Starting Your Survival World in Minecraft

In order to start your Minecraft world, select Singleplayer and then Create New World. This will open up a menu where you can name your world whatever you want. In order to play survival, you should select either Survival mode or Hardcore mode. Survival mode is just regular survival, you can change the difficulty at any time. In Hardcore mode, you cannot change the difficulty, as it is locked on Hard mode. Also, you only have one life, meaning you cannot respawn. There are 4 difficulties in Minecraft: Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and Hard. In peaceful mode, no hostile mobs will spawn, and your hunger cannot go down. You take less damage, and wolves/iron golems cannot harm you, even if you provoke them. In easy mode, a few mobs spawn, and you take a little more damage. Your hunger bar can go down, but you cannot die if you run out of hunger. In normal mode, quite a few mobs will spawn, and you take a decent amount of damage. Your hunger bar still cannot kill you even if it runs out, but it will deal damage to you, reducing your health to half a heart. In hard mode, a ton of mobs spawn, and they all deal a lot of damage. Your hunger bar can kill you if it runs out. Once you select your gamemode, you can select Create World, and you will spawn into your world.

When you first spawn, you should look around a little and take in your surroundings. You can spawn nearly anywhere, whether it could be a harsh desert, a wild jungle, or just some grassy plains. What you want to do first is find a tree. Start punching the wood until it breaks, and break at least 3 pieces. Open your inventory and place 1 log into the crafting table (the 4 squares at the top of your inventory). This will make 4 planks. Take those 4 planks and place one plank into each square of the grid. This will make a crafting table. Take the crafting table and place it down on the ground. Using the crafting table gives you a 3 x 3 grid, or 9 squares, to craft with. Take 2 planks and place them, one on top of the other, to make 4 sticks. Take 2 sticks and place them in the crafting grid, one on top of the other, and then put 3 wooden planks on the top row. This will craft a wooden pickaxe. I suggest you immediately go mine for stone to upgrade your tools.

Sure, you could make a full set of wooden tools. But those aren't going to last very long, and besides, you're gonna need some upgrades to start harvesting better materials. So, try to find a cave. If you can't find a cave, then you can just punch out a small hole in the dirt. Dig deep enough in the dirt, and you'll come across stone. Use the wooden pickaxe from the last step to mine out stone until the pick breaks. This should give you about 59 pieces of cobblestone. Go back to your crafting table and, using the sticks you have leftover, craft a stone axe. Do this by placing your 2 remaining sticks vertically, just like you did then crafting the pick. Now, take 3 cobble and place them in an upside-down L shape, with 2 in the top row and one in the middle row. This will make a stone axe. Using your new axe, go chop down trees until you have at least 10 logs. Craft all of those logs into planks, which will give you 40 of them. Using this wood and the cobble you have, craft more sticks and create a set of stone tools. To make a shovel, place 1 cobble on top of 2 sticks. To make a pickaxe, do the same thing we did earlier, but with cobble instead. To make a sword, put 2 cobble on top of 1 stick. Use the axe to break your crafting table, and get going.

When night falls, dangerous monsters will start spawning. See my combat guide for more info on them. You will need a shelter to avoid them. Usually I just dig a 3 block deep hole and cover it with dirt to wait out the night. Occasionally break the dirt block to check if it is daytime yet, then replace it. If you want you can build a more roomy dirt hut to place down your crafting table and perhaps a chest and furnace. Build a door is you want to exit easily. Make a door with 6 planks, which creates 3 doors. Make a chest by placing 8 planks in the crafting table, in a ring shape. For a furnace, do the same, but with cobble blocks instead. Furnaces can smelt you items such as turning cobblestone into regular stone, or turn raw meat into cooked meat. During the day, you should kill a few animals with your sword and cook the meat. In order for a furnace to operate, it requires fuel. You can use wood as fuel, but those will burn up fast. A better way to smelt items is by placing a few wood planks in the fuel slot (the one on the bottom) and placing more planks on the top slot. This will smelt the wood into charcoal. Note that one wooden plank only smelts 1.5 items, so placing 2 planks in the fuel slot will smelt 3 items. Keep that in mind while burning charcoal. You can use charcoal to craft torches to light up your hut. Place one stick and one charcoal in the crafting slot, with the coal on top of the stick, to make 4 torches. You can also use regular coal to make torches. Speaking of regular coal...

You are going to need more resources before you can progress in the game. First, you need to mine plenty of coal. This shouldn't be too hard, as coal spawns in large veins. Find a cave, and look around in it. You should spot a coal vein relatively quickly. Look for black spots in the stone. That's coal ore. Use your pickaxe to mine it, and it will drop coal. You will usually find about 10-16 coal in a single vein, so it is very plentiful. Once you have a good amount of coal (at least 32), exit the cave. You may want to mine some more cobble before you leave, though, as making stone tools again and again will eat through your supply of cobble.

You can't just keep wandering around forever. You'd run out of inventory space! You are going to need a house. Look around for a little while and find an ideal spot to build a base. A good place would be a flat plains biome, as you will have trees pretty nearby, plenty of grass, and tons of open space. See my guide on building a house when you find a good spot. In my opinion, one of the best places to build a base is near a village. These rare structures house many valuable items, not to mention the villagers themselves. Finding a village is a great thing, and you should definitely build a base there.

All this adventuring has probably drained your hunger bar. And I bet you don't have a lot of cooked meat left, do you? We need to build a reliable food source. See my guide on farming to find out how to grow food. If you want to have a source of meat too, then you need a pen. You should use fences for this, as fences are 1.5 blocks tall, meaning mobs cannot jump over them. In order to craft fences, take 2 sticks and 4 planks and place them in a crafting table. Put 2 planks on each side vertically, with the sticks in between the planks. This will make 3 fences. To make a fence gate, you need 4 sticks and 2 planks. For this one, just do the same thing as the fences, but with the sticks on the edges and the planks in the middle. This will make 1 fence gate. A fence gate is 1.5 blocks tall, just like a fence, but players can use the fence gate to open them, allowing you to walk through. Place the fences in a square that is at least 5 x 5 in size (you will need 20 fences for this) with a gap on one side. Place the fence gate in that gap. Now you can either use a lead (crafted using 4 string and 1 slimeball, or dropped by wandering traders) of you can lure the animals into the pen using different items. Lure cows and sheep using wheat, pigs using carrots, and chickens using seeds (any seeds will work). When holding the specific item in your hand, the animal will follow you around. Go into the pen and they will follow you, then stop holding the item. They will stop moving and stay in the pen, allowing you to quickly exit the pen and close the fence gate. Congratulations, you have just captured an animal!

Good job, you've caught yourself some animals. Now what? If you kill them, you'll get some meat, but then they'll be gone. What you need to do is get 2 or more of the animal you want to farm. Get them both into the pen. Then, take the item you use to lure them and use that item on each animal. If you do it right, the item will be consumed, and some hearts should appear around the animal. The hearts indicate that the animal is in "love mode". While in love mode, an animal will walk towards any animal (that is the same species as it) that is ALSO in love mode. They will then make a baby animal. Given time, the baby will grow into a normal animal. You've just bred the animals. Continue doing this and eventually, from just 2 animals, you will have as many as you want! You can then kill off the excess animals, collect the meat, and then rebreed the remaining animals to repopulate the pen! Infinite food! Just remember to smelt the raw meat, as eating raw meat can poison you. Besides, raw meat restores a lot less hunger than cooked meat.

That's the end of this instructable, but there's so much more you can do in Minecraft! Check out my other guides for tips, and continue building, exploring, fighting, and farming!