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. This guide assumes that you are already familiar with Minecraft and able to get by in the early days. The basic idea here is to farm things early and hard.

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) Death is an inconvenience, which limits the balance weight of danger in general (Hardcore excepted).  The player can quickly become able to deal with most enemies, and enemies are also sources of resources.  As noted above, the world is infinite and generous.  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.
 * 2) Some activities are reserved for the player, with no proxies allowed.  Seek advantage by minimizing these, or saving them for when you need them.
 * 3) * Placing a block
 * 4) * Mining most blocks (some "lightweight" blocks can be broken by pistons)
 * 5) * Feeding or luring an animal
 * 6) * Picking up experience
 * 7) * Crafting items
 * 8) * Loading chunks and making them tick (there are exploitable exceptions)
 * 9) * Fishing
 * 10) Some activities have an intrinsic time cost, variously negotiable.  Advantage comes from looking for bonuses and more powerful methods.
 * 11) * Mining or placing large numbers of blocks
 * 12) * Breeding animals and waiting for them to grow up
 * 13) * Fishing
 * 14) * Smelting items
 * 15) * Long-distance travel
 * 16) * Moving items long distances
 * 17) 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.
 * 18) * Resource has been located, and now the player knows where to get more.
 * 19) * Player sets up a farm for the resource, or makes a concerted effort to gather it, providing a reliable supply.
 * 20) * 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.

Starting off
At the start of the game, note the location of the spawn point and perhaps build a shelter nearby, but then prepare to get well away from the spawn point, because you'll want to pick and choose what goes into the spawn chunks. First of all, look around for a village -- if you don't see one right off, grab just enough wood for a pickaxe and a boat, and immediately upgrade to stone tools. Initially, grab any iron and/or coal you come across,and collect the usual "scavenger hunt" items -- saplings for any tree types you find, and pick up seeds or samples for any farmable plants you pass (especially sugar cane). Pick a place along the way for a base, but focus on the village first. Taking to the sea is a good way to find a village.

Once you do find a village, take it over. Ransack the chests, hopefully getting some iron. In Java Edition, you can get some more iron by carefully killing iron golems. Set up a base there where the villagers can't annoy you. Make sure to sleep at night until you've got all the villagers (or at least the ones you want to keep) moved into safe quarters -- specifically, dive right in to make a trading hall and a breeding dorm. You may need to grow some trees and/or make a cobblestone farm for building materials.

Once you've got your villagers safe, build a standard 9x9 farm for your own crops, a cow crusher for meat, and start a sugar cane farm.

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
 * Librarian: You get to pick one book -- try for Mending, but if it's taking forever Unbreaking III is acceptable.  A paper trade is nice, but the book is more important.
 * Cartographer: Paper.
 * All three blacksmiths: You want them to buy coal so you can level them up at least until they buy iron.
 * 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.

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 (you still need a couple for an enchanting table). If you don't like the enchantments they offer for a given piece, feed it to a grindstone and enchant it yourself.

At this point, you may want to set up your own base near the village. If you want to maintain a base at spawn, you can also start placing the upcoming farms (and another iron farm) there, so that they will continue to grow or accumulate resources any time you're in the Overworld. Set up a fishing spot if you haven't already. This is also a good time to mine (redstone, gold, diamonds), explore, and hit the Nether for quartz, gold, and other resources, and you'll generally want to try and fill in the scavenger-hunt list of crops (the Wandering Trader can help with some of them). If you find a monster spawner, turn it into a farm!

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. In general, go automatic if you can, otherwise go big:
 * 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.
 * 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 another 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.