The game of Minecraft is a lot of things for those who play it. For some, it's about connecting with the community and working together to create amazing things. For others, it's a canvas to express their creative side. For still others, it's an arena to test their skills by battling against other players. However, at its core, Minecraft is a survival game, where a solitary player is pitted against their environment in an effort to survive and thrive.
While there are mechanics to make this harder over time, like local difficulty, overall the game gets easier as you gather resources and build a safe place designed to help you endure. this one world. That being the case, your first night is one of the biggest survival challenges in Minecraft gaming, but it can definitely be done if you stay focused and rush on the first day.
The day-night cycle
Minecraft has a day-night cycle, but since it's not practical to make it a full 24-hour cycle like we experience in real life, the developers opted for a much shorter, evenly distributed 20-minute cycle. between 10 minutes day and 10 minutes night.
As you can imagine, 10 minutes isn't a lot of time to gather the resources you need to survive a night filled with seemingly endless waves of hostile monsters, especially when you're starting from scratch, so we have to make every minute count.
Luckily, you don't have to start from scratch if you don't want to! Minecraft has an option during world creation to receive a bonus chest with some basic tools to get you started. If you're new to Minecraft and this is your first world, it doesn't hurt to use this option just to give you a little boost on your first day. The bonus chest spawns near where you spawn during world creation. It is a single chest surrounded by 4 torches, 1 on each side of the chest and it contains a random selection of basic supplies which may include tools (could be a pickaxe and a wooden or stone axe), blocks of wood (can be logs from any variety of trees from the outside world) and/or food (like apples or bread).
Once you've collected the supplies from your chest, you can also collect the chest and torches, which is one of the biggest bonuses on your first night.
This guide will assume that you have left this option unchecked and are starting out on your own and with no resources.
your first day
Thus, you appeared in a new world and have no resources. Your inventory includes a basic 2×2 crafting space, great for basic supplies like torches, but you'll need the more versatile 3×3 crafting space provided by the crafting table in order to craft more complex objects like tools. This is made of wood, so task number one is to find a tree and collect logs.
Since you don't have any tools yet, just use your empty hand and hold down your left mouse click while pointing the crosshairs at what you're trying to collect. You'll notice that when you hold down the mouse button your arm will move animating you 'cutting' everything you're looking at and the block you gather will change its texture a bit to indicate it's breaking down .
Once the log reaches a certain point of decay, it will cease to exist as a block placed in the world and will turn into a small object hovering just above the ground that you can pick up by stepping on it.
Congratulations, you have your first journal! Now press the "E" key on your keyboard to open the inventory. You'll notice it holds 1 log (or maybe more if you're keen on punching out the rest of that tree). You should also notice that at the top right of the inventory is the previously mentioned 2×2 crafting grid.
Using your mouse, click on the journal in your inventory to pick it up, and click again in the crafting grid to place it there. You will see that the small box to the right of the crafting grid will show a new item. This is the product that will be crafted from whatever you have placed in the crafting grid, in this case, 4 wooden planks. Shift-click to skip the product in your inventory.
Great! Now you have just enough wooden planks to actually make your crafting table. Now take your wooden planks and place 1 in each of the 4 squares of the crafting grid. You can pick up the entire stack of wooden planks by left-clicking on them, then hovering over each space in the crafting grid, right-clicking them once to place 1 item from the stack into that space . Once you place the fourth plank in the grid, you will see a new product appear, the crafting table.
Grab it and move it to your hotbar, located under your inventory. There are 9 slots that correspond to the number keys on your keyboard 1 through 9. Go ahead and place it in the leftmost 1 slot and close your inventory. You can close this menu and others by pressing the “Esc” key on your keyboard.
Now, to use the crafting table, we need to place it in the world. Select box 1 on your hotbar by scrolling to it with your mouse wheel or by pressing the 1 key on your keyboard (just above and to the left of the "Q" key). Now point your crosshairs at a ground location somewhere near you and right click. This will place the block you're holding (in this case the crafting table) where you're looking. Now we have access to a larger crafting grid to craft more complex items. Unfortunately, we are out of materials, so go back to that tree and get 2 more logs.
These logs, we're going to be crafting them into planks of wood again, so go ahead and do it in your inventory crafting grid, or if you prefer to use the fancy new crafting table, you can do it by right-clicking while looking at her. Now take 2 of the wooden planks and place them anywhere in the crafting grid, just making sure one is directly above the other. This will introduce a new product that we have never seen before, sticks. Take the sticks and place them in your inventory (you may already have sticks if you cut down the whole tree as they sometimes drop from rotting leaves. That's okay as they are used in many crafting recipes and are never bad to have extras from).
Now place 3 of your remaining wood planks in the upper left corner of the 3×3 crafting grid making a small arrow and place 2 sticks on the crafting grid in the middle slot and the lower middle slot. This will present you with a new product to grab, the Wooden Axe. Take it and place it in your hot bar in slot 1.
Now you have an axe! It may be made of wood, but it will help you pick up logs faster than just using your hand, so put it to good use by chopping down as many nearby trees as possible. If you are in an area with oak trees, try to catch them first as they can sometimes drop apples. Once you have collected all the logs from a tree, the leaves will begin to decay, slowly decomposing on their own and dropping items, in the case of oaks, either oak saplings, sticks or apples. Not every leaf will drop an item, you might not get a ton, but after a few trees you should get some. Apples can serve as a food resource for the start of the game, but if you don't have any, don't worry, there are other options you can grab in the next few days before you really need anything. it would be.
You will notice that when you use the ax, a green bar appears at the bottom of the ax image in your hotbar. This is the remaining durability of the axe. It will eventually turn yellow, then red, and eventually shatter destroying the item and removing it from your inventory. It's part of Minecraft; you can always craft new tools, so don't worry if you break a tool.
Once you've collected two or three trees, you've probably got enough wood for the night and it's time to search for better resources, but you'll need a new tool, a pickaxe. Return to the crafting table and place a plank of wood in the top three slots, a stick in the middle slot, and another stick in the bottom middle slot. This will create the wooden pickaxe in the exit box. Grab it and place it in slot 2 of your hot bar.
Now you need to find stone. Sometimes it will be on the surface, but most of the time you will have to dig into the side of a large hill or into the ground to reach the stone. To get through the dirt, you'll eventually want to craft a shovel, but for your first day, just use your hand.
It is important to note at this stage that you should not dig directly. Instead I recommend either going up a flight of stairs or staying on the line between two blocks and breaking them one at a time back and forth so if you break a block and find something you don't don't want to fall (lava, a deep cave, etc.), you can stop before you fall into it. You should soon hit the stone that you can pick up with your pickaxe. It's possible to smash the stone with your fist, but it takes forever and the blocks won't drop for you to collect as items unless you use a pickaxe. Once you find stone, use your pickaxe and grab at least 16 of them. They'll drop as cobblestone instead of stone, but that's what you want in this case, so that's fine.
Once you have your cobblestone, use it and some sticks to craft a new ax and pickaxe (same patterns as with the wooden versions, just replace the wooden planks with cobblestone) and now we'll craft some new objects; a stone sword and an oven.
Let's start with the sword. Place 1 stick in the lower center space on the 3×3 crafting grid and 1 cobblestone in the center space and the upper center space. This will introduce the Stone Sword which you can grab and place on your hot bar.
Next, take your remaining 8 cobblestones and place 1 in each slot of the 3×3 crafting grid except for the center slot. This will display the oven. Take it and place it on the hot bar.
your first night
At this point you're probably running out of daylight, so use your ax to smash and pick up your crafting table and take it all to where you'll shelter for the night. It can be a shallow cave entrance, an abandoned building, or you can create your own shelter by digging a hole to jump into or quickly erecting a very small house. Once there, put down your crafting table and furnace and use your remaining blocks to seal the area with you inside.
You can make a door if you want (fill all but the left 3 slots on the 3×3 grid with wooden planks to make 3 doors), but as long as you're sealed, you're fine.
Technically, you could spend the night in your shelter as it is and be fine, but sit for 10 minutes in total darkness on a…
