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Even though Minecraft has been around since 2011 and has become a global phenomenon, there are still people trying out this game for the first time. Fortunately, it continues to have a thriving community of loyal fans and the developers habitually release massive updates that expand the game’s content and take it in exciting new directions.

Related: Minecraft: How To Cure A Zombie Villager

For those starting out though, it can be a bit overwhelming. Here are some beginner's tips to keep you alive the first couple of nights; these will give you a good head start as you figure out what to do in Minecraft.

Updated March 17, 2023 by Jacqueline Zalace: Do you still need help starting fresh in Minecraft? We've added even more tips for you to follow, as well as removed some that were more of end-game content.

20 Punch A Tree

Starting out you have nothing; no tools, no weapons, no shelter, nothing. The first thing you need to do is arm yourself with some tools. To do this, walk up to the nearest tree and start punching it until the wood drops.

Wood is the basic building block you’ll be using for the rest of the game. Gather a bunch of logs then open your inventory to turn the logs into planks. Use four planks in your mini crafting grid to create a Crafting Bench and open up a world of possibility.

19 Acquire Stone Tools

Minecraft Survival Crafting Building 4 stone tools sword shovel ax pickax

Using this Crafting Bench, you can build yourself a wooden pickaxe. To do this, craft a set of sticks and use the sticks with wood planks to craft the pickaxe. It’s highly recommended you have the crafting guide pulled up as there are a lot of things to craft, and it’ll spare you hours of trial and error to figure out what you can and can’t build. Thankfully, Minecraft has a little green book that you can open from the menu, showing all recipes.

Use that wooden pickaxe to gather a bunch of stone and then use the stone to craft stone versions of a pickaxe, axe, hoe, shovel, and sword. With these tools in your arsenal, you’re ready to move to the next step.

18 Build A Shelter

Minecraft Dirt House

Nightfall is very dangerous in Minecraft as there are monsters known as mobs that come out at night to attack you. Later these mobs will become another cog in your machine to progress, but in the beginning, they are your biggest threat.

The best way to avoid this is to sleep in a bed built by killing sheep and using their wool plus wood to craft it. Unfortunately, sheep are only found in specific biomes so odds are your first night is going to be spent hiding indoors. Whether it’s dirt, wood, or stone, use your tools to gather enough of your chosen material to build a basic shelter. Most Minecrafters have fond memories of their first base; a square made from dirt.

17 Set Your Spawn Point

A bed in Minecraft

When you die in Minecraft, you will respawn at the coordinates 0,0. This is where you begin the game, but it's typically not where you choose to settle. To avoid this, be sure to set your spawn point.

This can simply be done by sleeping in a bed, or just clicking on the bed during the day. When you do this, your spawn point is set and you will respawn on your bed whenever you die.

16 Find Some Food

Minecraft Lead On Sheep And Cow

Now that you have a shelter to keep yourself alive at night, your next issue is going to be keeping yourself properly nourished. Every action in the game, such as mining and running, costs you hunger. When the hunger bar is full, your character will naturally heal from any injuries, but lose a little hunger and you stop healing.

RELATED: Minecraft: The Best Tool Enchantments, Ranked

If your hunger bar continues to drop you’ll become unable to run and eventually will start losing health as you starve to death. It’s important to grab some basic foodstuffs like meat from animals, fish, berries, apples from oak trees, or even rotten meat from zombies to keep yourself alive in the beginning. Some food provides more satiation than others, meaning the player gains more 'hunger' which lasts them longer. Cooked beef is one of the best sources.

15 Light It Up

Minecraft torches and placed around player

Most mobs in the game hate light, which is why they don’t appear until nighttime. Keeping the inside of your shelter lit will prevent any mobs from spawning inside. To do this you need torches.

To build torches you can either gather coal from the environment or make charcoal by creating a furnace using stone blocks and then ‘cooking’ wooden logs to make charcoal. Charcoal will be handy later for smelting projects, but for now, place it on top of a stick in your crafting table to create torches. These torches can then be placed practically anywhere to generate light and prevent mob spawns from happening in the area.

14 Write Down Your Base's Coordinates

Minecraft coordinates

Before setting out in the world, it's important to note where you are. Exploration can be fun, but you may get turned around, especially if your base is in a common area like a plains biome.

We recommend writing your coordinates down. If you are playing on PC (Java), you can show coordinates by pressing F3 (FN + F3 on Mac). If you are on the Bedrock version of Minecraft, you will need to enable coordinates when creating your world. Thankfully, you can head back to the edit world button from the main menu and enable coordinates if you forgot to when creating the world.

13 Build A Chest

minecraft four chests stacked in a building

Chests are great for storing items and are quite easy to make. At the start of the game, you will probably be hoarding everything that you come across. To ease the inventory clutter, be sure to make a chest or two. Placing two chests will make a double chest.

Placing important items in chests will also help you avoid permanently losing them if you die. A great tip is to store important tools in a chest if you are exploring somewhere that looks dangerous. When you do die, your tools will still be intact.

12 Find A Cave

A wide cave with water streams and pools of lava, and dripstone blocks on the ceiling and floor

With a basic shelter, a supply of food, tools, and torches your next step is to find a cave. Caves are naturally created tunnels and crevices in the environment that extend underground. Caves vary in size from small rooms barely large enough for you to stand to large complex tunnels that reach the bottom levels of the world.

Giant chasms can form down here, as well as Lush Caves full of food and life; just keep an eye on your torch supply. Caves can be useful as large underground shelters and for your next step in survival; gathering raw materials.

11 Gather Raw Materials

player branch mining underground

By now you’ve probably had to replace your stone tools a few times and would like to upgrade to something better. Your next technological tier is iron, which is primarily found underground. If you found a decent cave complex this makes this part very easy. If not, you’re going to have to dig your way down and build a mine.

Related: Minecraft: Caves And Cliffs Ore Distribution Guide

In any case, you’re looking for small tan flecks in stone that represent iron ore blocks. Dig up a bunch of these, plus whatever coal you find, and put them in your furnace. Once you’ve ‘cooked’ the iron, it becomes iron ingots that you can use to craft iron tools. Iron ore typically spawns mostly at Y= 16, but larger veins occur between Y= -56 and Y= -8. Coal is usually much closer to the surface.

10 Locate A Village

A villager being transported in a boat in Minecraft

Since the Village and Pillage update of 1.14, these generated structures are way more useful than they ever were before. Breeding the NPCs and trading with them is incredibly beneficial as they can give you enchanted weapons and armor, rare enchantments, and even Suspicious Stew.

Their homes are also super helpful, as they often have beds for you to commandeer, chests with food and sometimes diamonds, and endless bales of hay. By deconstructing the haybales, you will be rewarded with more Wheat than you know what to do with. Try putting three in a row on a Crafting Bench for some Bread.

9 Begin The Iron Age

Minecraft - Crafting a Block of Iron

Once you have enough iron ingots, you can craft iron tools and armor. Iron tools are much more durable than stone tools and much more efficient. Depending on your iron stores, you might have to resort to stone tools every now and then.

Your number one priority is to have an iron pickaxe on you at all times. Important and valuable blocks like gold, redstone, and diamonds can only be mined with an iron pickaxe. If you use anything else you’ll destroy the block without getting the valuables inside.

8 Start A Farm

Minecraft wheat, potato, carrot and beetroot

By now, you should be running low on food supplies and will need to start planning for a more sustainable solution. Using the bucket made from iron ingots, create a small pool of water near your base.

Next to the water, use a hoe to plow grass blocks in rows up to four blocks away from the water. Now, run around and chop down all of that grass growing around you to gather seeds and plant those seeds in the prepared blocks. After a few days, you’ll see brown wheat ready to harvest, which can be crafted into bread, providing you with a renewable source of food.

7 Breed Animals

Starting a crop farm is one thing, but in order to get your hands on better food that will keep you satiated for a longer time and restore more hunger, animals need to be bred. There are a few options out there, including cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Whatever is closest is usually the best to go for.

If there are a lot of animals around, cows are objectively the best option due to leather. This can be later used to make bookshelves to equip yourself with the best enchantments which can be very tedious to grind for in the long run. Cows and sheep can be bred by feeding two animals of the same species wheat. Pigs will accept beetroot and carrots, while chickens will eat seeds.

6 Find Diamonds

Diamond is among the rarest ores in the game and the most useful as well. You can create diamond tools and gear, which have some of the highest damage, durability, and protection (second to Netherite).

Related: Minecraft: Tips For Finding Diamond Quickly

Diamond appears only at a certain elevation, below Y=16 but becomes increasingly abundant the lower you go. The perfect depth seems to be Y= -56 for finding larger veins. Mine a long hallway at this elevation, and every five blocks mine branching out hallways. This technique is called strip mining and is the most efficient way of finding diamonds in the game. Huge caves show glimpses of diamonds in the walls, so run through any you find.

5 Build A Nether Portal

A Nether portal in Minecraft

There's a ton of exploration to be done in the Overworld, but if you want to progress in the game, you will eventually want to make your way into another dimension known as the Nether. To get there, it's best to have diamond gear, just to be on the safe side.

To build a portal into the Nether, you need to mine out ten blocks of obsidian, which can only be mined with a diamond pickaxe. Then, place them in a two-by-three doorway. Corners can be any other block, but above, you can see a Nether Portal with obsidian corners. The portal needs to be lit up with a flint and steel, which is made by combining an iron ingot and flint, gained from shoveling gravel.

4 Find A Nether Fortress

Since the Nether update, this dimension has had a whole new lease of life, with lush biomes of warped trees, hostile mobs with weapons, and endless ashen scapes of rock.

Then there are Nether fortresses, which are large dark castles made out of Nether brick. Inside, tons of loot awaits, along with black Wither skeletons and fireball-slinging Blazes. Blazes will drop Blaze rods, which are needed for potion making, as well as later on to find an End portal and eventually beat the game, so don't destroy any of the Blaze spawners in the fortress. Blaze rods can be made into Blaze Powder, which when mixed with Ender Pearls form the compass to find the portal. For now, explore and loot chests!

3 Enchant Your Gear

Enchanting Table

At a certain point, you will need to enchant your gear. This can be done with an enchanting table, which is made from four obsidian, two diamonds, and one book. From this table, you can use your own levels and lapis lazuli to put enchantments on tools and armor.

A simple enchanting table will provide basic enchantments, but by placing bookcases around the table, you can 'power' it up. For more information, be sure to check out our guide on enchanting your gear.

2 Experiment With Redstone

Minecraft Redstone Block Powering A Piston

Minecraft may seem like a very simple world; punching trees and punching zombies and punching, well, anything really. But did you know, there's a component called Redstone that acts as a conductor for electricity? No, you won't have to harness the power of lightning strikes. There are thousands of ways to use this material to make your life much easier, and a lot more stylish.

Automatic doors, humongous farms for anything you can think of, traps around your fortress base, or even just bulk smelting the Iron ore you dug up recently. It can get complicated, so feel free to follow some guides and let your imagination run wild.

1 Plan Your Next Steps

A snowy scene in Minecraft using the Realistico resource pack

What you do from here is totally up to you and your imagination. There are dozens of biomes to discover, other dimensions to explore, a variety of mobs to fight, machines to build, and resources to gather, all enabling you to build some really amazing things.

Take a moment to plan your next steps and have fun exploring this wonderful game. Below, you can find some helpful guides to aid you in your journey.

Next: Minecraft Complete Guide And Walkthrough