NEVER PLAYED MINECRAFT? START HERE. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED.
Minecraft is a game about surviving in a world made of blocks. You break blocks to gather materials, combine those materials to craft tools and shelter, and stay alive, especially at night, when things come looking for you. This guide takes you from your very first click to surviving your first night and joining us on cryptidcraft.net.
These are for the Java Edition on PC (keyboard + mouse). Learn these five and you can do almost everything:
Walk up to a tree, hold Left-Click on the wood until it pops out, then walk over the dropped item to pick it up. Grab enough for at least 4 wood blocks. Everything in Minecraft starts with wood.
Press E to open your inventory. Put 1 wood block into the small 2×2 crafting grid, and it becomes 4 planks. Fill all 4 squares with planks to make a Crafting Table. Place it on the ground with Right-Click; opening it gives you a bigger 3×3 grid for real recipes.
Make sticks (stack 2 planks vertically). Then, on the crafting table, build a Wooden Pickaxe (3 planks across the top row, 2 sticks down the middle). A pickaxe lets you mine stone. Also craft a Sword and an Axe if you have spare wood.
Use your wooden pickaxe on grey stone to collect cobblestone. Upgrade your tools to stone versions (swap planks for cobblestone in the recipe). Look for black-speckled blocks; that's coal, which you'll need for torches.
Combine 1 coal on top of 1 stick to make torches; these are your light source and keep monsters from spawning. Before the sun sets, wall yourself into a small dirt or stone box (or dig into a hillside) and light it up inside. Congratulations, you survived day one.
The hearts (top-left of the hotbar) are your health; the drumsticks are your hunger. When hunger drops you stop healing, and if it empties you take damage. Kill animals (cows, pigs, chickens) for meat, then cook it in a Furnace (8 cobblestone in a ring) before eating. Hold Right-Click with food to eat it.
It's the classic rookie mistake; you can drop into lava or a deep cave and die. Dig in a staircase pattern instead, and never mine the single block directly under your feet.