minecraft
A cobblestone house with a dirt pillar for visibility

A cobblestone house with a dirt pillar for visibility

This guide is intended for those who have read the beginner's guide first, and survived their first day and night.

A brief picture of a second-day house is shown on the right.

Introduction

If you read the beginner's guide and followed it, you should have at least a crude shelter, stone tools, and some cooked meat and other food. This second-day tutorial builds upon that to guide you in setting up a better base.

When you venture outside after surviving your first night, be on the lookout for hostile mobs from the previous night. Hunting for them happens after you get weapons, some armor, and proper food supply.

As you move around:

Reviewing hunger and food

Main article: Food
Main article: Hunger § Mechanics

The "First Day" guide briefly discussed hunger, but by your second day this hunger becomes more urgent, requiring you to obtain food.

Besides the visible hunger bar, you also have an invisible hunger bar, called "saturation". When the game starts, the hunger bar is full, but you have only 5 saturation points. Like your health bar and hunger bar, this maxes out at 20 points (each "shank" of the visible bar represents two points), although it is never higher than your hunger level. Whenever you do something that would make you hungry, the saturation gets used up first, which provides extra time before you get hungry again. Most foods provide saturation as well as filling the visible bar, and the "better" foods provide more saturation per hunger point restored. The general rule is that, apart from the golden foods, cooked beef and cooked porkchops are the best, followed by other cooked meats (or fish), bread, and vegetables. Cooked foods are always better than their uncooked counterparts.

The biggest drain on hunger is healing damage, but for quite some time (until you get golden apples and potions), this is the only way to heal damage! In Java Edition you heal faster when your hunger bar is full and have some extra saturation, and if your hunger bar is below 18 (🍗 × 9), you cannot heal at all. Each point of damage healed costs the equivalent of 1.5 (🍗) hunger, or 3⁄4 of a shank.

A few other activities also cause hunger, though at a slower rate:

Note that if you are staying at full health, and not fighting, sprinting and/or jumping, or mining blocks, then you use almost no food. Thus, if your character has a secure place to stay, you can just stay put to conserve food while waiting out the night, a storm, or crop/animal growth. Walking around at normal speed uses no hunger. So if you are injured and/or hungry, it's best to wait out the night quietly in your home (perhaps doing some crafting or smelting) until daylight, when it is safe to go out and find some food. Sleeping works too unless you're actually starving, in which case you can't sleep at all since you'll be taking damage.

If your hunger bar is completely empty, you begin to starve, and take damage until you are down to half health in easy difficulty, or a single hit point in normal difficulty. You shouldn't be on hard difficulty for this first game, but if you are, you can actually starve to death. Well before this point (under 3.5 shanks or 7 hunger), you can no longer sprint.

Therefore, if you are low on health or critically low on food, getting food is a priority:

Writing your to-do list

For the second day, your main objective is to get the lay of the land, locate resources, and plan out further construction. Look for at least the following things. Don't worry if you can't find all of them, right now you're just spotting the resources that are near your home:

Crops

Animals

In order of priority, note the locations of these animals (see their respective pages for full details). If you have plenty of wood and/or stone, you can even throw up some corrals ahead of time for "whatever you bring back first".

Resources and mining

The foundation of everything is mining (though farming is pretty important too). By now, you should have mined at least enough stone to make your basic stone tools, and you hopefully have some wood left over. You need more of both materials: Wood for various utility items, stone for more durable construction. Over the next few days, you'll be mining a variety of ores as well, but for now, concentrate on the basic materials:

Basic Materials

Dirt

As you explore your world, you are likely to pick up some dirt blocks. These are not good for building structures, but they are quick to place and remove, so you can use them for temporary staircases, pillars, and such. More importantly, you can use them to modify the landscape, making it easier to get around near your home. If you've had a creeper explode nearby, you can also use your collected dirt to fill in the hole (immediately after the explosion, there may be dirt and perhaps stone items left in the crater. Pick those up, but don't expect to get enough to fill in the crater). Note that mining grass blocks (that is, full blocks with a green top, not "tall grass" plants) drop dirt — don't worry about the difference for now. If you place the dirt next to grass blocks, the grass eventually spreads to the dirt, cleaning up the "scars" of your work.

Sand and gravel

Sand and gravel have special uses: Sand is used for making glass, which is useful for windows and even transparent walls. However, note that glass is fragile — a creeper blast destroys any glass in the blast range. Glass also cannot be recovered once placed (without the appropriate enchanted tools); if mined or blown up, it does not drop anything. Gravel is used to produce flint, which is a key material needed to craft arrows. As a bonus, these can be crafted together with dye to form concrete powder, so any cactus or flowers you've picked up may come in handy.

Both sand and gravel, unlike most blocks, are affected by gravity: If either block is placed without something directly beneath it, or if whatever's beneath it goes away for any reason, it falls to the ground below. If it falls on you such that your head is buried, you take suffocation damage until you get free or mine your way out. They can also suffocate mobs, which can be useful for traps.

You may see shelves of "floating" sand or gravel, which the game generated without support (that is, a player couldn't have placed them like that). Be careful around these, as they are natural traps: Mining them or placing any block next to them sets off a chain reaction that can bring down the whole shelf. Sand shelves appear in deserts, while gravel shelves (or ceilings) can appear underground. When seen from underneath, sand and gravel shelves drop "falling dust" particles. Always be careful not to mine or place any blocks touching them.

Beneath sand, you often find sandstone. You can build with this and craft it into various forms, but remember that it is much more fragile than "real" stone.

Wood and logs

You can build with wood, and converting the logs to planks quadruples the number of blocks you have to work with. However, wood has two liabilities: First, it is flammable, and lava or lightning can start a fire that can destroy much of your house. Secondly, it has low blast resistance, so if a creeper explodes near a wooden house, it can demolish a good deal of work and perhaps damage the inside of the house as well.

Wood is plentiful in forests. If trees are scarce around you, you may want to plant some replacement trees: You may have noticed when you chopped down trees, that as the leaves decay, some of them drop saplings, which you hopefully picked up. You can plant them on any dirt or grass block where there's room for the tree to grow. Once you plant them, don't hang around waiting, just go do other things and come back later when the trees have grown (it can take up to a day or more). Once you have spare torches, you can put one of those a couple or few blocks away from your saplings, as this helps them continue growing overnight.

Stone

As you've seen, mining gray ("plain") stone, drops a mottled block called cobblestone. This differs from stone only in appearance and what you can craft with it. Stone is so plentiful, that you may find yourself making chests just to store your accumulated cobblestone. However, don't throw it away, as stone is a key building material. Stone is not flammable, and has high blast resistance: If a creeper explodes right next to your stone wall, it may break a few blocks, but not much more than that. For your early houses, you should be making most of the walls out of stone.

Once you have coal/charcoal to spare, you might want to use your furnace to smelt some cobblestone back into gray stone. With this, you can fill holes in underground caves without leaving unsightly patches of cobblestone. You can also make various decorative blocks such as stone bricks, which lets you build more attractive houses and other structures. Any variation of stone bricks are just as strong as gray stone or cobblestone.

You may also find pockets of other "rocks": granite, andesite, and diorite. These are fine building blocks and are as strong as gray stone, but are less flexible: They can also be crafted into various more decorative blocks, but can't always substitute for gray stone in recipes.

Coal ore

This is a major resource, with two main uses: it is used to make torches, (your major source of light), and to smelt or cook items in your furnace. Smelting items not only let you cook your meat for better nutrition, but is also necessary for making use of iron (see below). A stack (64 lumps) of coal is a fairly large amount for the beginning, but over time you need a lot of it. Fortunately, it is common: It is found everywhere underground, and even some on the surface. Coal is the only ore you can mine with a wooden pickaxe. Coal is not strictly necessary since you can make charcoal from wood, but it is common, and you have plenty of other things to do with wood. Also, five types of villagers offer emeralds in trade for coal, but they don't accept charcoal.

Iron ore

Iron is probably the most important and versatile resource you can find underground, and it seems there is never enough of it. You can use it to craft good quality tools, armor, and a variety of other things. For your second day (or whenever you venture underground), your initial goal is to get at least 33 pieces of iron ore (see below for what to craft with that), and more iron is always needed and useful. Once you have some of the ore, use a furnace to smelt it into iron ingots, that you can then craft into other items. Remember that to mine the ore, a stone pickaxe is required.

Cave exploration

Main article: Tutorials/Exploring_caverns

Cave exploration is pretty straightforward: you light up your way with torches, mine up ores as you see them (check ores and minerals) and kill enemies as you encounter them (see "Tutorials/Combat" for details). There are also some important techniques that might not be obvious to a new player, such as using waterfalls to descend into shafts, and/or swim back up from them. There are also many options for marking your trail and not getting lost. Also, note that sneaking (on PCs, the ⇧ Left Shift key by default) prevents you from falling over the edge of a block, which is useful if you are caving near a long drop, especially a drop into lava. Sometimes such caves end immediately, but often they continue into big cave systems. If they seem to end right away sometimes there is often a continuation about 2-8 blocks farther back and below the cave's end; mining in these directions (8 blocks back and down, exploring somewhat to the sides) may reveal a continuation. Digging away gravel or dirt can also expose cave extensions, but you may go through a few shovels that way. When exploring caves and mining underground, make sure to thoroughly light up the caves and tunnels as you go. If you don't do this, monsters can spawn in the darkness, even in places where you've already been through (meaning, they can come up behind you, or block your exit!).

If there are few nearby caves, or they seem too dangerous, you can explore more advanced mining techniques. Remember, if mining, never ever dig a single-block shaft straight down -- you are likely to fall into a deep monster-infested cave, if not into lava! You can, however, dig a mineshaft in a pattern, such that you always have a safe block to stand on as you mine a different block. Such patterns can range from a simple 2x1 pattern (standing in the middle so one of the blocks always supports you), to a 2x2 or larger staircase into the depths. A simple diagonal staircase works too. Just keep a careful eye out in case you break through into the top of a cave or lava pool. If you do dig a vertical mineshaft, bring a lot of ladders to get back up!

As you explore caves. you may run into dungeons or mineshafts. Don't get near these until you have at least full iron armor, sword, plus bow and arrows. Once you are properly equipped, these present a challenge, but also contain treasure chests with rare and valuable items.

Other ores and minerals

You're unlikely to find these on your second day, but it's worth knowing a little about the more advanced ores. Gold, lapis lazuli, copper, and redstone are more specialized ores, found only in deeper parts of the caves. Diamond is the top-tier crafting material found in the Overworld, while emerald is used to trade with villagers. Lapis and copper can be mined with a stone pickaxe, but the remaining ores all need an iron pickaxe. Some key uses:

Crafting

Repairing tools

Main article: Item Repair

To fix a tool, put two damaged tools of the same type and material in a grindstone or your crafting grid. This combines the two old items into a new item that is either unused, or has slightly more remaining uses than both the old items together. This applies to any tool that has durability, including swords and bows. Later you'll have enchanted tools and/or weapons, but don't use this method for those, you'll need an anvil to preserve the enchantments.

Iron equipment

Iron is one of the most important resources in Minecraft. Your first half-stack or so provides enough equipment to take on the world, but you need ongoing supplies to replace worn-out equipment. Get used to collecting, smelting, and stockpiling it, because you need to replace equipment, and the more you advance in the game, the more uses you'll have for iron.

Optimal iron usage depends on the local environment, but the first things you should make have this approximate order:

Beds again

If you haven't already made a bed, you should get some wool to make one! This lets you set your spawn point someplace safe (and stocked with spare equipment), and also lets you skip past dangerous nights and storms. If you have can craft shears (for just two iron ingots), you don't need to kill sheep, and you might get the wool you need from a single sheep.

Once you get a compass, use it to locate the world spawn point, and build a shelter there (assuming your home isn't already in sight). Once you've done that, you can carry a spare bed with you as you explore, and skip nights and storms by sleeping in it and breaking it in the morning to carry along. This leaves you without a spawn point, but if you do die, you still have a shelter nearby when you respawn. Stock the shelter with spare equipment, and place a bed too, in case you respawn at night or during a storm. Then you can just go to sleep and fetch your items by daylight, if your items are less than 5 minutes away (they despawn after 5 minutes).

If your bed is "missing or obstructed" when you actually try to respawn, you'll lose your spawn point and go back to the default respawning behavior (random within 20 blocks of the world spawn point). This continues until you actually sleep in a bed again. If there is no place to stand (solid block, not glass, fences, slabs, etc.) when you try to respawn, your bed is considered "obstructed".

When trying to sleep, make sure it's either night-time or storming (not just rain), and there are no monsters around you. If there is a problem, you should get a status message explaining what's wrong. You can't sleep if you are currently starving, poisoned or on fire. If trying to sleep at sundown, you may need to wait a few seconds for night to officially begin, and try again.

Slabs and stairs

You can craft most kinds of stone, or any wooden planks, into slabs, stairs or ladders. Slabs are half-height blocks that can be placed in either the top or bottom half of a block space. A floor made of "bottom" slabs can help prevent monster spawns, as mobs can't spawn on bottom slabs, and individual bottom slabs can be used as an easy step up to the next level of blocks. A ceiling made of top slabs can give you a little extra headroom, and double as the floor for a level above.

Stairs, naturally, can let you move up and down an incline without jumping, which is much more convenient, and for an often used path, it can save a lot of food.

Monsters

As you build up your equipment, you'll be able to fight the basic monsters more easily, and start to take on the more dangerous ones as well. A quick (and incomplete) list of the usual Overworld monsters:

Next Day

There's a tutorial of sorts for The third day, but at this point, you've progressed past the beginning of your game and can choose what to do next. Some ideas:

Tutorial videos

Tutorials
Introductory
Newcomer survival
Shelters
General
Challenges
Non-standard
survival
Challenge maps
Constructions
Farming
Blocks and items
Mobs
OP farms
Enchanting
and smelting
Blockbreaking
Mechanisms
Basic redstone
Detectors
Minecarts
Traps
Pistons
Advanced
redstone
Servers
Server setup
Technical
Maps
Resource packs
Data packs
Creating
Minecraft media
Game installation
Outdated