Your First Day in Minecraft: What to Do

My cousin messaged me late on a Tuesday to ask what she was supposed to be doing, because she'd loaded a survival world, punched a tree for a while, and then stood still in the dark waiting for something to tell her what came next. She'd started playing after watching Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed and xQc all wander into Minecraft within about a month of each other, which seems to have happened to a lot of people this summer. I typed out four paragraphs of advice, deleted them, and sat there realizing I hadn't done an unassisted first day in years, not properly, not without a stash of iron somewhere and a world I already knew my way around. So I rolled a fresh world that evening and played the first day again with nothing, and wrote down what I did in the order I did it.

Everything below is Java Edition, which is what I play. The recipes and the day length are identical on Bedrock, though a few of the mob spawning details differ enough that I'd rather not quote you numbers I haven't sat and tested there myself.

The first few minutes

The first thing that happens is you punch a tree with your bare hands, which takes longer than you expect and looks faintly ridiculous, and after a few seconds a log pops loose and floats toward you. One log becomes four planks in your inventory grid, and four planks become a crafting table, so the useful move is getting three or four logs out of the same tree before you go anywhere else. I spent my first minute wandering between trees taking a single log from each, which is the kind of tidy-minded thing I do without noticing, and it cost me about thirty seconds I turned out to need later. Chop one tree out entirely and then move on to the next one.

Place the crafting table down and you get a three by three grid instead of the little two by two square in your inventory, and that grid is what unlocks nearly everything else in the game. Two planks stacked in a column make four sticks. Three planks along the top row with two sticks beneath the middle one make a wooden pickaxe, and the pickaxe is the whole point of the exercise, because until you have one you can break stone but you can't pick any of it up.

Stone is the gray blocks sitting under the grass, and you'll find it exposed in a cliff face, a cave mouth, or about three blocks down if you dig straight into the side of a hill. Mining it with a wooden pickaxe gives you cobblestone, which is the rough version of it, and cobblestone is what your next and much better set of tools comes from. I mined roughly twenty blocks of it, which felt like far too much while I was standing there doing it, and turned out to be about right.

Make this	From	Why it comes early
Crafting table	4 planks	The 3x3 grid, without which nothing else here exists
Wooden pickaxe	3 planks, 2 sticks	The only way to pick up stone
Stone pickaxe	3 cobblestone, 2 sticks	Mines iron, and lasts far longer than wood
Stone sword	2 cobblestone, 1 stick	Something to swing that isn't your bare hand
Stone axe	3 cobblestone, 2 sticks	Gathering wood stops being a chore
Furnace	8 cobblestone	Cooked meat, and charcoal when you can't find coal

All of that is maybe six or seven minutes of work if you keep moving. Mine took closer to ten, because I stopped to pick poppies on the way past a pond, and the poppies sat in an inventory slot doing nothing for me until I dropped them somewhere near the water.

Before the sun starts dropping

The sun moves quickly once you start paying attention to it, and a full cycle runs twenty minutes of real time, split into about ten minutes of daylight and seven minutes of night with a minute and a half of dusk and dawn on either end. That gives you ten usable minutes from the moment you spawn, which sounds like plenty and is not. I watched the light go orange while I was still counting sheep on the wrong side of a hill, and the walk back was the tensest part of my entire first day.

I killed two cows on my way past that pond without thinking much about it, and by the time the light started going I had eight pieces of beef and no idea how grateful I'd be for them the following morning. Your health only regenerates while the hunger bar is nearly full, so running empty on day two means moving slowly, taking damage you can't heal off, and eventually not being able to sprint at all. Cows, pigs, chickens and sheep are all edible, three or four of whatever you come across first will see you comfortably through the night, and raw chicken is the one to hold onto rather than eat, since it can poison you.

Sheep are the ones worth going out of your way for, and I walked past two flocks before I understood why. Three wool and three planks make a bed, killing a sheep drops a single piece of wool, and the three pieces have to match each other in color, so one white sheep and two brown ones leaves you with nothing to sleep on at all. I found that out the slow way, having taken one of each color out of the same flock like I was collecting a set, and then I counted the whites in the next group along and went back for three of those instead. It put me a couple of hundred blocks from where I'd started, which is a long way from your logs when the light goes.

Coal shows up as black flecks scattered through the gray stone, and it's the most common thing you'll find near the surface, which means cliff faces and cave mouths are usually where you spot your first lot. One coal and one stick make four torches, and you want more torches than you think you need, because anything you leave dark is somewhere a mob can appear. If you can't find coal before the light goes, put a log in the top of the furnace with a few planks underneath it and you'll get charcoal, which makes torches in exactly the same way.

Night one

There are about three ways to survive your first night and I've built all of them at one point or another. The one everybody does first is a dirt box: dig up eight or nine blocks of dirt, stack them into a small cube around yourself, seal the roof over your head, and stand inside until morning. Seven minutes in a brown cube listening to something scrape along the outside is the least enjoyable Minecraft ever is, and I have never once been glad I was in there.

Digging into a hillside is the better shelter, and it's the one I keep coming back to despite not liking it much either. You mine three or four blocks straight into a cliff, turn around, and wall the entrance behind you with the cobblestone you just pulled out, which takes about twenty seconds and costs you nothing you weren't already carrying. What I've never managed is making one feel like anywhere I want to be. Every version I've built has been a gray corridor with a bed at the end of it, and I've tried widening them, cutting a window, putting the torches at ankle height instead of eye height, and they all still feel like a place you're waiting out rather than a place you're staying.

My first night in the new world went wrong in a way I still can't explain. I'd dug into a hill, sealed the entrance behind me, and placed two torches, and about four minutes later there was a zombie in there with me. It might have come up the tunnel I'd started at the back and abandoned, if that tunnel broke into a cave I hadn't noticed, or it might have spawned in the unlit stretch behind me while I was facing the other way. I couldn't tell from where I was standing, and by the time I'd dealt with it all the evidence was a hole in the wall and a scatter of dropped cobblestone. So I don't know which it was, and I've stopped leaving unlit tunnels behind me on the strength of not knowing.

A bed is the finest six items you will ever put together. 🌸 Three wool and three matching planks, placed anywhere with a free block beside it, and using it at night skips the whole seven minutes and sets your respawn point to that exact spot. Before you have one, dying sends you back to wherever the world first dropped you, which after a day of walking can be a genuinely long way from everything you own. After you have one, dying costs you a walk across the room.

You can't sleep while anything hostile is within about eight blocks of you, and the game says so with a message about monsters being nearby, which on a first night usually means something is standing on the other side of your wall. Waiting a few seconds and trying again normally sorts it out, since mobs wander off on their own. If it keeps refusing, something is close enough that putting another layer of blocks between the two of you is faster than going outside to look for it.

The things out there worth knowing about are zombies and skeletons, which both burn up when the sun comes back, spiders, which stop being aggressive once it's light, and creepers, which don't burn and will happily still be there in the morning. Creepers are why people end up walling their houses in later on. On night one the answer is simply not opening yours back up until it's properly light outside.

Morning, and what to do with it

Morning arrives as a sound rather than a sight when you're walled in, so the first thing I do is punch a single block out at head height and look before opening anything properly. Skeletons standing in shade don't burn, and one that's been waiting outside your wall all night will still be waiting at seven in the morning, which I found out by stepping straight into one on a morning I'd assumed was safe.

Set the furnace down somewhere you'll come back to, put the raw meat in the top slot and any spare planks or logs in the bottom one, and by the time you've sorted your inventory out you'll have cooked food that fills a good deal more of the hunger bar. If you end up doing this constantly, a hopper-fed auto smelter saves you standing there feeding a furnace by hand, though it's a second-week project rather than a second-day one.

Dying with a full inventory scatters everything you were carrying across the ground where you fell, and starts a five minute clock before the lot of it disappears for good. I built two chests on my second morning, one beside the bed and one beside the furnace, and eight planks apiece is a very small price for never having to make that run.

Iron is what to go looking for once you're fed and awake, and you need a stone pickaxe to pick it up, which is the reason the stone tools come before any serious digging. It shows up as pale tan flecks in the stone, common enough that you'll turn some up in any cave mouth or ravine within a few minutes of walking. Twenty ore smelts down into a pickaxe, a sword, a shield and a bucket with plenty spare, and the bucket is the one that surprises people, because carrying water around is how you start a farm and how you get down a long drop without dying at the bottom of it. I mined twenty-six on that first trip and spent nine of them before I'd climbed back out.

Feeding yourself past the first few days means either a wheat farm or animals you've penned in, and both are easy enough to begin on day two. Hoeing dirt next to water and planting the seeds you get from breaking tall grass gives you wheat in a few in-game days, and water hydrates farmland up to four blocks away in every direction, so a single row of it covers a surprising amount of ground. Wheat also breeds cows and sheep if you hold it out to them, which is roughly where the semi-automatic farms worth building start to make sense.

The stuff that can wait

Diamonds, the Nether and enchanting all sit a long way past day one, and most of what I read while I was checking my own facts wanted to hurry me toward them. Diamonds are deep, they need an iron pickaxe to mine, and they're worth nothing to you until there's somewhere safe to keep them. The Nether needs a diamond pickaxe before you can even build the portal. Enchanting needs a table, a table needs diamonds and obsidian and a book, and a book needs sugar cane and leather, which puts you back among the farms and the animal pens. Villagers are the shortcut most people find eventually, and a trading hall will hand you better gear than mining ever will, though building one is a proper undertaking.

My cousin's world is going better than mine did, which is mildly annoying, because she found a village on her second morning and moved straight into somebody's house. I'm still living in a gray hillside corridor with a bed at the end of it. There's a window in it now, and a chest of wool in four seperate colors I keep telling myself is for a proper bedroom, and I think the next thing I do is knock out the back wall and find out whether that tunnel goes anywhere after all 🕯️

- Amy