Tutorials/Multiplayer survival

This tutorial is intended to help advise the player when playing on a public survival server with strangers.

If you are playing only with friends on a private server or an LAN world, each situation is different, and you will have to adjust to how you play the game if you want to have fun.

If you get bored of these tips, feel free to break a few, or all. These tips are just to ensure the player has the most fun when playing with others.

Note: This guide is not for Factions. Factions is a different minigame with different rules and strategies.

Starting
First, you will have to find out a few things:


 * If the server does not have PvP allowed
 * If the server has plugins that protect claimed land
 * If the server has limited or changed any features (e.g. disabling TNT to prevent griefing)
 * If the server does not allow cheating or toxic behavior and can effectively punish rule breakers
 * If the server allows new players to teleport to random locations

Friendly servers
These servers meet most or all of the above conditions.

While these servers are not 100% safe, they are generally cheater-free, friendly and encourage cooperation. There is not much strategy needed apart from a singleplayer world, and depending on the server, you might be safer to build things that you would normally not in a singleplayer world (e.g. creeper explosions turned off), and it is also recommended to engage in trade, if the server's players have set up an economy or you happen to be near a lot of players. Trading with players is a good way to start making new friends, along with helping them in various ways. The only rule is to be nice to others to get the best experience from these servers.

These servers are usually not Hardcore servers, but on the few that are Hardcore servers, try to bring friends to reduce the overall chance of death for all of you.

Vanilla servers
These servers meet a couple of the above conditions.

These servers try to install a minimal amount of plugins other than anti-cheats and moderator plugins. These servers want players to have a vanilla experience, so you will need to keep your guard up as there are ways for your day to be ruined. There are a few tips:


 * Try to log on when almost no players are online for the first time to run from spawn, like in the middle of the night, there may be players camping near spawn killing all new players. You do not need to worry about this if you can be teleported to a random location upon spawn.
 * Have your best gear at all times to fight off enemies trying to kill you
 * Try not to have your base near spawn or heavily populated areas. If possible, hide your base and remember the coordinates.
 * If your friends are joining with you, make an alliance. It is risky to do this with strangers, but it is a good way for new friendships to be made (and broken if they betray you!)
 * It may still be possible to trade, but only on a few servers.
 * Do not participate in wars unless you are being threatened or your friends are involved. Unnecessary wars can needlessly damage or destroy your gear or damage your base, possibly with no make-up for it at the end even if you are victorious.
 * Be ready for the day someone finds your base and decides to destroy it and loot the contents. Unless the server has anti-griefing rules and can restore to a backup, the damage will be permanent.
 * An efficient villager trading hall with weaponsmith, toolsmith, and armorer villagers selling diamond gear can be a great addition, along with a villager to obtain lots of emeralds from. Ideally, you would also have librarians selling high-level enchantments, but this is hard to set up.
 * If you raid an enemy base, always look for traps. These include random valuable blocks to trigger a trap, a pressure plate (even in front of an iron door), a storage container that is linekd up to redstone, a tripwire, or a switch. If their entire floor is carpet, break a piece (not the one you are standing on). Carpets usually hide pitfalls or lava underneath, and can quickly fall if their supporting blocks are removed. You should also watch out if they built their floor from gravity-affected blocks, because they could be one update away from sending the player into a pit.

Hardcore servers under this category must be played with extreme caution, as an enemy can quickly either give you a ban (allowing the player to rejoin after a few days at a random location so they can continue playing, albeit having to start over) or make the server unplayable in survival forever if they sneak attack you or you fall into a trap.

Anarchy servers
These servers meet none of the above conditions.

These servers are brutal, with only a bare minimum of rules (which only prohibit things that would compromise the entire server, like intentionally generating server-side lag or destroying the server economy with item duplication exploits), and an unmoderated chat. These servers may even be prone to crashes caused by players or map corruption, and players with hacked clients are ubiquitous. Griefing is all but an inevitability for players who choose to build anything that attracts attention.

These servers are not recommended for most players due to their unwelcoming and unforgiving nature, and many of their users are openly antagonistic to newcomers that cannot prove themselves.

Even so, a handful of guidelines still apply:


 * It is highly recommended to get a VPN in anarchy servers, to prevent the server owners to trace player's IP address.
 * Expect spawn to be an incredibly hostile environment due to spawn campers and deliberate destruction of all nearby resources vital for survival (especially food and wood), and the area is likely to be surrounded with multiple deathtraps explicitly designed to kill or confine players trying to escape spawn. For the most treacherous spawn areas, you may need to use a hacked client equipped with a pathfinding bot.
 * If present, Nether portals can aid in putting a good distance between you and spawn. But beware of portals that have been booby-trapped by having the other side be blocked off. Generally, portals that are far away are less likely to be traps.
 * You should definitely build your base as far away from spawn as possible (no fewer than 10,000 blocks away, though even this might not be sufficient on heavily populated servers), hide it, and use ender chests to prevent your items from being stolen when the base is griefed. Due to X-ray clients, your base will almost certainly be griefed if it is near highly populated areas or if you fail to cover your tracks. Keep the base small and unknown, as larger bases are noticed far more easily and every person you share the base with is a person who might reveal it to griefers- or even grief it themselves. In the event of exposure, some players might even grief their own bases just to deny others the satisfaction of doing so.
 * It might be worth considering the possibility of taking up an entirely nomadic lifestyle, as the only way to truly avoid having a base griefed is not to have a permanent base at all.
 * You will probably have to use a hacked client to PvP (and in many cases you will need to have over a dozen hacks active at once), but if you feel dirty, just activate it if you see another hacker. Some servers may prefer forms of combat that are wildly different from standard Minecraft PvP- a common technique involves using End Crystal explosions to kill anyone who isn't under the effect of an Enchanted Golden Apple or a Totem of Undying.
 * Be wary about who you trust- there is a good chance that the person who says he wants to help you is trying to lead you into a trap. Similarly, when attempting to establish yourself within a community it is important to establish your trustworthiness. Players with a bad reputation are prone to being repeatedly griefed.
 * Alliances can be risky to join due to frequent bouts of open warfare between alliances, but your chances of survival as part of a group are significantly better than they are if you're alone. Some groups do not readily accept new players into their ranks, and so you should work to build trust with their members and show them that you can be a productive part of their group.
 * There are almost no Hardcore anarchy servers, but it is not recommended to join one if you find one unless it is really new, as you will probably be killed as soon as you join by a spawn killer.
 * Some hardcore anarchy servers (and most hardcore servers in general, anarchy or not) usually are not truly hardcore (vanilla's built in hardcore feature), instead, may temporarily ban players for dying.