User:Craesius/Craesius' Guide

Hello and welcome to my guide to Minecraft. In this guide I will be telling you how to go from not knowing what the hell you are doing to building structures, big or small. This is Minecraft Alpha.

Starting Off
When you first open up Minecraft, click 'Single Player'. Then click on the first '-empty-' button. You will spawn in a random area. The controls are:

Move around the Mouse to look around W - Move Forward S - Move Backward A - Move Left D - Move Right Space - Jump Left Click (hold) - Delete Block Right Click - Place Block I - Inventory/Small Crafting Grid Esc - Menu F5 - Third Person Mode

The first thing you want to do when you spawn is mark your spawn. Dig down a couple of spaces by looking straight down and holding down left click until you delete one block. Now, look around for some dirt. It will be covered in grass. Delete the dirt, then go up to the little blocks on the ground and walk over them. You will automatically collect them. Now go back to your spawn and look down. Now jump (by pressing space) and quickly place a block underneath you by pressing right click. You should have placed a block underneath you. If it didn't work, try again. Keep placing blocks underneath you until you have no more blocks to place.

Now, go find some trees and hit them, gathering the wood that comes from them. You need to collect about 16 pieces of wood. When you have done that, press I and left click on the wood. Now move your cursor to the 2x2 crafting grid, and left click. All the wood should have moved to the crafting grid, and there should be an item to the right of the crafting grid with an arrow pointing to it. Continuously click the item until you have it all, then move it to the inventory. You have made planks. Planks are very useful. They are used to make walls and workbenches, signs, basic tools and a few other things.

Go to the inventory and click on the planks you made. Now right click ONCE in each of the 4 boxes in the crafting grid. You should have made an item. Collect the item and put it in your hot bar. This is a workbench and allows access to a 3x3 crafting grid allowing access to more tools you can only make with a 3x3 crafting grid. Place the workbench down on the ground anywhere and get some planks and make this formation:



If you do that, you should have made 4 sticks. But we need more than 4 sticks. So grab the planks and right click 4 times in each of the spots the planks are already in. Now you should have 5 planks in each pile. Now continuously click on the sticks until they run out and move them to your inventory. Now we can make tools.

First, make a pickaxe.



Now switch to your bare hands and beat the workbench until you can collect it again. Collect it.

Now you should have a pickaxe, which is used for mining. Put your pickaxe in your hot bar and move everything else into the inventory. Remember to keep it neat. Now, with your pickaxe, go find some stone. Stone is a grey colour and is found in mountainous regions. It is fairly easy to find. When you have found a mountain or cave not far from your spawn point, dig into the stone. Now if you look at the pickaxe in the hot bar after digging into a piece of stone, you will see a bar. That bar is the durability of the item. If the bar runs out, then the item disappears and you have to use another one. So keep mining stone, and only stone until the pickaxe runs out of durability.

Now, go back to your spawn point and put the workbench down next to it. Make another pickaxe, but instead of putting planks in, put the stone in instead. Now you have made a stone pickaxe.

Now would be a good time to decide if you want to fight monsters or not. If not, press Esc and click Options. Then keep clicking the difficulty button until it says 'Peaceful'. This means that no monsters will spawn when it becomes night time and you may continue working.

Building the Base
Now we are getting serious. We have a stone tool and we have a fair few materials. Now we want to collect some more materials for making our base and for making more tools. Make 5 pickaxes, 5 shovels and 5 axes. The recipes:

Stone Pickaxe:

Stone Shovel:

Stone Axe:

Once you have made 5 of those tools, go collect wood from trees with the axe, stone and coal (coal looks like stone but its got black specks in it) with the pickaxe and sand with the shovel Don't use all the shovels though. Save one and dig up dirt about 20 blocks away from your spawn. Now you might be wondering, "WTF? Sand? What do I need that for?" And the answer is to make glass. Making a glass roof to have light instead of having torches looks better and its more effective. Torches are only more effective at night. If you got some coal when you went mining the first time, make a couple of torches like this:



That formation makes 4 torches. Using multiple sticks and coal will net you more torches.

Now we are ready to make a base. Find an area, and use the dirt from earlier to fill in the gaps so you have move space to construct your base. Now, I recommend you make your base out of planks and make it no less than 5x5. It's a base, so you want the main room to be not that big, but not too small either. Make the walls about 5 blocks up so you have enough space to not feel like you are cramped, and to not make the ceiling so high you can barely see it. Make it about 5 squares up.

Something you might need to know how to make is a furnace so you can make better weapons, such as steel. This is how you make a furnace:



Once you have finished constructing the main room, it is up to you to decide what else you want to put in your base. My base as of now consists of stairs going up to the roof, a storage area and work area, my main room and an art room. I also have paintings scattered around my house, though the main paintings are in the art room. I also have signs telling me where I am about to go into. You can find all the recipes you will need for crafting in the Crafting section of the wiki, found here:

http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting

From here it is up to you to construct your grand base and go mining for more materials and the like. I wish you good luck in your base building.

Tips & Tricks
Building a base close to your spawn means that if you die, you can easily go and recollect your stuff and continue whatever you were doing.

Holding SHIFT makes you go into Sneak mode, meaning you move at about 1/2 speed but you can't fall off ledges, so it's great for making bridges.

Don't stray too far from your base, otherwise you won't know how to find it when you go back and you will get lost.