Tutorials/The second day

This guide is intended for those who have read the beginner's guide first, and survived their first day and night.

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

Intro: Second Day
VIf you read the Beginner's Guide and followed it you should have at least a crude shelter, stone tools, and some cooked meat and other food. This day will guide you in building on that and setting up a better base.

When you venture outside after surviving your first night, be on the lookout for hostile mobs. Later, you will be hunting them, but that's after you get weapons, some armor, and a proper food supply. Also, keep track of where you are, using the debug screen if needed. If you do get killed at this point, you haven't lost much, and you're presumably still near spawn -- just head back to your death site to collect your few items.

At this stage, creepers are deadly -- run away until they despawn or lose track of you. Skeletons and zombies may survive in shady spots; lead them into the sun and avoid them until they burn to death. Spiders will mostly be neutral, so just avoid them; if one has targeted you, lead it into the sun and run it around until it loses interest.

Collect any loose items you see, including but not limited to bones, arrows, rotten flesh, eggs, and wool. Destroy any tall grass you see and collect the seeds. You might break and grab some mushrooms too -- if you can get both kinds of mushrooms, you can make mushroom soup. After chopping trees, collect the saplings (and perhaps apples) that drop from the leaves. You may even be able to kill a spider or two during the day to get string. All these things will help you sooner or later.

For the second day, your main objective is to get the lay of the land, locate resources, and plan out further construction. You will be looking for at least the following: As you're moving around the area, keep an eye on how the ground rises and falls. Over time, you will be fencing off more and more territory to keep monsters out, starting with the area right around your house (or cave entrance). If the terrain is uneven, you'll probably run your fences along ridges, avoiding places where mobs could jump over the fence from a hill or cliff.
 * A place to grow wheat. Even before you have a bucket, you can till the ground next to a river or lake, and plant whatever seeds you have to get an early start,  Later, you'll want a basically-flat area at least 12 blocks square, remembering that you can add or remove dirt blocks to flatten out any imperfections.  After fencing off a 9-by-9 square and placing water in the middle (that's what the bucket is for), you can till the square and make a farm that will serve you well for most of the game.  (Watch out for nearby rises that could let monsters jump over your fence.)
 * A place to build a larger house or lair. There are many options here -- the most popular options are to build on (more-or-less) flat ground, roof over a valley, or wall off and occupy a handy cave.
 * Various special crops which you need to find in the world so you can farm them (see their respective pages for how to grow each of them):
 * Sugar cane, Sugar cane is important, because it's needed to make paper, and you will need a lot of that (along with leather, see below) for enchanting.  Look for it at the edge of any body of water.
 * Pumpkins appear wild in several biomes. They are mostly used for jack-o-lanterns, but you can also make pumpkin pie.
 * Cactus is mildly useful for barriers and traps, and is also the source for green dye. It is only found in desert and mesa biomes.
 * Melons are found in jungles, though later you might be able to find the seeds in treasure chests or buy slices from villagers.
 * Cocoa beans are another jungle specialty. They're the only source of brown dye, and also you can make cookies!
 * Different kinds of trees. Each kind of tree provides wood with a different appearance, and the various trees have different characteristics for farming them -- see the Tree page for full details.  Collect the wood for crafting and building, and the saplings to grow your own.
 * Animals, for meat and other resources. You will eventually build pens to breed and slaughter them (using the wheat and seeds from your farm, and later carrots).  Again, you're looking for large, fairly-flat areas that you can fence off and otherwise defend against mobs.  You can kill some of them if you need more meat, but leave some of each type to later catch and breed.  Note that deserts will not spawn any animals except the occasional rabbit.  In order of priority, note the locations of these animals:
 * Chickens provide feathers as well as meat. (You will need those feathers to make arrows.)   Chickens are the easiest farm animal to breed, because in addition to breeding them "normally" with seeds, you can also collect the eggs they drop, and break those for more chicks.  With patience, you can start with a single captured chicken, breaking its eggs until you get a second chicken for normal breeding.  Or you can start with no chickens, but two or three stacks (16 each) of eggs!
 * Cows provide both beef and leather. Cooked beef is one of the best foods in the game,, and leather will be important when you prepare for enchanting -- you will need quite a lot of leather to make a complete enchanting setup.
 * Sheep provide (mutton and) wool. Wool is necessary for the all-important bed, but it is also useful for decorative uses such as carpets.  Once you have shears, you will not need to kill sheep for their wool, but you will want to keep a lot of them around to provide quantities of wool in a variety of colors.  A warning:  If there are wolves around, they will tend to slaughter any sheep in the area, yo you may need to go far afield later to find surviving sheep.
 * Wolves, unlike the other animals are not bred for slaughter. Instead, you will tame them with bones, after which they will become "dogs" which follow and protect you.
 * Pigs are the odd child here -- pork is as nourishing as beef, but pigs provide no other resources besides the meat. Worse, luring and breeding them requires carrots, which you won't get until you start killing zombies (or find a village).
 * Rabbits are even less useful than pigs -- they only have a 50% chance of dropping (second-tier) meat, and a separate 50% chance of rabbit hide. If you accumulate four of the hides, you can turn them into a single piece of leather.  You can lure and breed rabbits with dandelions, as well as carrots.
 * If you are near or in a jungle, you may see ocelots. Once you begin fishing, you will be able to tame these into "cats", which can be helpful in fending off creepers.
 * Keep an eye out for for a pond or riverbank site where you can eventually make a fishing spot. Fishing requires time and (for safety) some preparation, but can get you a lot of resources, some of which are difficult to get otherwise.
 * One or more cave entrances, to get underground and start collecting iron and stone in quantity.  If you spent your night in a cave, this might be easy, but for mining you'll want a cave that heads deeper into the ground.

Resources and Mining
The foundation of everything is mining (though farming is pretty important too). By now, you should have mined at least enough stone to make your basic stone tools, and you hopefully have some wood left over. You will soon need more of both materials: Wood for various utility items, stone for more durable construction. Over the next few days, you'll be mining a variety of ores as well, but for now, concentrate on the basic materials:

Dirt, Sand, Gravel: As you explore your world, you are likely to pick up some dirt blocks. These are not very good for building, but they are quick to place and remove, so you can use them for temporary staircases, pillars, and such. More importantly, you can use them to modify the landscape, making it easier to get around near your home. If you've had a creeper explode nearby, you can also use your collected dirt to fill in the hole. (Immediately after the explosiion, there will be dirt and perhaps stone items left in the crater. Pick those up, but don't expect to get enough to fill in the crater.)  Note that mining grass blocks (that is, full blocks with a green top, not "tall grass" plants) will drop dirt -- don't worry about the difference for now. If you place the dirt next to grass blocks, the grass will eventually spread to the dirt, cleaning up the "scars" of your work.

You will also encounter sand and gravel. These have special uses in Minecraft: Sand is used for making glass, which is useful for windows and even transparent walls. However, note that glass is very fragile -- a creeper blast will simply destroy any glass in range. Gravel is used to produce flint, which is a key material needed to craft arrows. Both sand and gravel, unlike most blocks in Minecraft, are affected by gravity: If either block is placed without something directly beneath it, or if whatever's beneath it goes away for any reason, it will fall to the ground beneath. If it falls on you such that your head is buried, it will cause suffocation damage until you get free or mine your way out. (They can also suffocate mobs, which can be useful for traps and such.)

You may see (usually in deserts) shelves of "floating" sand which the game generated without support (that is, a player couldn't have placed them like that). Be careful around these, as they are basically natural traps: Mining them or any block next to them, or placing any block on or next to them, will "update" the floating sand. When updated, the sand will not only fall, but update any blocks next to them, setting off a chain reaction that brings down the whole shelf.

Wood: You can build with wood, and converting the logs to planks will quadruple the number of blocks you have to work with. However, wood has two liabilities: Firstly, it is flammable, and lava or lightning can start a fire which will burn up much of your house. Secondly, it is not very resistant to creeper explosions, so if a creeper goes off near a wooden house, it can demolish a good deal of your work and perhaps damage the inside of the house as well.

If you are in a forest, wood will be plentiful, but if trees are scarce around you, you may want to plant some replacement trees: You may have noticed when you chopped down trees, that as the leaves decay, some of them drop saplings, which you hopefully picked up. You can plant them on any dirt or grass block where there's room for the tree to grow. Once you plant them, don't hang around waiting, just go do other things and come back later when the trees have grown (it can take up to a day or more). Once you have spare torches, you can put one of those a couple or few blocks away from your saplings, as this will help them continue growing overnight.

Stone: As you've seen, mining gray ("smooth") stone, drops a mottled block called cobblestone. This differs from smooth stone only in appearance and what you can craft with it. Once you start mining in earnest, stone will be plentiful, to the point where you will be making chests just to store your accumulated cobblestone. However, don't throw it away, as stone will be a major building material. Stone is not flammable, and is much more durable: If a creeper goes off right next to your stone wall, it may break a couple or few blocks, but not much more than that. For your early houses, you should be making most of the walls out of stone. Once you have coal/charcoal to spare, you might want to use your furnace to smelt some cobblestone back into smooth stone. With this you can fill holes in underground caves without leaving unsightly patches of cobblestone. You can also make various decorative blocks such as Stone Bricks, which will let you build more attractive houses and other structures. Any variation of stone bricks will be just as strong as smooth stone or cobblestone.

Coal: This is a major resource, with two main uses:  It is used to make torches, (your major source of light), and to smelt or cook items in your furnace. Smelting items not only lets you cook your meat for better nutrition, but is also necessary for making use of iron (see below). A stack (64 lumps) of coal is a fairly large amount for the beginning, but over time you will need a lot of it. Fortunately, it is common: You will see it everywhere underground, and even some on the surface. Coal is the only ore you can mine with a wooden pickaxe. Coal is not strictly necessary since you can make charcoal from wood, but it is common, and you have plenty of other things to do with wood.

Iron: Iron is probably the most important and versatile resource you can find underground. You can use it to craft good quality tools, armor and a variety of other things. For your second day (or whenever you venture underground), your initial goal is to get at least 33 pieces of iron ore, and more will be useful. Once you have some of the ore, use a furnace to smelt it into iron ingots, that you can then craft into other items. The very first things you should make are (in order):
 * A shield. This will need several wood planks, and a single iron ingot.  Shields were introduced fairly recently in Minecraft development, but have seriously changed the balance of power against mobs:  You can use them to block skeleton's arrows, and hold off most other mobs' attacks.
 * An iron pickaxe. This will let you mine more advanced ores (see below) as you encounter them, which are key to proceeding through the game.
 * An iron sword, which will let you attack monsters much more effectively than your stone sword.
 * A bucket. This lets you pick up water source blocks and place them elsewhere.  This is a key ability for making a farm, and it also lets you remove inconvenient waterfalls, or place your own waterfalls for easily getting up and down steep hills, in and out of ravines, and so on.  It also lets you create your own ponds and rivers, which can be useful for fishing,  protecting against creepers (water keeps explosions from destroying blocks), and more complex purposes.
 * At this point you've used 9 ingots so far, but it's time to start making iron armor, which will give you much more protection against monster attacks and most other damage. The full set will take another 24 ingots.  If you don't have that much yet, make the various pieces of your armor set as you get more, starting with the chestplate.
 * If you have iron left, go on to make shears and a second bucket (to hold a second water source, or get a bit of lava out of your way).
 * Even after you have made all of the above, keep collecting iron ore as you find it. Set aside half a stack or so (that is, 30-odd ingots) in case you need to replace some or all of your armor, but after that you can start making more iron tools:  An iron pickaxe, shovel or axe will work faster and last longer than the stone tools.  Eventually, you'll want to make other items, some of which are described below..

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, which is useful if you are caving near a long drop, especially a drop into lava. 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. When exploring caves and mining underground, make sure to thoroughly light up the caves and tunnels as you go. If you don't do this, monsters can spawn in the darkness, even in places where you've already been through (meaning, they can come up behind you, or block your exit!).

Other ores and minerals: You probably won't be finding these your second day, but it's worth knowing a little about the more advanced ores. Gold, lapis lazuli, redstone, and diamond are more specialized ores, only found in deeper arts of the caves. Lapis can be mined with a stone pickaxe, but the remaining ores all need an iron pickaxe. Some key uses: If there are few nearby caves, or they seem too dangerous, you can explore more advanced mining techniques. Remember, if mining, never ever dig a single-block shaft straight down -- you are likely to fall into a deep monster-infested cave, if not into lava! You can, however, dig a mineshaft in a pattern, such that you always have a safe block to stand on as you mine a different block. Such patterns can range from a simple 2x1 pattern (standing in the middle so one of the blocks always supports you), to a 2x2 or larger staircase into the depths. A simple diagonal staircase works too. Just keep a careful eye out in case you break through into the top of a cave or lava pool. If you do dig a vertical mineshaft, bring a lot of ladders to get back up!
 * Gold works like iron, in that you mine the ore blocks and smelt them in a furnace to get ingots. You can make tools and armor out of it, but don't:  Golden items are somewhat more powerful than iron, but their durability is abysmal, so they will wear out very fast.  There are more advanced uses for gold, but for now the important one is that four gold ingots and a bit of redstone (see below) lets you make a clock.  This key accessory lets you know the time of day, even when you're deep underground, which is very helpful to avoid coming up to the surface to find a monster-filled night.
 * Lapis lazuli will later be needed for enchanting. For now, don't worry much about it, but if you happen to find a vein, mine it and save it for later.
 * Redstone is found quite deep (watch out for lava). It is mostly used for redstone circuits; for now you only need a few pieces, which a single block of ore can provide.  Besides the above-mentioned clock, 4 iron ingots plus redstone lets you make a compass, to help you find your way around.   Once you find and start growing sugar cane, you can make another compass and craft it into a map (paper+compass) to keep track of your explorations and help avoid getting lost.
 * Diamond is a very rare mineral, probably the most-sought resource in Minecraft. It can be crafted into very durable and quick tools, and vastly superior armor. The ore is found at the very bottom of the world, the bottom 15 layers of the map, and (again) requires an iron pickaxe to mine. Other guides will give tips for finding and safely mining diamond, but for now just note that if you're seeing diamond ore, you're very close to where you can encounter lava, which is dangerous.
 * Emeralds are normally gained (and used) by trading with villagers, but scattered blocks of emerald ore can also be found beneath extreme hills biomes. Emerald ore is found at the same depths as gold ore, and likewise requires an iron pickaxe.
 * All these minerals including coal (but not charcoal) and iron, can be crafted into "storage blocks" at the crafting table, 9 pieces or ingots to a block. You can build with these blocks for show, but that risks losing them to a creeper blast.  For now, just use this trick to save storage space.  It's trivial to get the individual pieces back, you can even do that in your inventory's crafting grid.

Reviewing Hunger and Food
The "First Day" guide discussed hunger, but here are some more tips:
 * Besides the visible hunger bar, you also have an invisible hunger bar, called "saturation". Whenever you do something that would make you hungry, the saturation gets used up first, which provides extra time before you get hungry again.  Most foods provide saturation as well as filling the visible bar, and the "better" foods provide more saturation compared to how much they fill the visible bar.  You can read the Food page for a full discussion, but the general rule is that cooked steak and pork chops are best, followed by other cooked meats, bread, and vegetables.
 * If your hunger bar is below 90%, you will not heal damage (and remember that healing damage is also what costs the most hunger). Therefore, if you are low on health, getting food should be a priority.
 * That said, remember that only certain actions cause hunger; in particular, at night you can wait quietly in your home (perhaps doing some crafting or smelting) until daylight, when it will be safe to go out and find some food. (Sleeping works too.)
 * If you get too hungry, you will also be unable to sprint. (And sprinting, in turn, makes you hungry.)
 * If you have a fishing rod and a safe place to fish, fishing is a great way to get food, because it doesn't involve fighting, mining, or moving around much.
 * If you're desperate, you can try breaking oak or dark oak leaves for apples. Be careful to not take damaging falls or jump around a lot in the process (hint: ladders), much less get attacked by monsters!
 * If you are really desperate you can also eat rotten flesh dropped by zombies, but be warned this will usually give you "food poisoning". Food poisoning gives you the "hunger" effect for 30 seconds, during which time it will drain your (saturation, then) hunger level.  However, that duration doesn't accumulate, it just starts over at 30 seconds every time it's inflicted, and in that time it doesn't actually cost much hunger.   This is useful if you have a lot of rotten flesh but no better food, as you can quickly fill up on rotten flesh, then lose only half a shank or so of hunger to the food poisoning.

Repairing tools
To fix a tool, put two damaged tools of the same type and material in a crafting grid (you can use a crafting table, or your inventory's smaller crafting grid). This will combine the two old items into a new item that is either unused, or has slightly more remaining uses than both the old items together. This applies to any tool that has durability, including swords and bows. Later you'll have enchanted tools and/or weapons, but don't use this method for those -- you'll need an anvil to preserve the enchantments.

Beds again
If you haven't already made a bed, you should get some wool to make one! Here's a reminder for the crafting recipe:

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 compass to locate the exact point, and build a shelter there. Once you've done that, you can carry a spare bed with you as you explore, and skip nights by sleeping in it and breaking it in the morning to carry along. If you happen to die, you'll at least have a shelter nearby when you respawn. You should also place an extra bed in that spawn-point shelter, in case you die and respawn at night or during a storm (see below).

When trying to sleep, make sure it's night-time (or at least far enough into sundown), and there are no monsters around you. If there is a problem, you should get a status message explaining what's wrong. Also, make sure you don't place blocks that leave your bed "obstructed" (see the Bed page for details). If your bed is obstructed when you die, you will go back to the default spawn point, just as if the bed had been broken.

When you die, all your possessions will be dropped at your death site. Dropped items disappear after 5 minutes.  Accordingly, you need to get to your items quickly, or you could have to start over gathering resources! However, if you sleep in a bed, the time you skip does not count against the timer. So, if you die and respawn at night or during a storm, immediately sleep, and then go fetch your items by daylight. (If the sun is already going down when you respawn, you might need to wait up to a minute so until you can sleep.)

Slabs and Stairs
You can craft any kind of stone or wooden planks into slabs or stairs. Slabs are half-height blocks that can be placed in either the top or bottom half of a block space. A floor made of "bottom" slabs can help prevent monster spawns, as mobs can't spawn on bottom slabs, and individual bottom slabs can be used as an easy step up to the next level of blocks. (Admittedly, it's awkward to place furniture on such a floor.) A ceiling made of top slabs can give you a little extra headroom, and double as the floor for a level above. Stairs in turn, can let you move up and down an incline without jumping, which for an often used path can save a lot of food.

Next Day
Here's a tutorial for The Third Day.

Tips

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

Tutorial Videos

 * The Second Day in Minecraft 1.0.0 (SecretRevelation)

Next Part

 * Tutorials/The Third Day

Návody/Druhý den Anleitungen/Der zweite Tag Tutoriels/Le deuxième jour pt-br:Tutoriais/O Segundo Dia 튜토리얼/둘째 날 教程/第二天