How to Be an Expert Minecraft Player - Getting Started

Are you a new, average, or experienced Minecraft player? If so, this article is for you. In this article you will learn how to survive, thrive, and live Minecraft up to its potential.

1. You have spawned. Look around at your world. If there are cacti, trees, snow, water, clay and coal, you're off to a great start.

2. Start punching the first tree you see. This may sound strange, but it is one of the only things you can do at the moment. You will need wood for the rest of the game to make pickaxes to mine later on. You can make loads of items with them!

3. After you have gotten 5-10 pieces of wood, open up your inventory with 'E' (some people set it as 'I', but E is strongly recommended). You should now proceed to drag the logs into the 'Crafting' section of your inventory. On the output side, you should have wood planks. Collect them.

4. Once you have at least 4 wooden planks, put one wooden plank in each box in the Crafting section of your inventory. This will make a crafting table. You can use it to make many things in the Minecraft game, including chests, beds, furnaces, weapons, and more important stuff like that!

5. You can now make sticks. Put one wooden plank on the bottom, and one on the top. You should see four sticks in the output. Collect them to make torches and handles of weapons.

6. You now need to make wooden tools. You should look in the sources for the Minecraft Wiki. Look up Wooden Pickaxe, Wooden Axe, Wooden Sword, and Wooden Shovel on the wiki.

7. Look for a mountain, or if it is almost nighttime, look for a small hill. Take your shovel and dig through the dirt, then take your pickaxe to carve a small room out of the stone.

8. You can now use the stone you mined to make stone tools, which are much more efficient and more durable. Again, use the wiki to learn how to make them.

9. Expand your house a little bit and make a mine. Do NOT dig straight down! Use a stair-like fashion where you can climb up and down the ledges. Mine until you find coal! If you find coal within 4 minutes, skip to step 11. Also, if you find a cave, remember where it is, but avoid it, they are far too dangerous for you to explore at the moment.

10. Found coal? If so, skip to step 11.....You did not find any coal. It's okay, just go to the surface and find some logs. Make a furnace (use the wiki) and put it down. Put your logs in the top part of the furnace, and some wooden planks in the bottom. The outcome will be charcoal, a carbon copy of coal (no pun intended).

11. Take a stick and a piece of coal/charcoal and open your inventory. Put the stick in one of the bottom squares of the crafting table, and the coal/charcoal above it. The output should be 4 torches.

12. Go inside your cave house and place the 4 torches down on either the walls or the floor. If you need more light, repeat step 11 until you have reached your desired amount.

13. By now it should be night-time. It is essential that you make a door (look on the wiki) Make your doorway 1x2 so the door fits perfectly. You will probably start off with wooden doors. When you get slightly advanced later in the game, replace with iron doors for better security

14. Wait out the night inside away from the door. In this time you should make a chest (look on the wiki, last time it will be said).

15. In the morning, get your sword. This is probably the most dangerous time that you have experienced in Minecraft so far, so be prepared. Don't bring anything except your sword and be alert for monsters.

16. Kill. Now is your time to be relaxed and have fun. Kill everything that moves except yourself, and get great rewards by doing so.

17. Find wool and food. You may have to kill animals, but if you're too kind, find some apples from trees or harvest some wheat with a hoe and seeds. Mine with your pickaxe to find some iron and coal, and you will make shears to shear the sheep, not killing them. You need 3 wool. The easy way out is to kill sheep, but if you keep them alive you can continue shearing them and eventually breed them.

18. At home, make a bed with the wool you harvested. Put it somewhere in your house that looks good; it is recommended you expand your house! With a bed, you can save your spawn point, so if you die, you will respawn in your house. Continue to kill until the sun sets.

19. When the sun sets, grab your pick, shovel, and bolt again, for the monsters are coming out. Go into your mine and continue mining, since iron ore will be very valuable to you. Look for iron, coal and rare ores for about 7 minutes, because that is when the sun will start to rise.

20. Didn't find iron? If that is the case, then keep looking. Now that you have iron, go to your furnace. Put some coal on the bottom (wood will also work, but not very well), and put your iron ore on the top. Your outcome will be iron ingots! With iron ingots, you can make tools! Remember, your tool priority goes Pickaxe, Axe, Sword, Shovel, then Hoe (hoe is not needed at all for a while).

21. Kill more! At sunrise, kill all mobs again, since you will need all of the drops. See all of the crafting recipes you can make with these drops at the Minecraft Wiki.

22. Congratulations, you have finished the "Newbie" section of the guide!