Minecraft Survival Guide, Part One: Welcome to Your New World

The horizon isn't a limit; In this game, it's a goal.

Miss the great outdoors? Desperate to “get away from it all?” Slowly losing your mind from boredom? What if I told you there was a game that could give you all the pros and cons of a good old-fashioned camping trip, from the comfort (and safety) of your own home? That game is none other than the smash hit, and ultimate time sink, “Minecraft." Since the game’s been out for a long time, and on the cheap side, I’m sure that a lot of the people reading are already familiar with it. For those that aren’t, this post, and all the ones after it, are meant to serve as a primer for all the basics you’ll need to master in order to play the game.

But what IS Minecraft? Well simply put, what isn’t Minecraft? At its most basic, it’s a game that lets you play around in a world made entirely of 1-cubic-meter blocks. These blocks vary wildly in terms of composition, with certain “biomes” having more of some than others. Desert biomes are mostly sand, the Jungle biome is a lot of trees, dirt, and sheer cliffs with rivers at the bottom, etc. You can gather these blocks through a wide variety of methods; You use them for the game’s core purpose: To build. And you can build,

ANYTHING.

By anything, I mean anything. Want to build a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise? Which one? Want to live in Minas Tirith? You’ll need a lot of marble, but it can be done. AND you can even get the local flavor of “barbarian raiders” to invade it if you feel like. The game has no limits. Well, almost; the ship can’t fly. And sailing ships won’t be able to leave the harbor, either, for that matter. But, you can still build them! Okay, when it comes to BUILDING THINGS, you can do anything. Aside from the game’s abridged version of the laws of physics, your only limits are your imagination, and your patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the Romans had a multitude of “volunteers” to build it for them. All you’ll have is yourself, and any of your friends that you can rope into helping.

On that note, let’s talk about the game’s multiplayer. There are two kinds: Online, and Splitscreen. The first big downside to using splitscreen is that it’s not available on PCs, only consoles. Which actually makes sense if you think about it; Can you imagine trying to share a keyboard? On consoles, though, using splitscreen is pretty easy. All you need is up to 4 controllers. One person sets up the world, then the other three hit start and sign into the game. The caveat there is that each person will need to sign into, and by extension have, an account for whatever console you’re using and be signed into it.

Multiplayer is similarly easy, but each person will need their own copy of the game to use it. And they’ll all need to be on the friends list of the person setting the world up. Said person sends out invites to everyone, and then they just pop up like they do with splitsceen.

Now for a couple more downsides you should know about. First, to my knowledge cross-platform play isn’t possible. X box can only connect to X box, Playstation only to Playstation, etc. Finally, when the people who were invited go to leave the world, they’ll want to store their inventory in a secure chest before they sign out. I know that in splitscreen, they don’t keep their inventory since they’re basically just “guests.” What I don’t know is if that’s always the case, or if that’s the case with online multiplayer. Unfortunately, I can only tell you about what I’ve learned from my own personal experience. So, I advise erring on the side of caution, and testing things out for yourselves with items you’re okay with risking losing.

The next thing to do is to select the version of the game you want to play. My advice for beginners is the 360/PS3/Switch version. It provides you with virtually everything that’s available in the base game, and in my opinion the controls and mechanics are a lot easier to learn than the PS4/Xbox One version. As far as I know, the only downsides to playing the older version is that the newer one has biomes and texture packs that aren’t available on it, and that the graphics are slightly better. But regardless of which version you take up, I advise doing the tutorial to learn the controls. This guide is going to skip that part and just go straight into how to use those controls effectively.

As such: the rest of these posts from here on out will operate on the assumption that you know which button to use when the instructions say to do something; You’ve been warned!

Now, Minecraft comes in two play modes: Creative and Survival. The names are fairly self-explanatory: If all you’re interested in is building something awesome, without being limited by supply, hunger, things trying to kill you, or the laws of physics, then go creative. Let me explain that physics joke: They do apply to the things you build. They just don’t apply to you, if you go into hover mode. Very useful for building large structures on the sides of cliffs, for example. Creative gives you access to every single block in the game, including ones that you can’t mine/harvest in the regular game, and in unlimited supply. This is where your imagination being your sole limit comes in.

Now, if you want to have some fun and aren’t above things that could be considered “cheating,” you are capable of switching a creative-mode game to survival one from the main menu. So, if you wanted to add in some of those unobtainable blocks and use them for your survival game, you can. For example, there’s this thing called a spawner that appears in dungeons. True to the name, it spawns enemies. The way to win the fight against them is to break the spawner before too many spawn in. Unfortunately, there’s no way in regular survival to pack it up and take it with you. Plus the items you use to make it work, the spawn eggs, also aren’t available. So if you set one up and put an egg in it before making the switch, you can make it spawn any living or undead thing you want.

A more mundane use would, of course, be to give yourself a "competitive edge" by adding equipment to your inventory. Although some might consider it giving yourself a fighting chance. Where the line gets drawn is up to you, but I think we can all agree that there's a big difference between starting yourself off with a few things that can be hard to come by early on, like crops or an iron sword, and starting the game off with full diamond armor and a diamond sword. 

No, I can only justifiably condone you using this cheat for good: You might use a spawner to populate a village that you’ve built from scratch, for example. Or you may just want to go on a simple camping and/or fishing trip, and just want to skip the trouble of gathering the materials for a bed, fishing pole, "tent," etc. Which is fair; I mean, it’s not like you’d just march into the woods with nothing but the clothes on your back to go on a camping trip in real life.

As the name would suggest, survival is the more difficult option. What requires only a few hits of a button in creative can require hours of work in this mode. But the main reason why I prefer it is because of the added challenge. When you build a castle covering hundreds of square meters, I promise you'll love the sheer sense of pride that comes from knowing you did every step of building it yourself: You’ll have personally mined every square of cobblestone in its foundation, gathered all the wood needed for its doors and furniture, prepared the dyed wool and sticks for its ornate rugs and tapestries, braved the depths of hell itself to mine the quartz required for its marble floors, and even mundane things like growing the crops required to make sure you don’t starve to death while building it.  

Oh, I’m serious about that hell thing, by the way. Getting to the point where you can make a portal to the realm known as “The Nether” is practically a goal in and of itself, and as far as I know it’s the only place you can mine quartz. It’s about as pleasant as a realm modeled after the traditional fire-and-brimstone hell can be; You can literally walk right onto a burning magma block as soon as you step out of the portal, depending on where in the Nether the other end of said portal spawns in. And all but one of the mobs that spawn there actively want to kill you with a fervor typically seen in extremely hungry wolves. But as with all things in life, the harder something is, the more worthwhile the rewards tend to be. And the quartz is not nearly the best thing you can find there, if you survive.

Well, if you’ve read this far then hopefully I’ve sold you on it. If not, then it might be because I've left out one of the best parts (mostly) unique to this game: The worlds you make have no end. You know how in most games, there's either obstacles or an invisible wall in your way to keep you from going past a certain point? Yeah, there aren't any here. Okay, if you go millions of miles away from where you first spawn in, then the algorithms that make the environment generate in a way that makes sense will start to break down. Millions, though. Also I could be wrong but I think that only happens on the PS3/360 edition. Whether or not seeing that trippy landmass is a bad thing is up to you. 

The only other issue is that, the farther you go, and the more environment gets added to the world, the more space it'll take up in your console or PC's storage space. Beyond that, you can honestly just pick a direction, and keep on walking for pretty much ever. If you're interested, the game is only about $10, so it shouldn't be too much trouble to pick up. 

Part Two will cover all the basics you’ll need to get started on a survival playthrough. Posts that follow will be about more specific things, like a guide to surviving in each of the “main” biomes, building fortifications, making good furniture, how to not “Delve too deep” (and how to survive if you do), and, of course, The End.