User:MentalMouse42/Sandbox/Beginner's Guide

For players who do not know how to begin their Minecraft journey, the Beginner's Guide is a tutorial made to provide a list full of good ways to start. Here, you can learn how to survive the first night. There are three sections: The first one discusses the interface and controls, the second provides an overview with goals, and the third provides step-by-step instructions. In the course of following this guide you will also get announcements of several achievements; you can see that page for full details of achievements, but for now you can safely ignore them. You may also acquire some experience; again, ignore this for now, as it is not useful until later in the game.

$$, when you start the game for the first time, a short in-game tutorial appears to explain the basics of how to move and look around. The Controls page gives you a complete overview of all the controls.

Before reading this page, it's expected for players to have already bought and downloaded the game. You must create a new world before starting the tutorial. For Java Edition, the page Tutorials/Menu screen can help with that. For your first game, you should probably select Easy or Normal difficulty; if you normally have trouble finding your feet in new games, you may want to consider starting in peaceful mode. A new player may also wish to enable the Bonus Chest option, which will give you a few resources to start off with, but this tutorial will assume you do not have a bonus chest.

Controls and Interface
Minecraft is a sandbox game, in which your avatar will be wandering around in a world, collecting resources and using items. You will need to master the control system; if you are having trouble with it, you may want to start with a Peaceful Mode world to practice. Your world is made of blocks, mostly cubical. These blocks represent objects, but their size also makes a standard measure of distance; this and many other pages will talk in terms of, e.g., "five blocks away". (Officially, the blocks are one meter across.) Your character can stand within a single block's space, and they stand a little less than two blocks tall. Time passes within this world; a game day passes within 20 real-world minutes. Nighttime is much more dangerous than daytime; the game starts at dawn, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. The primary purpose of this guide is to let you "find your feet" and get basic equipment and shelter before night comes.

Your control system will depend on your platform, this article will mostly assume you are playing on Java Edition. Most of the controls can be changed in the game's option menu, but this and other articles will often refer to them by their default keys.

When moving around the world and dealing with blocks and creatures in the world, there are four basic operations which will be discussed below:


 * Movement in four directions, as well as looking upwards and downwards, jumping, and "sneaking". Variations include sprinting and swimming.  As you move around, you will occasionally see or produce items floating "loose" in the world.  Interacting with those is very simple: when you move close enough to them they will fly toward you and you will automatically take them into your inventory (unless your inventory is full, see below).  At the start of a game, just pick up every loose item you encounter, they will almost all come in handy eventually and it will take a little while to fill up your inventory.
 * "Mining" or breaking blocks, which is the basic way to collect resources from the landscape. In most cases, a broken block will drop one or more loose items.  Attacking mobile creatures ("mobs") uses the same controls as breaking blocks, and they also drop loose items when killed.  In general, attacking will use brief taps of the relevant control, while breaking blocks will require holding down the same control.  (Some blocks, such as tall grass, will break instantly.)
 * "Using" items or blocks. This is more complex, since it can apply to blocks in the world or to tools in your hand.  The same controls are used for some interactions with creatures (such as shearing sheep or trading with villagers), but this will generally be a matter for later days in the game.
 * Your character can also work with items in a GUI, especially managing your own inventory, crafting new items, and working with storage items such as chests.  This uses the mouse and sometimes the keyboard differently, while you are focused on your inventory and/or a crafting task rather than the world around them.

Non-Java editions
The controls for Java Edition will be summarized in the following sections, see the "Controls" article linked above for full details and for other platforms. For other platforms, here is a basic summary: mining, attacking, and "using" items all require targeting a spot on the screen. Many versions of the game will have a cursor in the center of the screen used for targeting, but touchscreens will allow the player to click on the screen to act as the targeting spot. Only blocks near you can be targeted, and you can tell a block is targeted by it having a box around it (or in the case of touchscreens, being brighter). This selected area or block affects the way you use these actions. For example, using is based on what you are looking at and what is in your hand. Less obviously, the player's actions of attacking and mining also use this cursor or selector method. The buttons for both attacking and mining are always the same, but attacking is only a tap of the control while mining requires holding down the control. These actions may use up blocks and change tools that you are holding and also change depending on your held item. Any time this tutorial mentions verbs describing in-game actions, you may want to test out that action using the controls page as a reference.

Movement
Moving the mouse (or trackball, for simplicity we will just refer to the mouse) forward and back will cause your character to look upwards and downwards. Moving the mouse left and right will cause your character to not just look, but turn in that direction, changing which direction is "forward". The keys will move your character left, forward, backwards and right. Be careful about moving to the sides or backward without knowing what's there, you can fall off cliffs or run into other dangerous things! Looking around also lets you pick out individual blocks or creatures to interact with, see below. If you walk off the edge of a block to where there is no solid block, you will fall off it. If you fall more than three blocks (and not into water) you will take damage depending on just how far you fell. If you fall into water over your head, you can eventually drown unless you swim back to the surface... and if you fall into lava, you will quickly burn to death!

Double-tapping and holding the "forward" key (again, by default), or pressing, while moving forward, will make you sprint, running faster (but this will use up food more quickly). If you fall into water, the same keys let you swim around.

The lets you jump; you can jump one-and-a-quarter blocks high, and can also jump across a two block gap in the ground (four blocks if sprinting). By default, walking into a one-block-higher edge will automatically make you jump up to the new level, but there are still many situations where you will need to jump upwards. If you turn off Auto-Jump you will need to explicitly jump up to higher terrain. If you fall into water (or lava!), this same key is how you move upwards toward the surface, and jump out onto the shore!

The key makes you "sneak". While sneaking, your viewpoint will get a little lower, and you will move more slowly. However, while sneaking you cannot fall off the edge of a block; in fact, you can sneak slightly over the edge of a block, to look at and interact with the side of the block you're standing on.

It is also possible for your character to crawl, but this is more complex; see the article "Crawling" for full details.

Breaking and Using
To interact with blocks, you need to move relatively close, within four or five blocks distance, and "focus" on the block by moving your cursor (the crosshairs) over the block you want to interact with.

Pressing the left button will "hit" whatever you are focused on. (This is also how you will attack animals or monsters later.) Holding down the button on a block will continue hitting it, eventually "breaking" it. This is how you collect materials from the world! Some blocks will need particular tools to collect them, but the first two sorts of block you will collect will probably be wood and dirt (grass blocks count as dirt) and both of those can be gathered with your bare hands. However, tools will make collecting even those much faster, and your second order of business (after getting some wood) will be to make some tools (primarily a pickaxe, axe and shovel). Generally when you start a world, the first thing you'll want to do is to find some trees and break a few blocks of wood out of their trunks ("punching wood"). Once broken, the blocks will "drop" as a loose item, which you can move forward to collect. Note that holding something that's not a tool (say, the block of wood or dirt you just picked up) still counts as "bare hands". You will also see a few other things around, such as tall grass or flowers; despite not being square, these still count as blocks, but they don't necessarily "drop themselves"; for example, tall grass will usually drop nothing, but sometimes will drop seeds.

The right button is more complex:  This is the "Use" command, with effects that depend not only on what you're pointing at, but on what you're holding. There are special blocks such as the "crafting table" discussed below which will open a GUI when used, but if you are not pointing at one of these, you will use whatever you are currently holding. There are various tools that are used for their respective purposes, but at first you're probably holding a block of wood or dirt, and the "use" of a block, is to place it down into the world. Simple blocks like these can be placed on any surface of a block that's already in the world, but more complicated blocks such as flowers can only be put in particular places (e.g. the top of a grass or dirt block). If you are pointing at a block which does have its own use, but you want to place a block on it (instead of, say, opening the GUI for a crafting table), you can "sneak" while placing the block.

When you eventually encounter a villager, you will also right-click on them to buy and sell items.

Combat
Surviving in Minecraft often requires a knowledge of the game's combat mechanics. There are two combat systems that exist in Minecraft – the system in the Java Edition and the system in all other versions. Regardless of platform, without a tool in the player's hand, any attack will deal 1 health point of damage. Tools in general do a great deal more damage, and does more damage the higher their tier. In general, swords do make the best weapons, followed closely by axes. Pickaxes do less damage, and shovels do the least. Hitting a creature with a sword will use up 1 point of its durability, while using any other tool will use 2 points of the tool's durability. When a creature is hit, it will turn red for a half second, marking its "invulnerability period". A second attack in this time will do no damage.

The combat mechanics for non-Java platforms are simple:  While three blocks away or closer to an animal, monster, or other players, the player can attack that entity by clicking the attack button while their cursor is over the entity. Clicking speed does not affect the combat, instead, a player's skill in combat is based more on their hit accuracy. The basic tools from above each deal multiple hearts of damage when the player attacks an entity while holding that tool.

In the Java Edition, a slightly different combat system is used. To attack any animal, monster, or other players, the player still must have their cursor hovering over the entity and be within three blocks of the entity when they press the attack button. However, after attacking, the weapon enters a brief "cooldown" period, indicated by the position of the weapon in the player's hand, and also by an icon in the hotbar. This happens even if you missed, or if the target was still invulnerable for a previous attack! Different basic tools have different cooldowns between hits. If the player attacks while still in a cooldown period their attack deals much less damage, making it more important to aim your attacks. In Java Edition, axes will do far more damage per hit even than swords, but their cooldown period is much longer, giving them lower DPS than swords over time. They also still wear out twice as fast as a sword.

In addition to attacking, the player can also block attacks with the. (Crafting a shield will require first obtaining an, so you probably won't have one for your first day.) A shield completely negates any damage when it is raised with the  right mouse button. In Java Edition, a shield can be temporarily disabled if attacked with an axe.

Items and Inventory
From the start of the game you can see nine special inventory slots, called your "hotbar", but you also have more slots which are normally hidden. As you pick up items, the first few will go into your hotbar slots, but once those are full, they will go into the 27 slots of your main inventory. At any given time, one of your hotbar slots is "selected", and the item in this slot is considered to be "in hand". (You can see the item in hand in front of you.)  You can press keys  through  to choose which hotbar slot is active, thus quickly switching among up to 9 items. Multiple items of the same type will usually "stack", showing with a number indicating how many of them there are. Most items will stack up to 64, but later you will encounter items that stack only to 16. Some items such as tools and armor are more individual, and do not stack at all. When you use or place items from a stack, you will generally use one item at a time, counting down the stack. You can also drop the item in hand (or one from a stack), which will toss it two or three blocks away. By default an item is dropped with the key. (Pro tip: On a standard keyboard, the  key is right next to to the movement keys, making it very easy to accidentally throw away the item you're using.  Many players prefer to use the Settings menu to rebind the "drop" function to another key, such as .)

To get at the rest of your slots (and the beginnings of crafting), press to open your personal inventory. First of all, note that this is your first GUI and shares many features with the other GUIs that you'll encounter later:


 * Your cursor is no longer controlling your view, instead you can use it to pick up and drag items among various slots. Left-click will pick up or drop an entire stack; right-click will pick up half of a stack or drop one item at a time.  There are more complex options, see the "Inventory" article linked above for details.
 * Note that opening a GUI does not pause the game, but while you are attending to the inventory you can only see a little of the world around you. Be careful about fooling with your inventory while monsters are around!  Opening your inventory also allows you to switch away from Minecraft and to another desktop window without pausing the game.

Looking to the right, you can see an image of your inventory screen. There is a little image of your character, showing their current appearance. Left of that image are four slots for any armor you are currently wearing -- these can each contain only an a appropriate armor piece, for helmet, chest, legs, or feet. Just to the right is a slot marked with a shield, which is your "offhand slot". This one can actually contain almost any item, but most common is indeed a shield. If you are wearing a shield, you can use it with the same "use" key as for other items In general you can "use" any item in your offhand, as long as neither the item in your main hand nor the block you are looking at has a "use" feature.

Below these are the 27 slots of your main inventory. You can drag items around from these slots to your hotbar and back, armor pieces can be moved to and from their armor slots, and items can be dragged to the personal crafting grid, about which more below. Dragging items completely out of the GUI's rectangle and releasing them there will drop the items into the world much like the key (or whatever you rebound that to), but it is easier to drop a whole stack this way.

The hotbar and main inventory adds up to 36 slots for general storage, which is the limit for how much a player can carry around and transport on their person. There is no sense of "weight" or encumbrance for items; a player moves at normal speed regardless of how full their inventory is or what particular items they are carrying. If your inventory becomes completely full, you will not be able to pick up new items, though you may still be able to pick up more of any stackable items that you already have.

Crafting
Also on your inventory screen, you will see your inventory crafting grid. Here you can take some of the items you've collected and turn them into new items. Below the crafting grid is the Recipe Book icon, which provides assistance with remembering and crafting recipes (see its page for full details). You do not actually need to use the Recipe Book, but for a beginning player, it can be very helpful in finding out what your options are, and even for advanced players, it adds a bit of convenience. In general, you will learn new recipes automatically when you pick up (or craft) a key item for the recipes in question. Actually crafting an item will certainly get you its recipe, if you somehow didn't learn it by picking up the ingredients.

When starting a game, your very first craft will usually be a two-step one: First, take a single log of wood and put it in the crafting grid. The output slot will show the matching wooden planks, which you can then take -- you will get 4 of them. Then take those planks and put one in each of the crafting grid's four slots. The output slot will now show a Crafting Table, which you should take, put on your hotbar, and place down in the world to begin more advanced crafting. Having placed the table, you can right-click on it ("use", as above) to open a UI similar to your inventory, but with a 3x3 crafting grid. This will let you do many more recipes; you can also use it for any recipe you could craft in your inventory, but the larger crafting grid allows many more possibilities. Notice that the crafting table also has a Recipe Book icon, as will several other crafting blocks you encounter later in the game. Any of these recipe books will show only the recipes that apply to its block. So your inventory's recipe book will only show 2x2 recipes, but the crafting table's will show all of its crafting recipes. (Similarly, the furnace's recipe book will show smelting recipes, and so on.)

Having set up a crafting table, your next step should be to make some sticks; you can actually do that in your inventory, the recipe is two planks arranged one over the other. Having a stick will unlock the recipes for your first tools, discussed below. (Note for beginners: A stick is not a club!  Using it to hit something is no better than using your bare hands.)  When you are done with your crafting table for the moment, you can break it like any other wooden block:  Your bare hands will do, but it will be much quicker to break it with an axe... which you might have just crafted.

Tools and Swords
The basic tools the player can acquire come in multiple tiers based on your materials, and they include the pickaxe, the axe, and the shovel, for for mining, respectively, stone-type, wood-type, and dirt-type blocks. The fourth tool is the hoe, which is a little different -- it is mostly used later, for tilling dirt into farmland, but can also be used to more quickly break some lightweight blocks such as leaves. Swords are similar to tools, and come in the same tiers, but these are used for attacking animals or monsters rather than breaking blocks. The five tiers are Wood, Stone, Iron, Gold, and Diamond, but for the first day you will be limited to wood, stone, and possibly iron. Higher tier tools will break blocks faster and last longer (swords will do more damage). (Gold is a special case, but that's not relevant for your first day.) For pickaxes in particular, many blocks require a minimum tier for you to collect them:  Wooden pickaxes can collect ordinary stone and coal ore, but iron ore requires a stone pickaxe, and more advanced ores (again, unlikely on your first day) will require an iron pickaxe.

Once you have sticks, the Recipe Book for the crafting table will include recipes for the wooden tools. The wooden pickaxe will let you harvest cobblestone, and once you have that, you will get the recipes for stone tools. Later, iron or gold ingots, and diamonds, will likewise show the recipes for those tiers. That said, all the recipes for each tool follow similar patterns, making a little picture of the tool in the crafting grid, and different tiers will vary only in the material used. For wooden tools, any combination of planks can be used. Here are the recipes for the first three tiers of the basic tools:

First day
For the first day, you have just a few basic objectives:


 * Look around to see what your environment is, and if necessary go someplace else. (See "Biomes" below for more details on this.)
 * Get wood, make wood tools, get stone, make stone tools, get coal (or extra wood if you can't find any), and find or make a shelter for the night.
 * Optional goals include:
 * killing animals for meat
 * killing sheep in particular for wool to make a bed
 * Breaking tall grass to collect seeds, and perhaps even tilling the edge of a pond or river to start a wheat farm.
 * Collecting some iron ore if you spot some near the surface.

As the first day begins, you will need to collect. First, you should look around for trees, and go towards any you find, and break their trunks by "punching wood" as discussed above. You need to collect at least 5-8 logs for your first round of tools and items you need immediately. You'll certainly want more a little later, but a few tools now will make collecting more wood go a lot more quickly. As discussed above, the first thing to make is a crafting table, followed by a few sticks.The first tool you should craft is a (3 planks on the top 3 slots and 2 sticks down from the middle plank). A wooden axe and/or sword are optional, but if you're having trouble finding stone they might be a good idea.

If any blocks are exposed close by, you can mine them with your new pickaxe to collect 19 blocks of. This is the amount you need to create every basic tool needed for this tutorial: a, ,, , perhaps a  , and a. While you're doing this, keep an eye out for coal ore, and mine any you find. Depending on the position of the stone blocks, mining them might well make you mini-cave to spend the night in, otherwise keep an eye out for possible places to lair up in.

Once you have a stone axe, you should try to get more logs as time allows; extra logs are useful in many ways, such as building, crafting, securing your base and much more. If you have difficulty finding coal, you definitely want an extra dozen or more logs to make charcoal! With coal or charcoal, you will be able to make (coal above a stick on the crafting grid) for the night.

Optional goals: While you're doing this, break any tall grass you pass and collect any seeds that drop (but don't waste time on this), and once you've got a sword, kill whatever food animals you pass, especially sheep (up to 3 of those), collecting whatever they drop. (Note: Horses, llamas, and foxes are not food animals, leave them be for now.)  Don't spend too much time chasing down animals though, a few pieces of meat are plenty, and you only need 3 pieces of wool for now. If you happen to spot some iron ore, wait until you've got your stone pickaxe, and then mine that too.

By the time you've done this, the sun will likely be starting to go down. If you're really ahead of the game, you might take a moment to hoe some dirt next to a river or pond, and plant seeds to get a head start on wheat. (Place a torch near these so they can grow overnight.) But at that point, it's time to head for cover, and either prepare a cave as your first night's lair, or make a mini-house.

Night time
For most players, the first night is time to set up your crafting table and furnace, cook your meat and perhaps some logs for charcoal, and maybe craft a few things for the next day. If you managed to pick up some iron ore, smelt that too, and consult the "second day" tutorial for what to make with it. (TL;DR: Shield, iron pickaxe, iron sword, bucket, in that order.)  If you've settled into a cave, you might want to mine overnight to look for coal or ion ore, but don't go too deep because you want to get an early start for the next day. If you managed to get wool for a bed, you also have the option of just skipping the night; if you managed to make yourself too hungry or hurt, or didn't get much in the way of other resources, that might be a good idea.

At night time, the primary danger will be hostile mobs (monsters) that only spawn in the dark. These include s, s, s, s, and more. All of these are good reasons to stay put in a well-lit shelter. But... if you are really seeking adventure, you could always arm yourself with a and fight some monsters. While you might be able to get some materials for further crafting, it is pretty dangerous, and if you die, all of your items and levels will drop where you died, and you will respawn at your bed (or at your world spawn if you don't have one). However, most of the monsters you can fight at this point will either burn (zombies and skeletons) or become less dangerous (spiders) when morning comes, and it will be much easier to fight them later when you have better equipment. If you must fight monsters this early, be especially wary of skeletons; in the open their arrows can easily get your health quite low or even kill you at a distance, and if they're in the water or on higher ground, it's unlikely you'll be able to reach them before being killed at this stage. If you happen to see any of the more powerful monsters, keep well away from them: At this point, an, , or even a can kill you easily.

If you are repeatedly being killed (too ambitious, a monster got into your shelter, or you didn't manage to make a shelter), you can always dig a three-block deep hole, cover it up and hide there. However, consider that because this is the first day, you won't actually lose much when you die (except for what has already been gathered that day), so if you do end up being killed you can just tough it out until dawn and start again. Keep on practicing killing mobs until you get the hang of it. If you're completely desperate, you can consider switching to "peaceful difficulty" (see "changing the rules" below), which will make all the monsters disappear until you switch back.

Shelter
As noted above, you should really want to find or make some kind of shelter before your first night, to avoid being killed. The "Shelters" article linked above gives a lot of suggestions for emergency shelters and more advanced ideas, but it only takes a little thinking ahead to manage a decent shelter for the first night. As you move around collecting logs and so on, look at the landscape for potential homes. Easiest (if you can find it) is a small cave with a single entrance that you can wall or off. If it's not quite ideal, consider if you can fix it quickly – say, fencing off a back door to deeper caves. If you don't have a cave, you may be able to make one, by simply digging into a mountainside or even roofing over a small valley. If instead, you have wide, flat space, then go ahead and build a small house. In all cases:


 * Don't be too ambitious the first night, because you will want it to be safe before dark, and you will also want to light up the space you claim (see "Light" below). You can always expand and decorate your home later, or even rearrange the landscape around it.
 * When picking your location, it's good to have a view of the landscape so you can see if any monsters are waiting for you in the morning. You might need to leave your shelter at a sprint to escape a pesky creeper.  Similarly, don't set up next to a pond where skeletons might take refuge in the morning.
 * Learn about the awesome powers of Wood! Fences can be used not only in the obvious way but as windows or transparent walls, with s to get in and out.  provide a full-height exit for solid walls:, planks, , even , but not fences! A few properly-placed s can make it a lot easier to get up to your roof or up a hill. A  will also be useful – stash anything you're not going to use soon, so you don't have to worry about it if you happen to get killed. You will save some of your precious 36 inventory slots by making planks and s only as you need them.  Even if you don't have a chance to do anything fancy before nightfall, you can spend part of the night exploring the Recipe Book for your crafting table.
 * If you can manage to make a early on, place that in your shelter and use it the first night you have it. Getting killed is much less painful after that because sleeping in a bed sets the spawn point next to it, so you will reappear inside your home rather than somewhere out in the wild. After the first night, you may well want to spend the nights crafting and mining.  Phantoms are not an immediate concern, but you really do want that bed by at least your third night.

Light
Monsters can't spawn within 24 blocks of you, but huddling in the dark is no fun – and when you do leave your home, you don't want to come back to find a monster has spawned or moved in. So, you need to light up your space, and at this point, the light you have is. A single torch gives enough light to prevent monster spawns completely within a 7 block range (barring obstructions), and reduce them for about the same distance past that. That range is in "taxicab distance", with each square east, west, north south, up and down counting independently. Accordingly, the safe zone only runs 3 spaces or so diagonally, and steps up or down can shorten it further. Even outside the safe zone, having some light will sharply reduce the chance of monsters spawning (depending on how much light), but it's better to use enough torches to keep your whole home well-lit. If you have extra torches after that, try to light some space outside your home (or at least the entrance) too, to push back the area where monsters are likely to spawn.

Food and hunger
Once you have tools and shelter, your next priority will be food. Hunger will take a while to hit, so it shouldn 't be a problem on your first day, but you should try to pick up some food for when it does, just so you don't get into an emergency situation. As with your health bar, you start with a full hunger bar, with 10 icons ("shanks") representing 20 hunger points. After you have been moving around (and perhaps fighting) for a while, the hunger bar will begin rippling and start to decrease. If the hunger bar drops below 90%, you will not regenerate health, and if it gets to 30% , you can't sprint. If the hunger bar goes down to empty, you will begin losing health. Unless you are in Hard mode (and a beginning player shouldn't be), you can't actually starve to death, but you will go down to 1 health point in Normal mode or half health  in Easy mode, which leaves you quite vulnerable. You will not lose hunger at all if you are playing in Peaceful mode.

The primary drain on hunger is from healing damage, and for quite some time this will be your only way to heal damage! Fighting (even before healing damage), sprinting, and jumping are all food-intensive as well. (Be careful about going uphill with auto-jump!) You will have a little grace period (see "saturation") when starting the game and after eating, but when that's exhausted, your food bar will start rippling, after which healing damage or getting too athletic will start to drain your hunger bar. See the Second Day guide for slightly more detail, or the Hunger page for the whole story.

Note that if you are staying at full health, and not fighting, sprinting and/or jumping, swimming long distances or or mining many blocks, then you will use almost no food. Walking at normal speed does not use up food. Thus, if your character has a secure place to stay, you can just stay put to conserve food while waiting out the night, a storm, or crop/animal growth.

Making a crude wheat farm early on (by breaking tall grass for seeds, and planting next to existing water) is listed as an optional objective above, but if you can pull it off your first day, it will give you a definite head start on the game -- having a few pieces of bread handy gives you a lot more options, let alone the ability to lure chickens and cows into captivity. And wheat is where you'll begin obtaining food: Harvested wheat can be used to make bread, or to capture and breed cows. Extra seeds can similarly be used to capture and breed chickens.

That said, killing a few animals and cooking their meat can certainly tide you over for long enough to make more permanent arrangements. The occasional apple or sweet berries can help a bit, but mind those damage-dealing bushes!

Getting Started
When the player begins the game, they will be standing in a landscape somewhere. The general area the player first starts is where they will reappear (also known as respawn, if not in Hardcore) if they die in the game. This is the start of a new Minecraft world. This tutorial is designed to allow you to learn the skills needed to survive in this world and eventually be able to do just about anything you desire. You can do the different sections below in any order you desire, but many sections require you to first complete other tasks first. The tasks listed on this page (except those noted as optional) should all be completed before moving on to the second day tutorial, even if it takes you multiple days to complete all of the tutorials. No matter what, your goal for the first day should be creating a bed or shelter so you can survive the night. The other tasks are also very important and can all be completed along with the main objectives while leaving you with extra time.

See the first section of this guide for information about controls and getting around in the world. You will need to master those skills in order to complete the following tasks. Again, the game starts at noon, and you have 10 minutes of game time before nightfall. Your overarching goal here is to acquire basic equipment and a simple shelter in that time. You do have some time to practice your basic skills and learn about your inventory, but don't take too much time at that. If night falls and you still don't have any shelter or basic equipment, it is fair (for your first game) to switch the game to Peaceful mode for the night.

While following the steps below, break any tall grass you see and collect any seeds that drop, they will come in handy later. In fact, collect any loose items you come across, almost everything can be potentially useful. Also keep an eye out for orange blocks and (if you happen to be in a jungle) green  blocks. If you find any, break some of them and take the results with you for later farming. Also watch out for sweet berry bushes. "Using" them can provide berries for a bit of food, but actually stepping into them will hurt!

Biomes
The Minecraft world is divided into different areas called "biomes". Different biomes will contain different blocks and plants and change how the land is shaped. There is an advancement that includes finding all the biomes; this is better explained on the advancements page. Biomes will affect you, especially at the beginning of the game, but you have little need to worry about specific biomes until you have learned how to play the game. If you are curious, you may want to read more about biomes on the biomes page. That said, there are a few cases you do need to worry about:


 * You start on a small island in the ocean: Go to the highest point on the island and look around for other land.  If you see a reasonably-sized continent with trees and animals, swim there.  If you see no large land and no animals in sight, you have an "ocean spawn".  For a player's first game, it is entirely reasonable to exit this world and try again.
 * You are standing on sand, with no trees or water nearby. You are in a desert.  Again, go to high ground and look around for trees and green grass.  If you see some, go there before continuing with this guide.  If there's no green in sight, this is another situation where you can reasonably toss the world and try again.  Deserts are much easier when encountered from outside, but they are missing important things like dirt, wood, and accessible stone, all of which which you really do need to start off the game.
 * You are in a dark forest, with squat, thick trees, a thick leaf canopy, and giant mushrooms scattered around. This is a particularly unsafe place for a starting character and a beginning player.  However, if you move quickly, you can probably make it to more open ground in a reasonable amount of time, and start setting up in a more reasonable biome.  Don't leave the dark forest behind completely, though -- once you've got basic armor and weapons, it's a very resource-rich area.  And grab some of that plentiful wood once you reach the edge!
 * The land around you is greyish-purple, with dusty particles, giant mushrooms, and red "cows": Rejoice, for you have received a miracle -- a spawn in a Mushroom Fields biome, where hostile creatures cannot appear (except for underground dungeons).  You will need to go elsewhere to find wood, crop seeds, and some other resources, but otherwise, you've got a golden situation here.  Once you have even a bit of wood, you will be able to get unlimited food from the Mooshrooms, and you have a large area in which you barely need to worry about your safety even at night.

If you see houses and other buildings nearby, this is not exactly a biome, but it means that you are near a village, which is a good thing (in fact, it will let you skip past a lot of the first and second-day stuff) but requires a bit of care. It's worth exploring the village and ransacking any chests you find; if you happen to find any emeralds, you might even be able to buy some useful items from the villagers ("use"/right-click on them to open the trading interface). You can also harvest any hay bales from the vicinity, craft them back into wheat, and sell the wheat to any farmer you find. Besides providing equipment, food and other resources, a village will also let you collect the seeds for all four of the basic crops up front, from their farms, and you can also take one of their beds with you when you leave. You may see some iron golems trundling around, do not attack them (or the villagers for that matter), or the golems will promptly kill you.

Important: Any time you are near a village, you must sleep in one of their beds overnight, as soon as night falls. Trying to stay up overnight can expose the village to attacks by monsters, which can easily wipe out the villagers. It's okay if a villager has already claimed the bed -- trying to use the bed the first time will kick them out, then you can use the bed again for yourself. If you have a village, you should probably travel some distance from it (say, fifty or a hundred or so blocks from the edge) to make your own lair, to avoid having monsters show up overnight due to your presence. If monsters (such as illagers) do show up during the day, your best bet at this point is to ring one of the bells present in the village, and hope that the village's iron golems can deal with the invasion.

Wood (logs)
Wood is the most basic resource in Minecraft, and you will need to collect some up front. The usual and most plentiful wood source are from trees, which are available in most biomes. Logs are one of many items that can be collected without the use of a tool. All you have to do is mine any log of the tree with your hand or any item. Each block will drop as an item that you can pick up and put in your inventory by approaching it. You should start off by collecting 6-8 logs for your first tools. There are many different types of trees in Minecraft, each having its own individual name and look. Each kind of log can easily be crafted into a matching type of. All logs and planks work for any recipe requiring logs or planks respectively, but a few recipes require that all the wood you use be the same type (for example, when making a boat, you can't mix oak and spruce planks). If you mine all the wood of a tree, the leaf blocks atop it will start decaying (you can also break them yourself), dropping sticks, saplings, and perhaps apples. For your first day, don't wait around for leaves to decay, but as usual, pick up any items they do drop and save them for later.

A rarer source of wood is sunken ships which are made of logs and planks and are found in ocean biomes, but dealing with these is probably best saved for later. Abandoned mineshafts (found on the surface in a few biomes) also contain planks, but these are definitely better saved for later. Your Recipe Book will provide an assortment of useful recipes for wood, including each type of wood as you encounter it.

In order to obtain better materials at faster speeds, the player needs tools. Tools are items that allow the player to complete tasks other than placing blocks at faster speeds than normal. Most tools can be made out of different materials each better than the last. Using a tool to mine the blocks it is intended to will mine the blocks quicker than normal. Tools lose durability upon each use, even if the use was to hit an entity. (In fact, using tools as weapons will generally wear them out more quickly.) Enough damage to a tool will eventually cause the tool to break. Different tools have different properties and abilities. If you are using a tool on a block and it seems to be taking an unexpectedly long time, you may be using the wrong tool for that block -- stop to look at the block and reconsider your approach.

Having acquired wood, the first tool to craft is a wooden pickaxe. This starts by crafting a couple of logs into planks, and then at two of those planks into sticks. The planks required for a wooden tool can be any combination of planks, as shown below.

You probably won't need to craft any other tools out of wood, since you will soon be upgrading to stone.

The 4 basic tools are the pickaxe, which is used to destroy and gather stone and stone-related materials, the shovel, which is used to gather, , , , and their variants, the axe is used to collect wooden materials more efficiently, and lastly, the hoe, which is used to turn dirt or into. See above for recipes, but the reader may have noticed that in order to craft a basic tool, they more or less draw it with its components in the crafting grid. Other items are crafted in a similar fashion.

Entering the Stone Age


Once the player has crafted a pickaxe, they can successfully acquire to make better tools. Cobblestone is collected by finding then mining it with any pickaxe. Stone mined with any pickaxe will drop as a cobblestone item. Note that besides stone, there are three other kinds of Rock around, which can not be used to craft tools. White and red  are fairly obvious, but  can easily be mistaken for proper stone -- when you start mining, check the block that you get in your inventory to make sure it's actually cobblestone instead of an andesite block.

If no stone appears above ground near the player, stone can also be found by digging into the ground. The stone layer will usually appear within 5 blocks under and  or within 8 blocks under  and. Remember to never mine out the block you are standing on unless you know that what's below that block isn't a long fall, lava, or other dangers! Another warning here: When digging sand and gravel, you will find that unlike most blocks, these can fall, and if they fall on you they can suffocate you. If that happens, don't panic, just dig yourself out as quickly as you can.

Most players will want to gather at least 19 cobblestones in total, which is enough to make a and all the basic stone tools including the sword and hoe. Taking some extra cobblestone is good in case you use up some of your tools and need to replace them.

More resources


Now, with your, you should cut down some more trees for. Although some trees may look different than others, all logs function the same. However, different kinds of logs don't stack together. While you cut down trees, try to gather the that fall. If you are cutting down oak trees, s will also drop (see "Tree" for more info.)

If the sun is still in the sky, explore the immediate area (making sure you don't get lost), to try and find some. has all the same properties as (and can also be crafted into s). If you get some, craft a few torches up front, but don't use up all your coal -- save some for later smelting.

If you happen across a coal-like ore with tan specks in place of the black, you have found some. will be extremely useful for most of your Minecraft career, and if it's within easy reach, go ahead and gather it (you will need to mine it with a ). However, If it's in a difficult-to-reach place, just note its location and save it for later.

First Farming
Back near at the beginning of the "play by play" section, we told you to break tall grass and collect the seeds. Now you have a chance to use those. Look for any water (pond, river, ocean) with dirt or grass nearby at the water level, Use your hoe on the dirt or grass, within 4 blocks of the water itself (diagonals count). Wait a moment to make sure the new farmland darkens instead of reverting back to dirt, then plant your seeds, one per block (save one or two seeds for possible chicken-wrangling, below). Later you can make a more organized farm, but for now, you have just gotten a head start on a permanent food supply. When you come back here tomorrow or the next day, at least some of those will have grown into wheat, which you can use to make bread or to lure and breed cows (see "animals", below). You will also get extra seeds from harvesting the wheat, which you can use to plant more wheat, or to lure and breed chickens. Pro tip: If you have any torches, place one to light the field overnight.

Animals
Some creatures in Minecraft are not immediately hostile to the player. These are known as passive and neutral mobs. Many passive mobs can act as important food sources.

Passive mobs will never attempt to harm the player. The majority of passive mobs are traditional domesticated farm animals which will usually ignore the player. If harmed, they will quickly run around in circles or dash away for a short time. Some animals will run straight away from players who get too near. If a passive animal is killed, it may drop animal-specific resources such as raw meat. Most passive mobs at least drop a fews if killed by the player, but baby animals never drop anything. These passive mobs include the several meat animals... and now you've got a new stone sword! Look for sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs, use your sword to kill a few and collect the meat and other drops. In particular look for sheep, and try to kill at least 3 of them for their wool. That said, don't slaughter *everything* you see -- try to leave at least two of each kind alive for later breeding. If you have a lot of wood and are doing well on time, you might even set up a small corral of wooden fences and fence gates, and use seeds to lure some chickens in there for later. Unless you found a village, you don't yet have the wheat you'd need to lure cows and sheep, nor the root vegetables that pigs prefer, but you might perhaps be able to use dandelions to lure rabbits into a secure pen.

Neutral mobs act similarly to passive mobs except that they will harm the player if provoked. , s, s, s, s, s and s will attack the player if the player harms them. These creatures will also attack other creatures that hurt them. Polar bears will turn hostile to the player if it has a polar bear cub with it, and bees will attack if you try to molest their hive. Bees and wolves will both attack as a group -- if one of them attacks all the others in the vicinity will join in! For all of these, plus the passive horses, donkeys, and cats, just leave them be for now -- they don't drop meat, and you don't have the means to tame or breed them yet.

For more information on breeding, see the page Breeding. Taming mobs is more complex, but you might look at the pages for, , , and.

Making your Bed
To make it through the first night, the player has two good options: craft and use a, or build a shelter. Both is good too, but a beginning player may not be able to pull that off, and if they have to choose, the bed is likely easier and safer... if you can find those precious three blocks of wool. (If you were lucky enough to run into a village, you can also sleep in one of their beds, and perhaps swipe it afterwards. Beds are a special block that take up two blocks of floor space, but are only about half a block tall, a shape most likely unusual for what the player has thus far seen.

Here is the crafting recipe for a bed. The color of the bed will match the three wool used. The three wool must be the same color, and the bed's blanket will be that color. Wool is obtained from by  them (an option unavailable to the player at this time) or by killing them. Sometimes the player may find wool on the ground; this wool comes from sheep that were killed by (or in multiplayer, by other players). If there are no sheep to be had, you will eventually be able to collect string from killed spiders, and craft wool from the string. With a bed, the night is easy to survive. All you need to do to do is place the bed somewhere suitable (see below, but almost any open ground will work) and use it (sleep in it) whenever night falls. If you try using it as sundown approaches but are told "you can only sleep at night or during a thunderstorm...", just wait a few seconds and try again, it will work once sundown has properly begun. You also cannot use a bed when hostile monsters are within 10 blocks, or you will get the message "you can't sleep now, there are monsters nearby". On sucessfully using a bed, you will be moved a lying position on the bed without the ability to move – not even the camera. It takes a few seconds after getting into bed before the game skips the night. If the player wants to leave the bed, they should follow the onscreen instructions when they are using a bed.

A bed allows the player to do three important things:


 * In single-player mode, it lets them skip past the night (or a thunderstorm, which can also be a fairly dangerous situation for a new player). No time will pass in the world -- crops will not grow, furnaces will not smelt, etc, but the game time will advance to dawn, upon which monsters will stop spawning on the surface and any skeletons or zombies caught in the sudden sunlight will burst into flame.  (If the player is in a multiplayer game, all other players must also use a bed before night is skipped -- various mods can alter the rules here.)
 * Using the bed sets the player's spawn point – the location they respawn in if they die.   Without a set span point, a player who dies will reappear somewhere within 20 blocks of the world spawn point, probably outdoors, and if it was night time, it still will be.  Their possessions (including weapons and armor) will be left behind at their death site.  This is not generally a pleasant situation!  In current versions (1.15 or newer) of Java Edition, using the bed during daytime will set your spawn point even if you can't sleep yet.
 * If a player has not slept (or died) within the last three days or so, can spawn at night and even during thunderstorms.  If the player goes outside, these will swoop down from the sky to attack.  Sleeping in a bed prevents this not-so-minor inconvenience.

Note that to use a spawn point like this, the bed needs to stay put! If you pick up the bed to take with you, then if you die the bed will be counted as "missing", and it's back to somewhere near the world spawn. You also need to have some open space next to the bed, on the same level or the level below -- someplace for you to actually appear when you respawn. Note that glass, fences, or other non-solid blocks do not count!. If there is no such space when you die, the bed is considered "obstructed", and again, it's back to the world spawn.If the bed has no blocks immediately next to it open for the player to spawn in, then the player will not respawn there but their spawn point will still default to the bed. In multi-player, if another player has since used the same bed, your spawn point is also lost.

This is why the best option is to have a secure shelter of your own, with a bed permanently installed inside it. That way, you come back safe at home. If it's still night or storming, you can go back to bed and sleep through to daylight before you go back in search of your fallen possessions. (Note: You only have 5 minutes to retrieve them before they disappear.)

Smelting


To progress in the game and even to stay alive, the player needs to know how to use a. A furnace is used to cook food, smelt ores, and create other specific items such as. To use a furnace, the player must first have one. This is the crafting recipe:

Just like the, the player usually uses the furnace by first placing it down in the world then clicking on it with the use button. The furnace itself counts as a stone-type block, so to pick it back up you need to break it with a pickaxe (or else the item will not drop). The furnace will light up, display fire particles, and create popping sounds while cooking items.

The furnace GUI has only three slots and includes two icons to indicate time. The top left slot is where items to smelt are placed. The items are moved from this slot one by one as they are cooked and the products are placed in the right slot. To cook items, the furnace requires fuel which is placed in the bottom left slot. The example below also shows how to smelt 3 logs into charcoal.

It's simple to tell how long is left for an item to smelt – just see how much of the arrow icon has turned white. When a valid item is placed in the top left slot and the furnace is either lit or has fuel to use in the bottom left slot, the arrow icon begins filling. The furnace will automatically light itself when it has both fuel and something to smelt -- when it lights, the flame icon will show a full flame which has the color's size diminish as the current fuel item is consumed. While lit, the furnace changes its texture to show flames near its bottom, displays fire particle effects near the bottom, and creates popping sounds. The furnace will also create light around it while in a lit state, allowing the player to use a furnace as a temporary light source.

It takes ten seconds for one item to be smelted. Luckily for the player, the furnace will continue cooking items even when they do not have the furnace GUI open. To also ease the use of furnaces, a furnace will automatically use fuel from the bottom left as needed to keep the furnace lit until all the items in the top left are smelted, or the fuel runs out. The furnace stays lit by using up flammable items from the bottom left slot of the furnace GUI. Different items burn for different amounts of time, but generally, most items made from wood can be used as fuel. Some common cases: Any wooden tool (or sword) will smelt one item; a wooden plank will smelt 1½ items (that is, 2 planks smelt 3 items, as shown above), and a piece of coal or charcoal will smelt 8 items.

For the first day, the most efficient use of a furnace would be to cook meat (raw meat smelts into cooked meat) and smelt some logs into charcoal, using any wood tools the player has replaced with stone tools, planks, and charcoal itself. Charcoal is a much more efficient fuel source than logs or planks because it keeps the furnace lit for much longer than the number of logs or planks it would require to create charcoal. One charcoal burns for 80 seconds, allowing a furnace lit with a piece of charcoal to smelt 8 items.

Here is the recipe for charcoal:

Once a furnace uses a piece of fuel, the time the fire stays lit will not stop if the player exits the GUI or the furnace runs out of items to smelt. For this reason, players who do not want to waste a lot of fuel ought to place at least as many items as their fuel will smelt into the furnace. Also, if the furnace is unlit or broken while in the process of smelting an item, the progress of smelting that item is immediately lost.

Smelting items in a furnace also produces experience, which will automatically be awarded to the player whenever they take any smelted item out of the furnace.

Light
Players are greatly affected by light in Minecraft. First off, any underground space is very dark and half of the time the game is at night. It is possible to see a little better by altering the same settings to raise the brightness level of the display, but eventually the player will need to craft light sources as well. The absence of light doesn't just affect the visibility of the world, but also allows monsters to spawn. Any space further than 24 blocks from a player that isn't lit up well enough (about 7 blocks in taxicab distance from a light source) is a free spawning ground for monsters. Accordingly, a player "claims" territory by lighting it up so that monsters cannot spawn. On the first day, a player can create the light source of. They give off light when placed. Torches work almost as well as any other light source except that they require a block to be set on. Unlike in real life, a torch will stay lit forever, allowing the player to use torches as a cheap and permanent light source. A single pair of one, and one or , crafts into 4 torches.

The most important places to light up are a player's home or base, caves they explore, the outside around the player's home, and anywhere the player will often be in or near that is dark.

Shelter

 * Prerequisites: Light (suggested if night or almost night but not necessary)

The best way to avoid the darkness and accompanying mobs of night time is to craft and use a, but this isn't an option easily available to all players as they start their first day. Building a shelter is an important skill for players to learn and important if the player cannot craft a bed. The point of a quick shelter is to keep all monsters far enough from the player that they cannot harm them. Monsters will not even move towards a player who is in a correctly built shelter.

To protect a player, a shelter should be made out of blocks that cannot be just passed through by monsters or the player themselves. Holes of any kind in the walls or ceiling are a safety hazard as s can fit through a one-block gap, s can shoot through open gaps created by or, and s can climb over most walls.

The walls and ceiling of a shelter can be made entirely out of blocks the player has gathered but it is usually much faster to dig out a shelter out of a hill. When doing this, you need to avoid the few blocks affected by gravity, which for now is  or. A player may already have a hole dug out from gathering cobblestone earlier in the day which can be quickly reused as part of a shelter. Sometimes there may be a naturally generated structure nearby that would serve as a shelter. Similarly, there may be a cave that is visible from the surface which can have its ends blocked off to create a shelter, being careful that no monsters are already in the cave.

If a village happens to be nearby, that is an ideal place to seek shelter, but in modern versions of the game, a village will also have many beds, which will let you avoid any trouble by sleeping through the night.

In an emergency, the player may not have time to make an adequate shelter. While digging straight down is ill-advised, an emergency may warrant mining straight down three blocks and quickly blocking off the top. The player could swim out into some or ride a  out to have some temporary safety, though players should avoid moving towards parts of the ocean lit up beneath, and -wielding  mobs swimming underwater may harm the player. If the player decides to swim and stay afloat on the water, the hunger bar will deplete more quickly (hunger does not deplete in a boat). If the player does not want to deal with monsters, they can change the difficulty to peaceful temporarily to remove monsters or use to skip night entirely if cheats are enabled, but cheats will prevent the player from earning advancements.

If the player is successful in creating a shelter then they will most likely find themselves in almost complete darkness. Lighting up a shelter and the surrounding area with some light sources such as not only allows the player to see but the light created by light sources can also prevent monsters from spawning. A can also be used as a temporary light source. Having light before building a shelter is usually best as it is easier for players to set up light sources when they can still see.

To get in and out of a shelter, the player needs some type of entrance/exit. If necessary, the shelter's exit can simply be some easily broken blocks. A much better way to set up a shelter's entrance is by crafting and placing a. A door is relatively cheap and can be placed on any solid, opaque block. The door will take up a vertical space of two blocks, similar to how a takes up a horizontal space of 2 blocks. By placing it from the outside, the door will be flush with the outside wall. Doors can be quickly opened and closed and many while closed allow the player to see outside without monsters being able to see or attack the player inside. If the player is playing in hard difficulty, there is a chance a zombie may come that can break down the door. If a zombie begins breaking down the player's door, they ought to quickly cover up the door from the inside with a couple of blocks.

Finally, it is useful for the player to be able to see when the time switches to day. Periodically breaking a block in the shelter can provide this information but leaves the player in mild temporary danger. Instead, it is better to use a block the player can see through but mobs cannot. Doors are perfect for this functionality along with s. With some extra work the player can craft by smelting  in a. and s can give the player some limited visibility but must be placed so they connect correctly with blocks to form a solid wall or ceiling. If the player doesn't have a way to check for day, they can listen for burning monsters or time the 10 minutes night lasts.

A shelter is a great place for the player to continue to mine, craft, and smelt items while they wait for daybreak.

However, if the player is not able to sleep, then after just 3 days, s will have a chance to spawn at night when the player is outside, harming the player. If this happens, the player can just stay indoors at night, and make tunnels to get to places.

Read more: Guide to shelters

Food

 * Prerequisites: Smelting

If the player is not playing in a peaceful difficulty, every movement will slowly drain away at the player's hunger bar. Similar to the player's health bar, the hunger bar has 20 points which are displayed by 10 icons that each display as either full, half full, or empty. Keeping at least 18 points allows the player to regenerate health and keeping above 6 points allows the player to sprint.

Different types of movements drain the player's hunger bar at different rates and standing still will allow the player to lose no hunger whatsoever. Quicker movements are usually less efficient – using up more of the player's hunger bar for the same distance traveled. For example, walking is more efficient than sprinting, and sneaking is more so but jumping while running is the least efficient action the player can perform.

To replenish the hunger bar, the player needs to eat food. Food has two values: food points and saturation. Food points immediately replenish the player's hunger bar. Saturation is an invisible number to the player which is used up before the player's hunger bar becomes depleted. As general rules, bigger food and harder to cook food items fill up more hunger points while foods that are more filling increase the player's saturation. After killing a few animals, the player will have a couple of pieces of raw meat in different varieties. A food item easy to make early on is any type of cooked food, made by placing raw meat of any type in a furnace, smoker, or campfire and cooking it.

Certain foods should not be eaten by the player under most circumstances. For example,, es, and s all poison the player. Another set of foods to avoid are those which give players the hunger effect which include and.

Cooking meat to greatly improve its efficiency:

Chest

 * Prerequisites: Crafting

If you have a couple of logs (or 8 planks) left over after making torches and a bed, you can also make a to stash items you don't want to carry around. If you get killed, anything in the chest will be waiting for you rather than scattered around your death site.

A chest isn't really necessary for your first night, but it will become very helpful over the next day or a few.

Dawn
Wait for full light, wield your sword, and carefully leave your shelter. Hopefully, it will be sunny, but even so, watch out for any remaining monsters — this may well be your first fight. If you see s, don't panic, they will hopefully have become peaceful in the sun (you can try to kill them for their s). If you see a, your best bet at this point is to run at least 16 blocks away from it, and wait for it to go away (or explode, if it got too close before you got away). If you see any s or s (hiding under trees or in water), stay away from them — skeletons can still shoot at you if you are too close (16 blocks or so), and either skeletons or zombies may come out from shade to attack you even as they burn. If a burning zombie attacks you and the difficulty is normal or hard, you have a chance to be set on fire! If this happens, flee and jump into any nearby (monster-free) water. Once you're out and clear of monsters, look around for and collect s, s, or which may have been dropped by dead skeletons and zombies.

If it is not sunny, you may have worse problems: You may need to kill zombies or even skeletons (or just retreat back in your shelter until the sun comes out). Zombies can be easy to kill by themselves, but if in a pack they can overrun you. However, if a zombie is attacked, it alerts all nearby zombies that you are there, and also some more zombies spawn out of sight to attack you. So even if there's only one zombie, you'll soon find yourself facing a horde.

Skeletons would be easy, but they are pretty accurate with the bow. It can be difficult to dodge their arrows. Also, the closer you get, the more likely the skeleton will hit you. If you get too close, it would only take a couple of shots to kill you. It's best to have a bow (or at least a shield) of your own before facing these undead creatures. If you don't have a bow or shield and they see you, try to run up to them and get in a few hits with your sword before you get shot too many times (at a distance, you can dodge the arrows).

Assuming you made it out of the shelter, congratulations! You've survived your first night in Minecraft! Within the next day or two, you should have acquired some armor and better weapons, which will take a lot of the terror out of nighttime. You can also make a more secure shelter, and hopefully a bed.

After the first day
A tutorial for the next day is available here: Tutorials/The Second Day.

Following are some general tips:

Home safety
By the end of the first day, the shelter will likely be primitive and small. In the days afterward, you will be able to build a better home, in any of various forms. Some natural extensions include a back door, windows, a surrounding fence, and even traps for monsters. Remember that any time you pick up your bed, your spawn point will revert to the default (that is, random within 20 blocks of the world spawn point), until you not only place but sleep in a bed again. For this reason, if your home is not very near the world spawn point, you should eventually use a to locate the exact point, and build a shelter there, or keep enough wool and planks to build new beds in new locations to keep your respawn point nearby as you explore the world.

Mining
Eventually, you will need to venture below ground to gather iron and other resources. While there are much more advanced mining techniques, the most basic way to find ores is by entering a cave and exploring. Remember, if mining, never ever dig straight down as you might fall in lava or in a group of monsters. You can, however, dig straight down in a 2&times;1 pattern, standing in the middle of the 2 blocks. This will allow you to have a "safe block" in case there is lava beneath you.

Finding a cave
You have no problems if you have just spent your night in a cave. If you haven't, the easiest way to do so is to roam the Overworld a little and look out for exposed cave entrances. Mountains biomes will have caves inside mountains, but these are generally not what you want, because only coal ore will appear above sea level. For iron and better ores, you'll want to find a cave opening into the ground (these are quite common) and head downwards. Sometimes such caves end immediately, but often they continue into big cave systems. If they seem to end right away sometimes there will be a continuation about 2-8 blocks farther back and below the cave's end; mining in these directions (8 blocks back and down, exploring somewhat to the sides) will reveal this if it is the case. Digging away gravel or dirt can also expose cave extensions, but you may go through a few shovels that way. If you can't find any all day, just sleep away the night, replenishing your resources like wood and food as you use them. If you hear suspicious, hostile noises, just try to listen and follow them.

Cave exploration
Cave exploration is pretty straight forward: you light up your way with torches, mine up ores as you see them (check ores and minerals) and kill enemies as you encounter them (see Tutorials/Combat for details). There are also some important techniques that might not be obvious to a new player, such as using waterfalls to descend into shafts, and/or swim back up from them. There are also many options for marking your trail and not getting lost. Also, note that sneaking (on PCs, the key by default) prevents you from falling over the edge of a block and as such it is useful if you are caving near a long drop, especially a drop into lava. There are mines called ravines. In some of your worlds, they will be in a forest and open space.

History
Návody/Začátečnická příručka Anleitungen/Die Grundlagen Tutoriels/Guide de survie Lezioni/Guida per principianti Útmutatók/A kezdők útmutatója 튜토리얼/초보자를 위한 가이드 Lessen/Beginnersgids Tutoriais/Guia para iniciantes Poradniki/Pierwsza noc Руководство для новичков 教程/菜鸟手册