The Minecraft Guide – 01 – Basic Shelter

Minecraft is an enormous and expansive game built on surprisingly simple mechanics, but with a lack of tutorials it can be confusing for many newcomers. Follow me William Strife as I cover the basics to the advanced of crafting, surviving, and building; welcome to the Minecraft guide.

When you create a new single player world in minecraft with all of the settings left at their default, you have a number of options to choose from for how to spend your first day. The most common of them all though, is gathering supplies and building a shelter.

In Minecraft monsters spawn in darkness, so before sundown you need to have a well lit shack or hovel to spend the night in and remain safe. To this end there are six things you need to do on the first day; gather wood, stone,

And coal or make charcoal, then craft tools and torches, and finally build your shelter. First off is wood, and gathering it is rather simple, just find a tree and punch the trunk to break it down into blocks you can craft with.

The basic mechanic of Minecraft is harvesting blocks by holding left click, and them placing them with right click. Now after gathering around four pieces of raw wood, open your inventory with E, and place the wood in the small 2×2 crafting square to the right of your character.

You’ll see a new icon pop up next to the arrow, wooden planks. You can make one group at a time by left clicking, or make them all at once by shift clicking. Then by placing planks in a vertical line you can make sticks, which are necessary for making tools.

The first tool you’ll need to make is a wooden pickax, but first you need to make the most important thing in the game, a crafting table. A crafting table is composed of four wooden planks, and after being placed you can access it’s extended crafting grid by right-clicking it.

With this crafting grid you can make all of the more advanced items in the game, including tools. Now to make a wooden pickaxe you need to combine planks with sticks in the following pattern. Once that’s done break down the crafting table and find some stone, sometimes you can find

It already exposed, and other times you’ll need to dig through dirt to find it. Either way You need to mine at least twelve pieces. Now unlike wood, stone will not drop a block if it is broken by anyting other than a pick,

So if you use your fists or another tool the stone will just break and not drop anything. With twelve stone on you use your crafting table again, but this time create a stone axe, shovel, and finally a furnace. Tools can be made of different materials, each with a different durability including

Gold, wood, stone, iron and diamond. The various materials will be covered in detail in a later guide, so all you need to worry about now is stone. Now the furnace is used to cook, char, and smelt items. As stated earlier monsters spawn in the darkness, and the main light source in Minecraft is

Torchlight. To make torches though you need coal or charcoal, coal is a natural resource you find while mining, while charcoal is made from charring logs in a furnace. If you can’t find coal during the scant few hours of the first day, you’ll need to make charcoal instead.

With your basic tools and furnace, pick up your crafting table once again and start chopping down trees with your new axe. Ten pieces of raw wood is more than enough, and once you collect that much you should start digging a place to stay for the night.

The best place to make your home is in the side of a hill or mountain, as it will afford you the best protection, it’s better than digging down to live in a hole, and takes fewer resources than building a house.

Once you find the site for your new home dig a niche that’s three blocks wide, two blocks tall, and three blocks deep. This is the bare minimum of space you’ll need to make yourself a tiny safe house, and It’ll be easy enough to expand when you want to.

Inside place your crafting table and furnace next to each other and against one wall. Open the furnace and drop two pieces of raw wood in the bottom slot, and the rest of your raw wood in the top. Doing this will turn the logs into charcoal which you’ll need to make torches for keeping

Monsters out of your house. Next go ahead and wall up the front of your house, leaving a small doorway. Then make a door out of wooden planks, and place it on top of the block you want it to sit on, in this case preferably in the middle of the hole in the wall.

The last thing to do is take the cooked wood, now charcoal, out of the furnace and combine it with sticks to make torches. Place at least one inside your little hovel, and a few outside to keep the front of you new dwelling fairly safe.

That should be everything, but there’s one last thing you’ll probably want to build on the frist day if you can find the resources, a bed. A bed serves a few purposes. It allows you to skip the night cycle, which is useful if you just want to work outside

Safely, and it changes your spawn point. When you die you’ll respawn at the world spawn point, unless you sleep in a bed, in which case you respawn at the last bed you slept in. To make a bed you need wool and wooden planks.

It’s a simple creation that’s more or less necessary to keep things running smoothly when you establish a base. The main obstacle in making a bed however, is needing wool which comes from sheep. They’re not always around when you need them, and sometimes it takes quite a journy to find them.

For this reason you should only bother with a bed on your first day if there are sheep hanging around your location. After running through all the necessary basics, hopefully the sun will have only just gone down, and you’ll have completed your first shelter in time to stay safe for the night.

There’s plenty more to learn though, so be certain to check out the next guide to discover just how varied the world can be, where you might spawn, and what type of biomes you can explore! Unil next time I’m William Strife of the Yogscast, and a Minecraft expert I’ll see ya later.