Tutorials/Flat survival

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your bonus chest contains all the resources you will ever have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to survive.

At a minimum, your bonus chest must contain a sapling. If the saplings are dark oak or spruce, you need a minimum of four saplings to grow a tree. Oak or dark oak are preferable because they yield apples. Dark oak and spruce provide a lot of wood, and spruce has more leaves, which drop more saplings. Birch provides the least amount of wood on the average, but birch and oak can also grow with bee nests (not that bees are particularly useful because you need a source of smoke to harvest anything from bees).

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

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

Building
Initially, your only building material is dirt. After you grow and harvest some trees, you can do many things with wood. After getting some wood, your priorities are:
 * One wooden hoe
 * Wooden swords for killing mobs more efficiently
 * Wooden shovels for mining dirt
 * Fences and optionally a few fence gates for animal farms (you can also dig holes in the ground)
 * Trapdoors to make mob traps and grinders

Feeding yourself
Cooking your food is not an option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A more labor-intensive way, but with greater yield after the initial effort, is to make an aerial farm.
 * Make sure your simulation distance is set to 4 (minimum). This causes mobs to despawn when they are more than 44 blocks away from you.
 * Build a pillar with ladders 45 blocks high.
 * Build a platform using dirt and open trapdoors. You can use a checkerboard or zigzag pattern for these.
 * Build another pillar with ladders 45 blocks high, 24 blocks away from the edge of the spawning platform.

At night, when you climb up the second pillar, no mobs can spawn on the ground because it's too far away. The only place they can spawn is on the platform. Mobs that fall through to the ground drop their lot as they die, but this loot disappears after 5 minutes. So every 3 or 4 minutes, descend your pillar and run over to the loot to collect it. Other hostile mobs can spawn on the ground while you do this so you may have to fight your way to the loot and back to the pillar to start again.

This farm works only at night unless you surround build dirt ceiling over the patform and walls around it, with the walls extending 15 blocks below the platform to keep the light from getting in. To increase the efficiency, you can shovel all the dirt around the farm into paths, prevent mobs from spawning on the ground.

Creating a village

 * plant saplings to get wood
 * build a mob farm and kill zombies until you get 10 iron
 * craft a bucket and cauldron and leave a cauldron in sky exposure until it rains and pick up water with the bucket
 * use glass bottles dropped by witches and the cauldron to get a second bucket of water
 * make an infinite water source
 * drown zombies to get drowned until you get at least 3 copper to get a lightning rod
 * breed pigs and put a lightning rod in the pigpen
 * wait until a thunderstorm comes and lightning strikes the pigs
 * kill the pigmen to get gold
 * on average you will need 200-250 pigmen to get 16 gold ingots
 * craft 2 golden apples
 * find 2 zombie villagers and use a witch to splash potions of weakness on them and then cure the villagers
 * breed them to start a villager population

and thats just to get villagers