This is chapter 2 of the Minecraft Basics Guide.
After Generating you first Minecraft World you will immediately find yourself in a random location of your new world. You will always be on the surface, so you won’t spawn underwater or underground.
This place will be your default Spawn Point from now on. This means that if you die and you don’t have another Spawn Point, you will start here again without items and without experience levels (we’ll see on the next article of this guide how to set a new Spawn Point).
The world will not reset though: if you built something you will be able to find it again where you built it, you will just need to travel there. But remember that if you’re playing on Hardcore mode you won’t respawn at all.
That being said, assuming that you’re playing on Survival or Hardcore mode, your mission will be to survive your first night. When the night comes, hostile mobs show up and try to kill you, so you will have to be ready.
Before seeing how to survive the first night, we will first see how to craft your first Iron tools, which will be needed soon. Let’s start.
Gathering materials
To craft these first tools we will need few crafting ingredients: Wooden Planks, Cobblestone and Iron Ingots. We will see how to gather these materials while we see how to craf the tools.
Crafting Table
This had to be the first one. The Crafting Table is the foundation of Minecraft crafting system and you won’t go anywhere without it. To craft it you will need 4 Wooden Planks.
To get Wooden Planks you will need to find a tree.
Get close to the tree and left-click on its trunk. Your character will start hitting the wooden trunk, which will start to break.
After a few seconds the block that you were hitting will break and it will drop.
Now if you walk on it, the dropped block will be added to your inventory. This block is not Wooden Plank, but regular Wood.
To turn it into Wooden Planks, open your inventory by pressing E:
Then place the Wood blocks in your basic crafting area. To move items in your inventory and placing them in other slots, like the crafting area, just left-click on them and then left-click on where you want to them them to.
Each Wood block will turn into 4 Wooden Planks.
Now put 4 Wooden Planks in you crafting area to craft a Crafting Table.
Once you have a Crafting Table, place it where you want by right-clicking while holding it in your hand.
Then to use it, just right-click on it.
Wooden Pickaxe
We will need the Wooden Pickaxe to gather Cobblestone. In fact, to gather Cobblestone you will need to break a Stone block and if you break a Stone block (by left-clicking on it, just like with wood), this will not drop unless you break it while using a Pickaxe.
To craft a Wooden Pickaxe you will need 2 Sticks. You can obtain them by putting 2 Wooden Planks in the crafting area (or Crafting Table) like this:
Then put 2 Sticks and 3 Wooden Planks in the Crafting Table to get a Wooden Pickaxe.
Now you can use this to break Stone blocks for collecting them.
To gather Cobblestone you will need to break a Stone block. You can easily find these gray blocks anywhere. Most of the times you will just need to take a look around you to find some, maybe on the side of a mountain or hills.
If you can’t find any stone around you, don’t worry. There is always stone underground: if you start digging, eventually you will find Stone instead of Dirt.
Keep in mind that, usually, players say digging when talkging about breaking blocks that break more easily if broken by using a Shovel, like Dirt or Gravel.
When instead they talk about breaking blocks that break more easily if broken by using a Pickaxe, they say mining. These blocks can be Stone, Iron Ore or Coal Ore for example.
Continues in First crafting part 2 – Furnace and Iron tools
