Minecraft (PC) Strategy Guide

Minecraft is a wonderful piece of design, but one of its biggest failings takes the form of lacking an in game tutorial. So we’re going to drill into Minecrafts juicy core with this article.

Getting started

The first thing you should do on starting a new game is to survey the land. You’ll need to gather some initial resources. You can look around with the mouse, left click punches at stuff with your hand or any objects you currently have selected. Right click will use certain types of objects (doors, boats, etc) or place a currently held object into the game world. You can ‘punch’ some things in the world to collect them, others require hand tools that you make before they can be picked up.

You’ll need to find some trees and punch out the trunks of them to get wooden logs (Don’t need to hit the branch blocks, which drop saplings that you can use to plant new trees). If you see any, punch some sheep once each to get some wool. Now press ‘i’ on the keyboard and you’ll be presented with your inventory menu. Here you can see everything you’re carrying, above that are (from left to right) slots for armour/clothing, the appearance of your character and the basic crafting system.

First, click the wooden logs and drop them into one of the boxes on the left of the craft panel. You can now take wooden planks from the box to the right of the arrow. You could start building a little hut right now, but first we need to get some things done before the sun sets. Note that having the menu open in singleplayer mode will pause the game.

When night falls a variety of monsters will spawn, terrorizing anyone caught out in the open. There are spiders and zombies which will hit/bite you, skeletons that fire arrows at you. The most notorious is the creeper. This beast sneaks up on you, makes a characteristic hissing noise and explodes, possibly damaging your building project as a result. Some monsters burn in sunlight, but not all. You can make swords, even bows and arrows, but the bow requires string looted from spiders and arrows require flint pieces dug from gravel and feathers looted from chickens or zombies, maybe later.

These are few things you can do to protect yourself from these threats, the easiest of which is to go into the options and set the game to peaceful. But this could deny you items that you can collect from them when they die.

Alternatively, if you want you can do a few things to counter the threat. Creatures do not spawn near light sources so you’ll want to create some. You could also build a home out on a small island with water around it so there are fewer directions from which land based creatures can spawn and sneak up on you.

For the first night in Minecraft, it’s easiest just to dig your way into a cliff with a pick axe and place two easily cleared away dirt blocks in the entryway to prevent anything following you in. A pick axe, you say? OK, let’s discuss crafting further.

Crafting Tools and Blocks

Go into your inventory menu, grab 4 wooden plank blocks and place one in each of the 4 boxes of your inventory crafting pane. Grab the workbench place it in one of the bottom inventory slots, now highlight it by pressing the appropriate number key or scroll your mouse wheel to it. Right click it to place it into the world, then right click to use the workbench.

Now it’s time to have some fun. Place two wooden plank blocks one above the other, grab the sticks that you get from it. From here on out, the design of the object creation panel will become more understandable.

First we want to create a wooden pick axe so that we can mine and gather some stone and coal, to do this place three wooden blocks across the top of the panel, then two wooden sticks down the middle.

Notice how this is roughly the shape of a pick axe, can you figure out how to make a wooden sword or shovel? Whilst you’re at it, if you have 3 wooden plank blocks and 3 wool blocks grabbed from sheep, place the 3 wool above the 3 plank blocks and get yourself a bed – This can be used to skip night time so you don’t have to wait out the monster spawns. Grab the pick, and go mine some rock so that we can make some sturdier pick axes.

We need coal to create torches for light. The best places to look for coal early on are cliff faces, you can tell them by the black bits poking out of stone. You’ll also find them in some cave sections but be aware that monsters might spawn in the darker parts of them.

It’s usually best to find your first few pieces of coal on a cliff face, then use torches to search exposed cave networks for more plentiful deposits of coal and iron ore. You’ll need a stone pick to get an item drop from iron ore blocks, a wooden pick only destroys the block.

When exploring caves, it’s possible to get lost in the deep cave networks but there are things you can do to prevent this. First, once you’ve mined any useful materials out of dead end cave sections, wall them off (Recover torches behind wall you’re going to build by hitting them). Secondly, if you place torches only on the left on your way in, you can follow the torches on your right to get out.