Tutorials/Survival in an infinite desert

Introduction - The Challenge of the Desert
The Desert biome is one of the most difficult biomes for a player to survive and prosper in, owing to an extreme scarcity of essential resources in the natural environment. Typically no trees are available to make planks for even wooden tools or a crafting table. Without even basic wooden tools there is no obvious way to obtain cobblestone, and no way to enter even the "stone age". Without a crafting table, crafting is extremely limited. Even basic survival becomes a real challenge in a desert, and very different approaches are required in order to make actual progress.

Creating a Desert World
To create an infinite desert to survive in, simply create a new world, change the world type to superflat, and choose the preset “Desert”. Then start the world.

Or to create it to be more like the normal Minecraft desert (in which you can mine for ores instead of having to raid villages for minerals), go to create a new world, change the world type instead to customized and change the biome to “Desert”. Then click done and start the world.

(In console editions, there is no customized world type, but your superflat world can be customized to have most of the features of a normal Minecraft world. It should have a deep layer of stone so that ores can spawn.)

Now, since the only point of creating this Desert world was for the challenge, set the mode to Survival and play on!

Survival Options
Normally if you spawn in a desert, you would try to find a more hospitable biome as soon as possible. If you have set yourself the challenge of an infinite desert, that's not an option. The easiest route to making progress is to find a village or Desert Temple. These have resources that are incredibly precious because they cannot be obtained anywhere else in the desert biome. If you can't find a village or temple, or if takes a long time to find one, you will need to take other approaches to survive while you are exploring.

Note: For added challenge, turn off village generation and/or temple generation in customized settings.

Immediate Survival
Very few of the normal survival resources are available in the desert, particularly before you have found a village or temple. A different approach is needed for initial survival.

During your first day, collect cacti and sticks as well as sand. You get sticks by breaking dead bushes with your hands. This is the only source of wood in the desert, but unfortunately you can only obtain sticks, not planks. Cacti are useful as defensive and offensive weapons. Use sticks to break things and, if you can't avoid a fight, use a cactus in your hand as your weapon. This "cactus sword" is more effective than your fist or a stick, and the most effective weapon you can obtain in the naked desert.

Shelter
First build a shelter of sand blocks. Sand is the most abundant material. Pick a low hill in an otherwise flat area, flatten the sand off the hill by removing it and use those sand blocks to build your shelter house. You may want to eave a few 1x1 empty block spaces in the walls as windows, since it will be a long time before you are able to make glass or light sources. But keep an area of the house that is not visible from any window, so you can hide from skeletons, witches, and creepers. As you will have no tools or weapons, mobs that are ordinarily not very dangerous become a real threat.

For your shelter at night (after returning from exploring each day), instead of blocking the doorway with a door (you don't have any way to make those) or a sand block, block it with a cactus. This will allow you to see, and will also damage any mob coming up to your door. Make sure you have at least a 3 x 3 clear floor area in the house so that you can stay out of range of creepers (or at least, one creeper). Maybe on your first night just make a 1x1 hole in the roof (too small for spiders to come through) and no 'windows' so you don't have to worry about creepers or ranged attacks. There is the possibility that an Enderman could fall through the 1x1 hole but if one does, just don't look at it until it goes away.

On your first or second day build a defensive system around your house. Dig two-block-deep trenches in a square or ring around your house, at least 3 blocks away from your house walls. This is to stop creepers blowing up your house. Put a bridge across this trench only one block wide and block it at night, or when you are away from your house, with a cactus (or better, a cactus at each end). Make sure there are no blocks in the ditch, that it is two deep everywhere (except at your bridge), otherwise mobs will cross the ditch. Mobs may fall into the ditch, in which case you can easily (though slowly) kill them with your "cactus sword".

Bear in mind this ditch system will not stop spiders, so don't wander out at night and be careful coming out in the morning (particularly for creepers). Add some cacti in the zone between the ditch and the house will stop spiders or at least harm them and alert you if they are there. If you have time put a few cacti on your roof for the same reason.

On the next day (or sooner if you can work fast), add a second, outer trench ring, so that if the first trench ring is destroyed by a creeper you are not holed up inside your house and vulnerable to a second creeper destroying the house. Losing your house walls will be instant death because you will not be able to defend against the zombies and husks.

Also add a ring of cacti (either later as an addition, or as an alternative to the ditch system). You can't place cacti next to each other and you can only place them on sand. But if you make a ring of zig zag (diagonally adjacent) cacti around your house, this will form a solid wall. As a bonus, mobs can be tempted into running into the cacti, taking damage, though this is a slow way to kill them. It helps if you are also hitting them with your own "cactus sword" at the same time. With the zig zag arrangement, if you get diagonally on from a mob it will attempt to path through the (too small) gap between the cactus, and repeatedly hit the thorns until it dies. The cactus destroys any loot drop though so it's better to finish mobs off with your "cactus sword" if possible. Also if the mob suicides against a cactus you don't get experience. The cactus wall will also not stop spiders, though it will damage them slightly as they cross over it.

It's probably not really worth the effort of crafting sandstone to build your house at first because this process takes at least 4 times longer (plus crafting time) and sandstone's blast resistance is only slightly higher than sand. But if you have time later on, start replacing the innermost walls (and floor and ceiling) of your house with sandstone, or at least, the walls and ceiling of an inner 'sanctuary' room. Also, without any tools, when you place sandstone it's very time consuming to remove, making any placement errors or redesign a real hassle. And any part of your house that is not made of sand, you can't place a cactus on, which weakens your defensive options. (You could however have a lower level of sandstone with sand on the top surface to allow you to place cactus). Long term, if you have water available, building your house from concrete is a far superior option to sandstone.

If you are exploring long distance and not able to return to your original shelter, or have searched in all directions for one day's (return trip) travel from your original shelter, create new shelters along similar lines. First a 5 x 5 (exterior) sand block house, 3 blocks high (solid roof at the 3rd level. Cactus for a door. Then a 2-deep ditch square at least 3 clear blocks distant from the walls. Then a zig zag cactus ring and then an outer ditch.

Food
Thankfully, Minecraft does not consider the need of human beings for water. But from Day 3, if you have not yet found a village, or earlier if you have been injured (from falling or fighting mobs) you will need food. In the naked desert there are very few options. While sugar cane can grow in the desert (if there is water), for some reason Minecraft thinks humans can't eat sugar. So the only food source is really rabbits, and you will probably have to eat them raw, which is not very nutritious.

Rabbits are hard to catch. You can chase them and hit them with a stick. If you are persistent you will eventually kill them. If you are lucky enough to be near water, chase them in to water. They lose their speed advantage in water and you catch them more easily. Of course the drops will fall into the water so be prepared to swim after them. Also, don't get lost chasing rabbits and lose your way back to your shelter. That can be fatal.

You can craft leather from rabbit skins, but the leather is not much use without a full sized crafting table.

If you are lucky enough to have any dirt, you may get flowers. With flowers you can tame and breed rabbits. This then turns them into a renewable food source. Otherwise you may have to keep wandering like a nomad to find more rabbits after you have killed off all the rabbits in an area. Bones from skeleton kills are crucial here, because you can craft bonemeal and use that to fertilise dirt to grow additional flowers. As long as skeletons keep coming, you can create a permanently sustainable food supply this way. Alternatively, if you are able to mine Fossils you can craft bonemeal from those, but that will be extremely difficult without at least stone tools.

The only other short term option for food is to kill zombies or Husks that come to your house at night and eat the rotten flesh. Because of the risk of poisoning, only eat this flesh when you are safe inside your house. If you create any solid barrier you can stand safely behind the barrier and slowly kill a zombie by hitting it with a cactus. Before the rotten flesh despawns, quickly remove your barrier (eg cactus), dart out to collect the flesh, dart back in your house and replace the barrier.

Finding a Village or Temple
After creating your infinite desert, once you have secured a shelter, explore the immediate area around - being careful of course not to lose the way back to your shelter. As with any game it helps to build a high pillar near your spawn point and/or initial shelter, so you can find your way back to it. If you see a desert temple or a village, go to it. (If commands are enabled, you can use commands if you couldn't find any: and )

The most important items you can retrieve from a Village will be the crafting table from the library and tools - most importantly a pickaxe - from the blacksmith's chest. Iron and diamonds can be taken from villages and temples for tools and dirt can be taken from villagers' farms. Ores do spawn in the desert preset but only on the bottom 3 layers. However without a pickaxe you are unable to build a furnace to smelt any ores (or cook any food). Though you can use the furnaces in a village once you have found one.

If you are using customized world generation rather than superflat world generation, a river may appear, which will have a low bank, allowing grass and/or flowers to spawn (as the grass is still in the “River” biome). Very rarely there will be a wide enough space here for an oak tree to spawn. In that case, be sure to create a tree farm from any saplings you collect from it. As trees are almost essential for normal survival, this would be very useful.

Raiding techniques for Temples and Villlages
Desert temples

If you have a pickaxe, just dig down two blocks away from the blue terracotta on the floor in any direction. If not,
 * Go outside and dig up 16 blocks of sand.
 * Dig out a piece of orange terracotta on the floor. Do not jump in!
 * Place blocks of sand into the hole until it is filled up.
 * Dig straight down until you are two blocks away from the floor.
 * If there are mobs, kill them.
 * Punch out the pressure plate in the middle of the floor.
 * Take anything you need out of the chests. Bones are good for bone meal, and any iron, gold, diamonds, or emeralds are also definite needs. Also, remember to dig out the 3x3 layer of TNT underneath the sandstone floor.
 * Using the jump-place technique, pillar your way out.

Villages

Check to see if the village has a blacksmith. If it does, and it has 3 iron, make a bucket, if it has 3 diamond, make a pickaxe. Use the crafting table in the library. If the village has no library, take all the valuables and head on for the next one. If the chest has enough materials to make a bucket and a pickaxe, with 3 of something left over, make an axe. If the village does not have a blacksmith,
 * Destroy all the crops. Don't bother replanting, as you won't be coming back here.
 * Eventually take all the wool and torches. They may come in handy later on.

Doing It The Hard Way - No Villages or Temples
If you challenge yourself by not allowing generation of villages or temples - or just can't find any - your situation becomes very difficult indeed. You can obtain shelter, safety and food using the techniques described above. But you can't obtain any tools and your crafting is extremely limited. You have no easy way to access cobblestone items, and also no way at all to create a crafting table (no source of planks). But with only a two by two crafting grid, even if you had cobblestone, you are unable to craft even stone or wooden tools. Without tools and with only very limited crafting, progression beyond basic survival is not possible.

In theory one way to get cobblestone would be to expose cobblestone blocks and then persuade a creeper to explode on or near the block. There is a 1/3 chance this will drop a cobblestone (item). Repeat until you have 3 cobblestone, and with sticks from breaking dead bushes you could create a stone pickaxe. A pickaxe (of any kind) is a revolutionary breakthrough that would allow you to "advance to the stone age" and start mining stone - except you still don't have a crafting table. That can only be created with planks (or found in a village library). And only a crafting table can create tools. Similarly, TNT could be used to create usable cobblestone, if enough creepers were killed to obtain enough Gunpowder (5 units), except that TNT also requires the full size crafting table to create. There is also the problem of how to detonate the TNT - probably the creeper is the only viable means, unless you already have gotten to the point of having stone tools and mining iron ore in order to craft flint and steel.

Feature Requests?
Probably if Mojang had given more thought to the problem of surviving in a desert, they would have come up with a way of crafting planks in the basic 2 x 2 crafting grid ( 3 sticks and one spider string?). They might also have made sugar edible, and allowed you to slowly mine [cobblestone]] with a stick, or make a low-durability wooden pickaxe out of 3-4 sticks on the 2x2 crafting grid. Or make a low-yield gunpowder bomb out of 4 gunpowder.

[[ru:Бесконечное выживание в пустын