User:MentalMouse42/How To Own The Game

This is not about purchasing the game, but about "owning" it in the gamer sense -- getting your character to a position where they have all the stuff and can do what they want. (Roleplayers may know this as "the way of the munchkin".) This guide assumes that you are already familiar with Minecraft, able to fend for yourself even in the early days, look for desired resources, and build fairly large farms including some redstone. The basic idea here is to farm things early and hard, with an emphasis on farming at least one village with a trading hall.

Balance
Minecraft by default is based on an infinite and generous world. There are a bare handful of things for which you can't get more by exploring more territory, and for most resources there is some way to "farm" them far more quickly than that. That said, there are a few basic constraints, and keeping these in mind can help you focus on significant advantages. These are the structural balance points for Minecraft:
 * 1) There is no advancement in the permanent character stats or abilities themselves.  All new capabilities come from resources, possessions, equipment, and some strictly-temporary status effects.
 * 2) *The only real limited resource is each player's play time, and so a significant number of farms will require the player's presence if not active participation. Farms which don't require this are important advantages.
 * 3) *Outside of Hardcore, Death is basically an inconvenience, which limits the balance weight of danger in general. This becomes more true when you have ample supplies for back-up equipment.
 * 4) *As noted above, the world is infinite and generous. That said, player knowledge and skill make resources much more available.
 * 5) Some activities are reserved for the player, with no proxies allowed.  The play-time spent on them is the price for these.
 * 6) * Placing a block
 * 7) * Mining most blocks (some "lightweight" blocks can be broken by pistons)
 * 8) * Feeding or luring an animal
 * 9) * Picking up experience
 * 10) * Crafting items
 * 11) * Loading chunks and making them tick (there are exploitable exceptions)
 * 12) * Fishing
 * 13) Some activities have an intrinsic time cost, variously negotiable.  Advantage comes from looking for bonuses and more powerful methods.
 * 14) * Mining or placing large numbers of blocks
 * 15) * Breeding animals and waiting for them to grow up
 * 16) * Fishing
 * 17) * Smelting items
 * 18) * Long-distance travel
 * 19) * Moving items long distances
 * 20) Many resources are gates for significant abilities, which provides such game progression as Minecraft offers.  The resources tend to follow a pattern, where advantage can come from jumping early to a higher tier, or from outright "sequence breaking" -- gaining a resource more quickly than the game design expects.
 * 21) * Resource has been located, and now the player knows where to get more.
 * 22) * Player sets up a farm for the resource, or makes a concerted effort to gather it, providing a reliable supply.
 * 23) * Player sets up a more advanced farm, or a battery of farms, providing a nigh-unlimited supply. These farms often require significant game knowledge and/or resources.
 * 24) *Each enemy type counts here too -- once the player knows how to handle them (and knowledge generally counts more than equipment), enemies become resources to exploit as much as the farm animals.

The general strategy from this is to focus on automatic farms or semi-automatic farms and villager trading. Villager trading in particular consumes resources you can easily farm, and returns resources which could be quite hard to farm.

Starting off
At the start of the game, note the location of the spawn point and perhaps build a shelter nearby. Setting up your main base at the spawn point has advantages and disadvantages: Having your default spawn in known and safe territory can be very helpful, but hanging out there will ramp up the local difficulty, which may make those respawns a bit rougher. Placing farms in the spawn chunks depends on the farm:


 * Any farm which does *not* depend on hostile spawns can work continuously in the spawn chunks, so long as a player is in the Overworld.    This includes any plant farms (automatic or otherwise), as well as an iron farm, and villages in general (specifically, their ability to restock their trades).
 * This applies to animal farms too, but having large numbers of animals at the spawn chunks will prevent natural spawns of passive mobs -- you will be limited to those animals which generate with the terrain.
 * Mob farms that depend on hostile spawns (darkroom or spawner farms, creeper farms, etc.) require the player's presence, and in some cases their active involvement. Prearrangement and automation can minimize this to where you can just show up and wait at an AFK spot, or spend your time slaughtering pre-weakened monsters.
 * Regardless, you will likely need to leave the spawn chunks for exploration; the Wandering Trader can supply some items from distant biomes, but some still need to be found by exploration.

Start off with ordinary exploration either from the spawn chunks or from your chosen base, but keep a special eye out for any villages, and for ransacking structure chests in particular. Leaning on the Fletcher stick trade, early access to a village can let you get a near immediate leg up with advanced equipment; if you've already got significant amounts of iron you may need to wait a bit for more significant advantages. Until you find that village, your early priorities are:


 * Saplings that you can grow for wood, especially spruce, jungle, and dark oak.
 * Accumulate building blocks -- aside from wood, you want any kind of stone, and a couple stacks of sand for glass can tide you over until you can buy glass from librarians.
 * Collect all the coal you can get your hands on, but don't use it for fuel -- make charcoal for that. The coal is for trading to the smiths later.
 * Collect iron as you come across it, but don't bother stockpiling yet.
 * Mine for at least a little redstone, lazuli, and gold. The first two you will eventually be able to buy from clerics, but a gold farm will be significantly later, and having some will help with both minecarts for your farms, curing zombie villagers, and and leveling up that cleric.
 * If you're lucky, you'll be able to find two diamonds and four obsidian and those chests, which will let you set up an enchanting table earlier. Push for Fortune if you can.  Remember, you can use a grindstone to "re-do" a bad enchanting result.
 * Starter wheat farm: A basic 9x9 wheat farm will do for now, if you're harvesting it regularly.  If you want to leave it for longer, make it bigger with another layer or a more complex layout.  Set up an auto-composter, but save your surplus wheat seeds until you have at least 8 stacks, for upgrading it to an automatic farm, as described below.  Multiply any other crops you come across, until you have at least two stacks handy.
 * Sugar cane farm: Go big, but think ahead.  There are two basic ways to start out:  A linear farm with canals to help you gather your harvest, or a big field of sugarcane with water blocks in the knight's-move pattern.   Either way, you will eventually want to automate this with a flying machine to break the cane, and tracks beneath for a minecart-with-hopper (using waterlogged bottom slabs for water will let you run tracks directly underneath the latter type of field).
 * Fill in any other "scavenger-hunt" items you come across. Once you have emeralds (see below), buy out the Wandering Trader any time he's offering a new potential crop.
 * Any time you find a monster spawner, turn it into a farm (you can skip the cave spiders, if you like).
 * Taking to the sea is a good way to find that village early, and the undersea chests can be remarkably useful.

By the time you have done the above, you should have found at least one village. You can take over that village in place, or kidnap villagers. If you really can't find a village, you may need special measures, namely curing a couple of zombie villagers (you'll need to make a couple of golden apples):


 * An igloo basement can provide your breeding pair and everything you need to cure them.
 * If you're daring and lucky, you might corral some zombie villagers and then taunt a witch to providing the Weakness potion
 * Most players, however, will need to just push into the Nether to get hold of blaze rods. Nether wart is useful, but you don't actually need it to brew a splash Weakness potion.  Once you have those potions, you can just wait until a zombie villager shows up, capture and cure them.

In any case, your immediate goal is to make a villager trading hall and a breeding pen where all your villagers can live safely. From here on, you'll be splitting your time between conventional character advancement, and "working" your farm -- leveling up your villagers and exploiting their trades. You'll need to make several farms for the purpose -- In general, go automatic if you can, otherwise go big:

For the trading hall, make sure to force your desired first trades for cash crops (or at least something you can level them up with) and key items:
 * Fletcher: Sticks (cash crop)
 * Librarian: You get to pick one book -- try for Mending, but if it's taking forever Unbreaking III, Fortune III, or even Silk Touch is acceptable.  A paper trade is nice, but the book is more important.  You can always make more librarians, too.
 * Cartographer: Paper (cash crop)
 * All three blacksmiths: You want them to buy coal so you can level them up at least until they buy iron.  Once your iron farm gets going, leveling them will be easy -- iron can even be a cash crop!
 * Farmers: At least one crop, preferably wheat so you can focus on growing lots of that.
 * Butcher (optional): Raw chicken, because you can farm that automatically.
 * Shepherd (optional): White wool, because that's most common.
 * Cleric: Rotten flesh, which is not a big thing yet but will be later.

Now, pick a spot a good distance away to make your first iron farm, and get that going early. If you want, you can combine that with a raid farm, but if so make sure it's far away from your main village. Once this gets working, you've basically got all the iron you need, and can rapidly upgrade to iron armor and equipment. This in turn lets you do a lot of exploring and mining in fair safety. This is also a good time to hit the Nether if you haven't already -- aside from the fortress goodies, you'll want quartz for comparators and observers, and if you can Silk Touch

With an iron farm, you should also be able to automate the farms for most of your cash crops pretty easily, for the full munchkin experience -- the limits will probably be your supplies of redstone and string. For the wheat farm, you'll need recruit a villager to farm it, filling their inventory with seeds. For the sugar cane farm, a flying machine can be helpful for auto-harvesting, though you might need to enclose the farm. Chicken or wool can likewise come from an automatic farm. Wood is more difficult to automated, but with an iron axe (and soon, a diamond one) you can easily get a couple of stacks at a time from the giant trees. For melons and pumpkins you'll want one of the "tower" types of automatic farm.

Once you've managed to level the smiths up to buying iron, you will rapidly be able to get them up to where you can buy diamond equipment, and at this point you barely need to mine diamonds (especially if you've already gotten enough for an enchanting table from chests). If you don't like the enchantments they offer for a given piece, feed it to a grindstone and enchant it yourself.

Set up a fishing spot if you haven't already, fishing gets you a variety of goodies, and is a good way to while away rainy days.

For a while, you can work on leveling up your villagers for a bit with the farms you have, and build some more as you accumulate crops.


 * Keep up your wood farming, for both cash and utility.
 * Go big for your sugar cane farm -- you can use your iron to set up automatic collection, and once you have enough slime blocks you can upgrade that to automatic harvesting.
 * Do at least one layer of 9x9 farm for wheat for starters; Once you've accumulated 8 stacks of wheat seeds, you can set one or more of your villagers to farming wheat for you -- this is the only way to make crop farming completely automatic. You've got plenty of iron for minecarts and hoppers...
 * Put a chicken farm next to your cow crusher, for feathers and optional meat. The fletcher will buy extra feathers.
 * Similarly, build a farm tower for melons and/or pumpkins, which are excellent cash crops.
 * You can also set up an automatic cactus farm/smelter for experience storage, and a kelp farm with smelter for fuel. A bamboo farm can fuel either farm, but for your personal use it's easy enough to just grow a big patch of bamboo and fill a chest or two with the stuff.

While you farm and work on your villagers, you can do some mining to get coal for trade, redstone, gold, lapis, and a few diamonds for your enchanting table. Similarly, do exploring to fill in the scavenger-hunt list: It's really good to have cactus, kelp, melons, pumpkin, bamboo, and cocoa beans (the Wandering Trader can help with some of these). Moss and azeala bushes are also good. If you find a spawner, turn it into a farm. Definitely set up an auto-composter, but save 8 stacks or so of wheat seeds. If possible, get bees and set up beehives too.

At this point, you're basically rich for Overworld stuff, but there's a few more points to complete your mastery. If you haven't already, you can easily fight the dragon now, and explore the end for shulker shells and perhaps an elytra. You can set up a gold farm in the Overworld (the End provides nigh-unlimited obsidian), or a better one in the Nether, with more resource-gathering. A piglin barter farm can be helpful too.