Minecraft Survival Mode: 7 Crucial Steps for Beginners

Minecraft is one of the top grossing video games of all time. I have played for about ten years now. Building in creative mode is always fun, but playing in survival mode can be intimidating. You start with nothing and are dependent upon yourself to survive. In this tutorial, you will learn how to start the game with the skills and resources to survive, along with pictures I took in Minecraft Pocket Edition.

Step 1: Generate the world.

Once you pick your settings and choose survival, the world will generate. You will take into consideration what is around you: trees, water sources, caves, and animals. You're first goal is to gather wood.

Step 2: Make a crafting table.

You will take the wood you've gathered and convert it into wood planks and then with four of those make a crafting table. The crafting table is used to make other tools and blocks with the items that you gather.

Step 3: Mine cobblestone and coal blocks.

With a wood pickaxe that you make with the crafting table, you can mine ores like coal and iron. Cobblestone can be used to make stronger tools to mine more efficiently. The coal can be used for cooking food and making torches, which are important to have at night.

Step 4: Gather food.

As you'll notice, running around the map reduces your hunger bar in the top right corner of the screen, so you'll need to eat. Finding animals like pigs, sheep, chickens, and cows are the easiest way to obtain food. You can also get food by planting crops, and crafting recipes, but to start, it's easiest to kill animals first. Be aware: uncooked meat can make you sick.

Step 5: Find shelter.

After some time mining and gathering wood, you'll notice that the first day of the new world is ending; the sun starts to set and it gets darker. Monsters spawn in the nighttime so you need to find somewhere safe. You can build a house, retreat to a cave, or find a village where you can get inside.

Step 6: Make a bed and furnace.

Three things you will need inside of your house is your crafting table, a furnace, and a bed. The furnace is crafted using your crafting table and nine cobblestone blocks. For the bed you need three wool and three wooden planks. During your scavenge for food, sheep will drop wool when killed or sheered. Make sure to sleep every night to set your spawn point in case you die and to skip to morning so that no monsters will spawn.

Step 7: Explore the world.

Remember: this map is infinite so don't limit yourself to one base. There are different biomes like jungle, desert, mesa, swamplands, and rainforest, each with their own unique animals and blocks that can be mined and crafted.

On average it takes about 60 hours for a player to beat the game, so these are just guidelines on what to do in the first hour alone. As you progress beyond these steps, there are thousands of different objectives you can accomplish. But for any beginner, these are the steps that you should always use when starting a new world.