MINECRAFT 101: Everything a Beginner needs to know
Welcome fellow Minecrafters and beginners.
Before you continue reading, i’ll tell you why should you read this post.
1. Cuz I am fairly experienced and can actually tell you everything you need to know about the game.
2. I have hosted servers and played on multiplayer a lot and even used Dropbox for syncing data across players, so this means I know what i’ll be talking about.
3. Cuz this is a ‘no-bullshit’ blog.
Again before you continue, I must say, I wont talk about any issues related to Cracked Minecraft applications you might have downloaded via torrent sites. I’ll jump to what happens after you start the game.
You can download the game from Minecrafts official website if you want to buy it.
And If you want to learn everything in bulk, that requires too much to go through all the articles, visit MinecraftWiki.
I suggest you to play the Creative Mode game to understand how most Blocks work, how the NPC Villages and its people work , how the Minecraft Weather System works. Later you may try a Survival mode game to learn about crafting things. Since you won’t know what you can actually craft, you can see a Crafting Guide.
The GameModes
1. Survival
2. Creative
3. Hardcore
4. Adventure (Multiplayer Only as far as I know).
1. SURVIVAL MODE
Basically, in this mode, you gather resources – kill animals for food and wool, dig for coal, iron, and other rare resources, chop trees for wood, craft stuff to build better things, and more complex mechanisms and try not to die. You can use tools for acquiring resources, or simply bare hands, but that’ll take a longer time.
2. CREATIVE MODE
Infinite Resources, Infinite Health! Only way to die here is to fall in the VOID or use the ‘/kill’ command. (Did I tell you that there are ‘THREE Dimensions” in Minecraft?) You can use this mode to create pixel art masterpieces! You can find a humongous amount of these on the internet.
3. HARDCORE MODE
For players who know what they are dealing with, and for players who have killed an EnderDragon in single player without cheats. This is hardcore in the literal sense. You will notice that the hearts in the Life Bar look different. If you die, the game data, that is, the world will be deleted. You have only one shot and surviving this mode.
4. ADVENTURE MODE
This is Ultimate shit. Only for multiplayer. You need specific tools for specific tasks! You can’t collect all resources with your hands unlike the other modes. Recommended only for the elite of elites! You need a village to spend the night to survive and… there’s a lot of deal here, I recommend you to read the NPC Villages Wiki and Adventure Mode for this. Its looks the same as Survival, except for the difference already mentioned.
DIMENSIONS IN MINECRAFT
There are 3 dimensions in Minecraft.
1. Overworld
This is the usual Earth, the place where you spawn, where you collect resources and live in biomes.
2. Nether
This is hell, literally, hell in minecraft! Here you find Zombie Pigmen, Oozing Lava and The Void on two sides of the dimension! You enter the Nether by making a Nether Portal. You can make a nether portal by creating an Obsidian Block Frame with a 3×2 blank on the inside and lighting up the inside on fire. Here is a YouTube Tutorial on making a Nether Portal. My recommendation, get decent Iron or Diamond Armor and Weapons and if needed, Tools of Iron or Diamond. P.S: Lava flows like water here. And Nether creatures aren’t harmed by lava.
3. End
This is… well… another dimension. It has endermen and one enderdragon that looks amazingly cool and is incredibly hard to beat on survival! You can reach the end by finding an end portal in a stronghold, which are increadibly hard to find, but could be found in the overworld. Even then you’ll need 12 Eyes of Ender to activate the portal which you can craft in this way.
BIOMES IN MINECRAFT
Minecraft features a large range of biomes. Now on the MinecraftWiki website, there is nothing much that should be very complicated to you. So i’ll share a direct link to the Biomes Page.
However, here is a list of the biomes and the things found in them…
1. Forest: Oak and Birch Trees, Flowers,Wolves,Mushrooms
2. Desert: Sand, Cacti, Dead Bushes,Sandstone, Sugar Cane, Desert wells,Desert Temple,NPC Villages
3. Plains: Tall Grass, Grass,Flowers, NPC Villages, Horses
4. Swampland: Witch Huts, Oak Trees, Grass,Vines, Lily Pads,Clay, Mushrooms,Slimes
5. Jungle: Jungle Trees,Jungle Temples,Ferns, Flowers,Vines, Ocelots,Cocoa Pods,Chickens
6. Ice Plains (Tundra): Snow, Snowfall,Oak Trees, Ice
7. Taiga: Snow, Snowfall,Ice, Spruce Trees,Flowers, Wolves
8. Extreme Hills: Oak Trees,Flowers, Emerald Ore, Monster Egg
9. Ocean: Water, Sand, Clay,Dirt, Squid
10. Mushroom Island: Mushrooms, Huge Mushrooms,Mycelium,Mooshrooms
11. Hell (The Nether): Magma Cubes,Netherrack,Glowstone, Soul Sand, Nether Brick,Gravel, Quartz,Ghasts, Blazes,Zombie Pigmen,Nether Fortress,Wither Skeletons
12. Sky (The End): End Stone,Endermen,Obsidian, Ender Crystals, Ender Dragon
KEYBOARD CONTROLS
Survival/Hardcore/Adventure/Creative Mode Controls
W – Front
A – Left
S – Back
D – Right
E – Use Inventory
Q – Throw Equipped Item
T – Chat/Talk
TAB – See online players on multiplayer games.
SPACE – Jump/Float
SHIFT – Crouch
Left Click – Attack/Dig(when pressed and held)
Right Click – Use Held/Pointed Item/Attack with bow(hold to use with more power)
1-9 – Equip Item in hand on boxes 1-9
Mouse Scroll Wheel – Scroll Through Items 1-9
W(double tap and hold) – Sprint (Doesn’t work if food bar is at 3 units of lower)
W(double tap and hold) + Space – Long Jump
F1 – Toggle UI
F2 – Take a Screenshot (saved at C:/Users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/.minecraft/Screenshots/)
F3 – Toggle Location and Memory details.
F4 – I don’t know. Nothing much happened when I pressed it!
F5 – Toggle Camera between First Person, Third Person and Face Viewing angle.
F6 – I don’t know what this does as well!
F7 – Nada! Not here too.
F8 – Same here Johnny! No clue.
F9 – Get Sherlock here! We still don’t know what this does!
F10 – Houston, we don’t have a clue.
F11 – FULLSCREEN! Minecraft is destined to be played fullscreen!
F12 – No clues again…
Creative Mode Only Controls
Space(Double Tap and Hold) – Fly Up/Stop Flying
Shift – Fly Down
MINECRAFT TIPS AND TRICKS!
Fighting Tips:
1. You know how to sprint, when you want to attack something at a distance, don’t simply walk to it. You can inflict much more damage, in some cases, achieve a 1-hit kill if you sprint-attack at it. How to do it? Simple, Sprint directly towards it and attack with perfect timing, improper timing will result in you overshooting through the target or you being hit, right timing will inflict more damage and knockback, which means if you have enough of the food bar left, you can again sprint and attack if it’s not dead already.
2. When you go to a fight, always take 2 swords, since I am assuming you’re a beginner, you dont have enough Iron by now. Even if you do, always have a backup sword. You never know how many enemies you come across.
3. See an Enderman? You can do these things, If you’re alone, and it’s attacking you, either run to somewhere with plently of light, place torches as fast as you can all around you on the ground and keep sword ready, and if you really have to fight it, aim for the legs. You can piss off an enderman by looking at it with your crosshair on it. But for some reason, they scare me even in creative mode.
4. Try to use enchanted swords whenever you can. And when fighting in a team, fight back to back when surrounded. If you try to fight together, you might end up hitting each other.
5. Armor Up before a battle, if you are dead sure you’re gonna die, you should’nt be going. If you think you have a chance, armor up the best you can! Look at my damn armor!
6. This one seems important for the many of you. I see that most beginners take damage while trying to kill a creeper. There is a technique to kill it without taking damage due to explosion. Also, killing it without an explosion would drop a piece of gunpowder which with other ingredients can be used to make TNT. Here’s how to kill it.
>When you spot one/multiple creeper, focus on one while trying to stay away from others, DO NOT APPROACH them if your food bar is less than 6 cuz you’ll need to sprint in the process.
>Sprint towards the one you focused on and attack it, and immediately run backwards while facing it, carefully paying attention that there is no creeper behind you or near you and you are sufficiently away from it. Reason? When you are close to a creeper, it’ll try to explode as close to you as it can to inflict maximum damage, before exploding it’ll give you about 1-1.5 seconds and it makes a hiss-ing noise in that time, multiple failures in this will help you time your “sprint-attack” perfectly, after that, you’ll be almost always succesful, and always wear an armor before facing them, else if they explode, you’ll die in one attempt.
>When you see it stopped “hissing”, sprint forward again, notice the presence of any other present creepers and sprint at it tactically so that you can attack it, yet maintain distance from the other ones. After a couple of attempts, you’ll do it just fine.
Building tips:
1. Never build a building too big. And even if you do, place too many torches across it. Torches help to avoid monsters. Also, if you don’t place torches well enough, monsters will spawn INSIDE your massive building, and if creepers spawn, be ready for trouble. See our building!
2. Build trap and killing mechanisms around your house. Like the one i’ve built. These will help you to save yourselves. The one i’ve built needs redstone to work. Read about redstone here. See, the castle is surrounded by double layer of fences!
3. Don’t stop your imagination, most real world logic doesn’t apply to minecraft, you are free you blow your minds out! P.S.- Sand and Gravel unlike every other block(except Lava and Water blocks) don’t stick in mid air.
COMING UP NEXT!
1. More Tips and Tricks.
2. Additional Minecraft get-arounds!