It’s impossible to cover all aspects of Minecraft in one guide. But if you’re jumping into the world of blocks for the first time (or again after a long time), we’ve put together five tips for beginners that will at least explain the basics of the game to you.

Your first workbench
In Minecraft, you start with nothing. You have no weapons, no equipment, no tools. But you have your fists, so let’s use them first. What would only give you bloody knuckles in real life gives you wood in Minecraft – chop down the nearest forest. You need the raw material for your first crafting attempts.

Wooden boards are now made from wood. If you have collected some wood, you can already build a workbench. Open your inventory with the “E” key and place your wood in the crafting square.

If you now combine four wooden boards, you already have your workbench. Drag it to the quick bar and place it in the world with a right-click. Right-click again to open the workbench.

Now you have an excellent workbench – the first gateway to the crafting world of Minecraft. If you open the workbench, you will see items on the left that you can potentially craft here. Items you do not have enough materials for are marked with a red frame.

Your first tools
For your first tools, you need sticks. You get this when you combine two wooden boards as follows:

To produce wooden tools from it, you have to combine sticks and wooden boards. You can get the different templates for the tools by selecting them in the workbench menu on the left. Alternatively, you can look at our pictures and recreate them:

If you want to progress further, you have to upgrade your tools. But even with stone, iron, or diamond, you apply the same patterns, but then you replace the wooden planks with whatever better material you have available.

Build yourself a shelter
If you’re playing in Minecraft’s survival mode, don’t waste too much time and quickly build yourself a shelter for the night. Because at night, the nasty monsters come to the surface. If you stand around freely in the wilderness, you are easy prey for creepers, zombies, skeletons, spiders, or crazy magicians.

To quickly build a small hut. Wooden blocks are sufficient for this, especially at the beginning. Reminder: You can easily dismantle these with your bare hands.

Build a door: So that you can leave your hiding place at any time, it makes sense to build a door. First, make boards from your wood and then combine them as shown in the picture:

Sleeping Through the Night: The quickest way to get through a night is to sleep. But it would help if you had a bed for that. It would help if you had wooden planks and three times sheep’s wool of the same color to make a bed.

Chances are you spawned in a biome with lots of sheep roaming around. Since you don’t have shears with which to shear sheep initially, you have to resort to more drastic measures. You can kill a sheep with your bare hands and hope it sheds wool. It’s best not to look into their cute googly eyes.

Stock up on provisions
In Minecraft, you should always keep an eye on your hunger. If your feeling of satiety drops to zero, your health will suffer, and you may even die. So get food together as soon as possible.

You can eat a lot in Minecraft: berries, apples, mushrooms, fish, meat, and even rotten zombie meat. However, it would help if you fried your non-vegan options first.

You can either do this at the campfire or build an oven. The latter must be fueled with coal. Then just put your raw meat in and wait for it to finish roasting.

If you want to eat something, all you have to do is place it in your quick bar, select it and munch on it with a left click.

Descend underground
Now that you’ve survived the first night and hunger pangs and have all the essential tools ready, it’s time to explore Minecraft’s caves. You will find these either by chance when you roam the vastness of the block world. Or you dig your way down. Grab your shovel and start exploring!

It would help if you had special tools to mine some resources. While you mine iron with a stone pickaxe, you need a diamond pickaxe to mine obsidian. In caves, you will find new materials from which you can build new items.