn't have to be a large platform; 10×10 or 16×16 or any reasonable size. The bigger the platform, the larger chance it has to spawn mobs.
 * Fence off the area below the platform into which mobs fall from above. Leave a gap in the corner.
 * Use a shovel to convert the surrounding land to dirt path blocks. At simulation distance 4, you need to clear at least 44 blocks from all around the fenced-off area, so that mobs can spawn only on the platform. Preferably clear more blocks because the mob spawning radius is centered on you, and you cannot always be at the center of the farm. This forces all mobs to spawn on the platform.

This farm works only at night unless you spend extra time building a large roof over the platform, overhanging the edge by 7 blocks, and made from blocks that mobs cannot spawn on (such as wooden stairs, slabs, or dirt path blocks). The advantage to night-time-only operation is that you can focus your day on survival activities: feeding yourself, breeding livestock, harvesting wood to make more tools, and so on.

Stand a small distance from the landing area (so that you are 24 blocks from the platform, which is the minimum spawn radius) and wait for mobs to fall, then run into the landing area to kill them with one punch each. If the mob is wearing armor, or if it's a witch, you may need your wooden sword because these mobs still have multiple health points after falling.

Getting unlimited water
Once you have a steady supply of wood and have become adept at killing zombies in your mob farm, you can focus on your next goal: obtaining an infinite water source.

As you kill zombies, you slowly collect iron ingots. It is tempting to use iron ingots for a sword, shears, or a bucket, but don't do it!. Your top priority is to create a cauldron, which requires 7 ingots.

As soon as you get 7 ingots, craft a cauldron and put it down somewhere exposed to the sky, so that it can fill up with water the next time it rains.

While you're waiting for the next rain, work on getting three more ingots to craft a bucket. Once you have a bucket, use it to remove the water from the cauldron. You can wait for another rain, or you can use three water bottles that you might have collected from witches to re-fill the cauldron with water. Now you have enough water for two water source blocks.

Once you have a water bucket and a cauldron full of water at the same time, you can make an infinite water source to get unlimited water source blocks. The most convenient configuration is a 2×2 hole in the ground, one block deep. Use the bucket to place water in opposite corners of this hole. If two water source blocks flow into an empty space, another source block is created. A 2×2 hole lets you remove water from any corner, which gets replaced immediately. You can also make a 1×3 straight trench or a 2×2 L-shaped trench, but then only the single water block in the corner can be removed. If you remove one of the end blocks, you can't get more water.

Once you have your water production hole, take water from it to produce a small pond for fishing, using a fishing rod that you craft from sticks and string obtained from spiders you killed.

You can fish from a location above the pond where mobs cannot bother you. If you make the pond 2 blocks deep, and your fishing rod's bobber has water 2 blocks deep for horizontal distance 2 blocks around it, you also have a chance to fish up other items, like bowls for making stew if you have beetroots or both red and brown mushrooms, saddles for taming horses and donkeys, and even enchanted fishing rods.

Raw fish isn't as high-quality a food as raw meat, but it's plentiful and less effort to obtain.

Congratulations! You now have an easy, unlimited supply of food and additional resources. This is a significant milestone on the way to a comfortable life. Take some time to relax, collect a few stacks of fish so you can eat on the run without needing to hunt animals, tidy up your area and your inventory, make some nice living quarters. If you plan to get villagers, you can start planning and constructing some village buildings, although getting a villager is a huge next step, even more difficult than what you've just lived through to get to this point.

Creating a village
Once you have unlimited water available, you can work on creating a village, which requires villagers. There is a large cascade of dependencies here:
 * To get a villager, you need to cure a zombie villager.
 * To cure a zombie villager, you need a golden apple and a splash potion of Weakness. You cannot obtain the potion; it must be thrown by a witch.
 * To get a golden apple, you need 8 gold ingots.
 * To get gold ingots, you need to kill zombified piglins, which sometimes drop ingots.
 * To get zombified piglins, lightning must strike near pigs.
 * To get lightning to strike near a bunch of pigs, you need a lightning rod.
 * A lightning rod requires copper ingots.
 * Copper ingots require you to kill drowned, which sometimes drop ingots.
 * Drowned are created from zombies drowning in water you created.

The success of some of these steps depends strongly on luck:
 * Drowned rarely drop copper ingots. You need to kill a lot of them.
 * Once you get a lightning rod, you may have to wait a long time for a thunderstorm.
 * Zombified piglins don't normally drop gold ingots. And when they attack you, they attack all at once. If you are fighting a crowd of them, and it takes more than 5 minutes to clear them out, the ingots they drop may despawn. You likely need at least 100 zombified piglins to get the 8 gold ingots required to make a golden apple.
 * Zombie villagers and witches are uncommon spawns. If they do spawn, you need to trap them in boats near enough to one another that the witch can hit the zombie villager with a splash potion.
 * Witches throw potions of Weakness only rarely. And if you happen to venture 32 blocks away from the witch, it despawns.

Once you have two villagers, you can breed them.

Villager professions
Decide what professions your villagers should have. For your first villagers, with the resources you have available, you can craft only five different kinds of job site blocks:
 * A cauldron (which you already have) is used by a leatherworker.
 * A composter is used by a farmer.
 * A barrel is used by a fisherman.
 * A loom is used by a shepherd.
 * A smithing table is used by a toolsmith (and requires 2 iron ingots).

These job blocks should not be near the villager at first. Put them in your inventory or in a chest. Your newly-cured villager might be one that doesn't match any of those professions (such as a cleric), which wouldn't normally exist because a brewing stand isn't possible to obtain in a flat world. Trade what you can with that villager before giving it a profession.

If you get a nitwit, keep it for breeding.

After you get a few emeralds from trading with villagers, you might be able to obtain sugar cane from a wandering trader. With sugar cane, you can craft paper, from which you can create books and bookshelves, which in turn let you craft two more job site blocks: The rest of the job site blocks require stone, and that is not available in a flat world without a lava bucket.
 * A cartography table (not really useful in a flat world) is used by a cartographer.
 * A lectern is used by a librarian, who can sell you lanterns so you can get more light.

Iron golem farm
You have many options for an iron farm. If you have trapped a villager in a boat, you're in a flat world, making it easy to drag the boat wherever you want using a lead, or rowing it over land, to put each villager exactly where you want it.

Getting to the Nether
Getting to the Nether is not possible without cheating, since there is no way to get lava or obsidian in a flat world (this may be changed in a future update). However, you might want to advance further, and since it is not possible to have achievements since creating a flat world puts you in Creative when you first join, you might think it is ok to give yourself a lava bucket.

Once you get a lava bucket, you can use dripstones and cauldrons to get more lava, until you have at least 10 buckets worth. Once you do, it is recommended to make a 4-wide 5-high cobblestone wall to make it easier to make a Nether portal. Lighting the portal itself is a challenge, since there is no way to get gravel or flint, however you can woodlight it using lava.

Once you get into the Nether, survival becomes much easier, since it is much easier to get wood and gold, you can get nether wart and ingredients for potion brewing, you can get blaze rods for an ender chest, you can find pure diamonds, you can mine blackstone to unlock making furnaces and several other crafting recipes, and so much more.

One thing pro players may want to do is defeat the wither. Wither skulls can be obtained from a fortress and soul sand can be found in the Nether, and potions can be brewed since brewing stands can be crafted and most of the ingredients required for regeneration, health and strength potions are found in the Nether. You can also brew Weakness potions to cure zombie villagers, resulting in lower prices for villager trades for diamond armor, tools, and enchantments. You can also build farms for blazes, wither skeletons, or zombie pigmen, giving you for XP to help with using an anvil or enchanting table. An enchanting table is also craftable due to being able to obtain pure diamonds.

Fighting the wither
Fighting the wither is significantly easier than on normal worlds because the entire terrain is flat. Once you are ready to fight the wither, travel a few hundred blocks in the nether and build a portal. This takes you to a new portal thousands of blocks away from your Overworld spawn point, so you don't risk destroying your home area. When you spawn the wither, dodge its hits and shoot it with a bow until it gets to half health, and kill it with a sword.

Once the wither is defeated, the nether star can be collected and used to make a beacon. If you have a good enough iron farm, you can afford to power the beacon, which gives you buffs.