Tutorials/Beginner's guide

This guide is intended for those who are not familiar with Minecraft.

It describes how to play and how to survive the first night of singleplayer mode (Beta), assuming you are playing on the default 'Normal' difficulty setting.

Controls
The default keys for movement are as follows:
 * W move forward
 * S move backward
 * A move left (strafe)
 * D move right (strafe)
 * Space jump
 * Left shift crouch/sneak
 * (These are just the default controls. You can change them by going to the Options screen in the menu, after pressing Escape)

The mouse is used to look around and interact with the world. Move the mouse to turn your head. Click and hold the left mouse button to break down (or mine) blocks. Right click to place or use the currently highlighted item from your inventory hot bar. The mouse wheel selects the currently held item in your inventory hot bar, or you can use the number keys 1 to 9 . I opens your inventory window and Q will throw a held item.

Additionally, F5 will enter 3rd-person mode. F1 will enter screenshot mode, which removes all HUD and darkness effects. F1 + F2 will take a screenshot, which saves in the directory ".minecraft\screenshots".

F will create fog in your world. Fog essentially sets the Render distance in-game, without having to go to the options screen. It stops lag in your world but prevents you from seeing as far across the map. This makes it more difficult to see mobs and anything else. There are four different stages of fog. The first is no fog where you can see across the map. The second stage gets rid of about half of your sight. The third stage prevents you from determining what time of day it is as it blocks the sun, you can only see about twenty blocks away from you. The last stage only lets you see ten blocks away.

Initial Priorities
There are many ways to play Minecraft, as it is a sandbox game. However, hostile mobs spawn in the dark, and unless you know how to defend yourself against them, it is a good idea to build a lit shelter on the first day, before nightfall. You can, if you wish, forgo building a shelter and attack any hostiles you encounter, but this is not advised on your first night as your lack of resources (weapons, food, etc) will mean you will probably be overwhelmed by mobs.

While you are making your preparations for nightfall, keep an eye on the sun. When you first start a world it is early morning. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, just like our sun. At midday it will be directly above you.

Work quickly -- a Minecraft day is only about ten minutes!

The essentials
However you approach your first night, you will need at least wood and coal to have a fighting chance.

To collect resources, you aim at the block representing the resource and press and HOLD the left mouse button. This will instruct your avatar to punch the item repeatedly. Cracks will gradually appear in the item. Keep holding the left mouse button until the block breaks and drops. You can collect the dropped item by moving near its spinning representation. It should then appear in your inventory.

Wood
Wood is obtained from tree trunks. Wood is the staple of everything that is crafting, and is required to access the larger crafting grid necessary for the crafting of tools. It is also possible to extract charcoal from wood, making wood the single most important and useful resource early on.

After collecting around ten to twenty wood blocks, you can craft your first item.

Craft a Workbench
Crafting is core to Minecraft. While there are some items you can craft directly from your inventory, you will need a workbench to craft almost all tools and most other items.

To craft a workbench, first open your inventory (press I) and click on your collection of wood:



Then place that in your 2x2 crafting square in your inventory. This will produce planks:



Left clicking on the plank icon will craft four planks for every one piece of wood you have. Click on the plank icon and move it to your inventory. Click on the remaining wood in your 2x2 crafting square and return it to your inventory. Click on the planks you just crafted and instead of left clicking, right click once in each of your four crafting squares. This drops one item instead of all items each click.

You should see this (with the exception that instead of a 3x3 grid of slots, you will only see a 2x2 grid for now):



Click on the result and place it in an empty square of your hotbar.

Press escape to return to the world view and walk to a spot you think appropriate, select your newly crafted workbench with either the mouse wheel or number key, point at a flat square of ground and right click. This will place your workbench on the ground ready for use. If you wish to pick it up again to move it, left click and hold to punch it to pieces and pick up its spinning icon.

Craft a Pickaxe
In order to collect coal, the next staple resource, you will need a pickaxe. Your first pickaxe will be made of wood; not very durable, but until you collect some stone, it's all you have.

You will need at least five planks to make one wooden pickaxe. Use your workbench by right clicking on where you placed it. Your workbench view is similar to your inventory view, except you now have a more useful 3x3 crafting space. First we need to make a handle for your pickaxe. To do this, pick up a stack of planks and place one above another anywhere in your crafting square. Two planks produces four sticks:



Pick up your sticks and clear your workbench if there's anything left in there. Now place one stick each in positions 5 and 8, and one plank each in positions 1, 2 and 3. You should now be able to add a pickaxe to your inventory:



You may have noticed that in order to craft a pickaxe, you more or less draw it with its components in your crafting square. Other items are crafted in a similar fashion.

Coal and Stone
Once you've crafted a pickaxe, you can successfully acquire coal. Start by finding stone in the world; it should be fairly easy, as it's extremely common. If you don't see any on the surface, dig down and you'll find it quickly. Using your pickaxe, mine at least 8 blocks, and craft them in the Workbench by arranging them in a square formation, leaving the middle slot empty. This will make a Furnace:



Next, you'll need at least 1 wood block and 1 wooden planks block (you may have some as leftovers from crafting the workbench and the pickaxe earlier). Place the furnace somewhere, open it and place the wooden planks block in the fuel slot (the bottom one) and the wood at the smelting slot (the top one). Once both blocks are in place, the smelting process will start automatically, consuming immediately the wooden planks block and heating the furnace up. After a few seconds have passed and the smelting is complete, Charcoal will appear at the previously empty slot on the right. Place it into your inventory and you're ready to craft your first torches (read the Strike a Light section below)! Like workbenches, you can break a furnace to collect it and be able to place it elsewhere, but, unlike workbenches, they require a pickaxe to do so. Breaking a furnace with your bare hands, or any other thing, will destroy it for good.

This entire process can be bypassed by mining coal directly (you'll still need a pickaxe to successfully extract it). Coal ore is found amongst stone blocks either in stone outcrops on the sides of hills or deeper underground. Wander around a bit, keeping close to your spawnpoint. Keep an eye out for the characteristic black spots of coal ore blocks, as it's very easy to see if it's exposed. This is what you should look for:



Keep in mind that coal ore is subject to random placement, and you may not find any exposed or in easily accessible locations. Once you have located some, make sure that you are holding your pickaxe and collect as much as possible, keeping an eye on the time of day -- it is probably close to nightfall by this stage. It's also a good chance to collect more cobblestone, which will be handy for crafting more durable tools.

Coal and charcoal have different names in-game and you can't stack them together, but they're functionally identical in every way. Anything you can do with regular coal, you can do with charcoal, and viceversa.

A Word about Digging
One of the immutable rules of Minecraft is:
 * Do not dig straight down.

It is possible to stand on a block while destroying it. Once it's destroyed you will fall down one block to whatever is beneath it. Bear in mind this might be thin air. You could fall into a deep dark cavern, not only suffering fall damage, and being in the dark, but be beset upon by all kinds of hostile mobs who reside underground. You could even fall into a pool of lava!

Another one of the immutable rules of Minecraft is:
 * Do not dig straight up.

Again, it's perfectly possible to do, but if you don't know what's above you, you might find yourself dropped upon by a mob, or buried under sand or gravel which unlike other blocks, obeys gravity and suffocates those it falls on. Or, as before, you might get set on fire by a lavafall.

Strike a Light
Initially, your sole light source at night will be torches. These are made from coal and sticks. You don't need a workbench to make torches, as they can be made in your 2x2 inventory grid or on the 3x3 workbench grid.

Make some sticks from planks as required and place coal above sticks in your crafting squares as follows:



One piece of coal and one stick make four torches. You can place multiple quantities on your crafting squares and each left click of the result will use one set of ingredients.

Now that you have the means to craft and a means of producing light, it's time to find a hole to cower in for the night.

Build a Shelter
There are several ways to construct a shelter. You can either build one in the open from materials you collect (dirt, wood, stone), you can close in the mouth of a cave, hole or other naturally occurring hollow, or you can dig a hollow in the side of a hill or make a hole in the ground. -- Be careful around cave entrances, as hostiles often lurk in those even during the day.

Whatever method you choose might be dependent on your surroundings, what you have managed to collect, how much time you have until nightfall and your fancy; however, it must have these key features:
 * Light. Mostly so you can see what you're doing. If you are in a sufficiently small area (less than 25 square radius) hostiles cannot spawn next to you (despite what you've read elsewhere). So even if you fail to find coal on your first day, you can make a small rudimentary shelter to see out the night.
 * Walls. Hostiles cannot deal you damage, or shoot arrows at you through walls.
 * No big holes. It's a good idea to leave a hole high up in a wall so you can see when the morning breaks. However, be aware that you can be shot at through a hole, some hostiles can drop through holes in roofs if they can get up there, and spiders can crawl through one block high holes if they can gain access. So, choose the position with care. An alternative is a one block high outer wall, with an over hanging roof, and a one block high "window" so you can see outside. Then a full height internal wall that you can duck behind in case of skeletons who can shoot at you through your window.
 * A safe crafting area to place your workbench. To pass the time waiting for morning you might want to craft a few more tools for the next day. Initially consider making a few stone pickaxes if you were able to collect any cobblestone during the day, more torches, and definitely a sword. If you have encounters with hostiles during the night, you can deal more damage with a sword. Swords are crafted from one stick (not two) and two items for the blade. You can use planks or cobblestone if you managed to mine any along with your coal.

So, depending on how much time you have left, what your surroundings provide, and what you have managed to collect, choose to either dig into the side of a hill, dig a small hole, live in the hollow your coal mining created, or build a shelter from materials you have collected. Remember not to dig straight down (see above).

For example, to build a simple 5x5x3 hut you'll need 73 blocks of dirt, wood, stone or a combination of those items (a few less for doors or windows). Digging a hole in the side of a cliff is usually a good method as you collect cobblestone at the same time as hollowing your chamber. Watch out that you don't connect to a cave system, while knocking out a wall. If you do, it's probably best to brick it up with dirt or cobblestone until you're prepared to venture in there.

Once built, you can light your shelter by right clicking on a wall or floor while holding a torch.

If you have six spare planks, you can even make a door for your shelter. When placing it make sure you place the door from the outside of your house as doors have direction. Skeletons can shoot at you from an inward facing door.

Also think a bit about the structure of your house as this will really be your only chance to change it.

Waiting Until Morning
Enjoy your first night. You can either hide in your hole/house/cave or venture out with your sword and take your chances with the mobs. If you do, stay away from the walls of your shelter in case a Creeper follows you and decides to explode, in which case your shelter would most likely be decimated. Another alternative is to begin digging into the earth a bit. Creating a mine in your house isn't a bad idea, but as was said before, never dig straight down. Dig in front of you, and if you want to descend, dig through a block a step or two away from your character. If you break through into a cave system, it's probably a good idea to block it off for now and come back to it when you're prepared. Mining in this manner should give you a significant amount of cobblestone and some more coal, should you find any. If you're really lucky, you might stumble upon some iron, which is invaluable in making tools. This option will probably pass the time the fastest; so fast, in fact, you may find yourself mining well into the day, and perhaps into another night if you get carried away.

Once the sun rises, your troubles aren't completely over. Zombies and skeletons will eventually catch fire in the sunlight and burn, spiders and creepers still wander about in the morning, but spiders will become passive in the daylight- just so long as they remain in the light and you don't attack them. But the main things you have to worry about when coming out of your shelter are creepers, so keep your sword at hand when you venture out.

Good luck!