Tutorials/Superflat survival

Living on a superflat world can be a hard task, even for experienced players. This guide will show how to survive and thrive in the superflat environment.

Step 1 - Pillage a Village
As soon as you have spawned in the world, immediately look for a village. If you do find a village, run towards it as fast as you can. If you don't find a village, run in any direction until you see one. When you do arrive at a village, check all blacksmith chests for useful items. Although there can be a multitude of items found inside the chest, take everything, as you will find food, armor, tools, iron, gold, obsidian, and diamond all useful. Take some wheat from the wheat fields, and mine some logs from the houses. As soon as you have a few logs, make a single wooden pickaxe and mine some cobblestone and use it to create a stone pickaxe. Collect a stack of cobblestone and use it to create some stone tools (2+ axes, 1+ picks, 3+ shovels and 2+ swords). With these tools, continue to harvest some materials from the village. The materials you should harvest are:


 * Wool
 * Wood
 * Ladders
 * Books
 * Pressure plates
 * Cobblestone
 * Iron bars
 * Fences
 * Torches
 * Slabs
 * Wheat

Leave iron golems and villagers alone at this point, as you can probably not defeat them yet.

Wheat
Ironically, wheat can be one of your most valuable resources in superflat. Apart from being a staple food when made into bread, it can be used for breeding, and most importantly trading. Wheat is the best resource to trade with villagers, as it is completely renewable, easy to acquire, and only 18-21 are needed to trade for an emerald. Through trading you can acquire virtually anything you need.

Step 2 - Making your Choice
At this point, there are 2 paths you can take. You can chose to continue moving from village to village to amass valuable resources, or you can settle down in one place to farm. The advantage of being nomadic is that you can continue to acquire valuable, non-renewable resources throughout the game, but if you chose to be sedentary, you can have a much easier time building and farming, at the cost of limited rarer resources.

Nomadic
When being nomadic in superflat, you focus on nonrenewable, valuable resources that can be found in smithy chests and pillaged from the village. Early in the game, you will have far more diamond, obsidian, and possibly gold than you would in a normal world. However, basic necessities such as wood, cobblestone, and iron can be hard to acquire in large amounts without settling down. Dismantle the village as much as possible. Take all logs, cobblestone, torches, wool, wheat, and other useful resources. Take all wheat to trade, and don't bother replanting, because you are nomadic and will never see the village again. Don't hurt the villagers, however, because if there is an iron golem you will not be able to fight it at this point. Once you have dismantled the village, take shelter in a house for the night, and in the morning take everything with you and repeat the first step: Wander until you find another village. It may be a good idea to keep moving in one direction so that you don't end up at villages you have previously visited. Live like normal nomadic survival, except using resources from the villages you encouter.

When you have pillaged enough obsidian and diamond from the chests, create an enchantment table. Enchantments are quite easy to get because of the abundance of slimes. Fight zombies whenever you see them to get their iron, and skeletons for arrows. Make a diamond sword if possible, or else an iron one. Your next step is to defeat the iron golem.

Whenever you find a village big enough to house an iron golem, kill it if you can. Because there are no ores in a superflat world, this will be the most effective way to obtain iron, the other finding it in chests and killing zombies, which only drop it rarely. Dropping gravel on the golem will sometimes kill it, but this is slow and tedious. If you have enough arrows, sniping them can be an effective tactic. Never sword fight a golem without armor, as it deals heavy damage and can kill you in one hit. Whatever method you chose, get enough iron for a full suit of armor and all tools. Enchant everything at least level one, and your armor, sword, and bow higher.

Now you're ready for the next step: the Nether

Sedentary
If you chose to be sedentary, you focus on renewable resources. You also can focus more on trading, as you have the potential to produce large amounts of wheat in a farm. Buy some melon slices as soon as possible and set up a melon farm, as melons provide one of the most useful food sources in the game and glistering melons for brewing. Apart from wheat, there are three major renewable resources that can be farmed in Superflat. These are wood, cobblestone, and iron. You will acquire these one at a time, making tools from each. However, keep in mind that just that you have a resource doesn't mean that you have it renewably. Mining wood and cobble from the village will eventually run out, as will chests of iron. To continually acquire them while staying in your city, you must acquire them from saplings, a cobblestone generator, and iron golems, respectively.

Wood
Chose a home from the village, and put a chest, bed, and crafting table in it. Avoid dismantling the houses too much for materials, as then villagers will not even recognize them as houses. Feel free, however, to take the corners and unnecessary ceiling pieces. After finding shelter, your most important goal should be finding a sapling. They occur in the chests in smithies, but are fairly rare, so you may have to look in several villages to find one. Write down the coordinates of your home or trade a villager for some redstone to make a compass, and continue out in a direction until you find a village. Take everything in its chests, return, and repeat until you have a sapling. Plant the saplings near your home. Now that you have a renewable source of wood, set up home in the village. Put fences around a farm or two, to keep the slimes from trampling it, or make a farm inside of your house. Make a furnace from cobblestone you have gathered, so you can smelt logs into charcoal for torches. Light up the village; you don't want monsters everywhere. Place some torches near your tree farm so that they grow faster. Now that you have a renewable source of wood, your next step is cobblestone.

Cobblestone
Using iron you have found in chests, make a bucket. If you don't have enough, go searching more chests for more, or if all else fails kill zombies until you have three iron ingots. Take water from the well and lava from the smithy to make a cobblestone generator. Now you have a renewable source of wood and cobblestone. Dig a Dirt Mine for dirt, Smelt logs in a furnace to make charcoal for torches, and you'll have everything you need. Your next step is getting renewable iron.

Iron
Now is the time to move out of the village. Make yourself a home a short distance from the village to keep it safe from the occasional rampaging iron golem, and it is advised to have a small doorway so that in the event of a large group of slime getting inside the outer gate, they cannot get inside the actual building. Build an outer moat 3 blocks wide to capture slimes and other mobs. A dry moat works, but having water is preferable, as it not only looks nicer, but will also drown slimes, as they cannot swim. Make sure to include a variety of farms in your house (wheat, melon, tree, cobblestone, cow) as to make the need for a risky venture to a village unneeded. Using your wood and cobblestone, expand the village. As it gets bigger, the villagers will reproduce to fill empty houses. Once it has 20 houses, iron golems will begin to spawn. Make it big enough to spawn several at a time for a more effective trap. At first it may seem like a good idea to just kill them, but this is dangerous and time consuming, so in the long run it is better to make a trap to kill them. There are a variety of ways to do this; see Iron Golem page for more detail. Once this is completed, you can sit back for a while until you have enough iron for a full suit of armor and all tools. Before you can move on to the Nether, however, you need ten Obsidian. If you don't have this, go exploring more nearby-or not so nearby-villages for it. Press F3 and write down your coordinates, or make a compass by trading for one or redstone. If possible, get 4 extra obsidian and at least 2 diamonds so you can make an enchantment table. You can save diamonds by buying your diamond sword and other tools from a villager. Surround your enchantment table with bookshelves from the libraries, and with experience gathered from slimes, it is possible to reach very high level enchantments. Use this to your advantage.

Step 3 - The Nether
Before venturing to the Nether, make sure you have a diamond sword, a full suit of armor (preferably iron), and of course, ten obsidian. It's also a good idea to make an enchantment table before the portal, as enchantments will greatly help you in the Nether. Get flint from the gravel paths of the villages, and make a flint and steel. Build the portal in your house if playing sedentary. Contrary to popular belief, ghasts do not currently spawn near a portal, so you will be perfectly safe apart from the annoying noise. (However, as of 12w22a, Zombie Pigmen will occasionally spawn near a Nether Portal, so you may wish to have a separate room for it. Although Zombie Pigmen will not attack you unless provoked, it's generally not worth the risk of accidentally punching one.) If you are being nomadic, portals will pose more of a problem for you. The good news is, you have several options. If you have enough obsidian, you could make new portals as you move, to have continual access to the nether. If you build the portal from the nether, then it will save you a lot of walking (as each block there is 8 in the overworld). Also, that way you will know where your portal is and it won't spawn in a dangerous or annoying location. To save obsidian, you can mine it from the corners of the portals you spawn, or go mine the whole portal and go back through to regenerate it. This creates renewable obsidian that you can use for more portals. Your other option is to gather lava from the Nether and turn it into obsidian where you are building your portal. However, this technique cannot be used in the Nether, as water evaporates, making obsidian impossible to create. In the Nether, you will find many useful resources, but some have less uses than they do in non-superflat because other crafting ingredients are not available. Nether wart, magma cream, and ghast tears are no longer completely useless because of the trading system (12w21a), which is the only way to get glass for potions, as there is no sand. Buy enough to make several bottles, but splash potions are wasteful as it is rather costly. For this reason, gunpowder is only useful for fire charges because you cannot make tnt. Blaze rods can be moderately useful to make a brewing stand, potions, and fire charges. Glowstone is now more useful, for decoration, potions, and lamps by trading for redstone or glass. Gold can be crafted with traded redstone to make a clock, and you can still use it for it's highly enchantable tools and golden apples, which are less useful now that potions can be made. If playing nomadic, you should have more than enough gold found from the chests. If sedentary, however, you may want to make a zombie pigman farm to obtain your gold. This is more or less the same as a normal mob trap, except replace the water with lava. Zombie pigmen are immune to lava, water cannot be placed, and cactus cannot be acquired, so the best form of death will be fall damage. If the pigmen are almost dead and you deal the final hit, you will get experience as well as a chance for their rare mob drop, a gold ingot, sword, or helmet. Build the trap out of cobblestone to protect it from ghasts, and make sure that it is protected from wild zombie pigmen, who will not quite agree with your slaughter of their comrades.

The End cannot be reached in Superflat Survival, as there are no strongholds or end portals. Hopefully, however, you'll have endless fun.

Tips

 * By placing lava from blacksmith houses using a bucket and pouring water over it, you can form obsidian. This way, it is possible to form a portal without ever having a single obsidian block in your inventory. However, you would need to 5 blacksmith houses and to have a bucket- so the best way may be to 'mix and match' by using some obsidian blocks and some formed from the aforementioned technique.


 * If you place a trail of blocks on your journey from village to village, you'll easily be able to find your way back to previously visited villages


 * Carry a lava bucket on you to deal with pesky slimes.


 * You can spin wheat into gold! (or emerald, diamond, etc.) Get all the wheat you can.


 * If you have difficulty finding a resource, remember you can always buy some from a villager. This is especially useful for acquiring a diamond sword and armor, as well as redstone.