Minecraft Survival Starter Guide: Your First Day, Night and Week

What is different on a server

If you have played single-player, you know the opening: punch a tree, make a crafting table, make tools, dig in somewhere for the night. That still applies. But four things change on a shared world, and they change your first half hour more than you would expect.

• The spawn area is stripped bare. Every player who has ever joined started here and took the nearby trees, ore and animals with them. The land around spawn on an established server is a picked-over wasteland, and standing in it wondering where the wood is, is a rite of passage. Walk away from it.
• You cannot pause. The world keeps running whether or not you are looking at it. Alt-tabbing to answer a message while standing in the open is how new players die.
• Other people can find your things. Most survival servers forbid stealing and griefing, and the good ones enforce it — but "enforced afterwards" is not the same as "impossible". A base nobody can find is safer than a base protected by a rule.
• Sleeping is a group activity. In single-player a bed skips the night instantly. On a server, by default every player in the Overworld must be in bed (servers can lower that with the players_sleeping_percentage game rule), so you may well be awake through the dark whether you own a bed or not.

The first ten minutes

Move first, gather second.

1. Turn on coordinates immediately. On Java, press F3 — your XYZ position is on the left. On Bedrock, open Settings and enable "Show Coordinates" under the world options. Do this before anything else, because you are about to walk somewhere and you will want to find it again.
2. Walk. Properly. Pick a direction and keep going for several minutes — a thousand blocks from spawn is a reasonable target, further if the terrain is still visibly harvested. You are looking for untouched land: full forests, animals wandering about, no torches on the hillsides. Walking away for five minutes now saves you an hour of scrounging later.
3. Note the coordinates where you stop. Write them down somewhere outside the game. Everyone thinks they will remember. Nobody remembers.
4. Punch trees. Aim for around twenty logs, which sounds excessive and is not. Convert to planks, make a crafting table, then sticks.
5. Wooden pickaxe, then straight to stone. The wooden pickaxe exists only to get you stone. Find exposed rock or dig down a couple of blocks and mine around twenty cobblestone.
6. Craft a stone pickaxe, axe, shovel and sword. Stone tools are far better than wooden ones and cost almost nothing. Since 1.21.9 there are also copper tools, a step up from stone, but a copper pickaxe mines the same ores as stone, so you still need iron for gold, redstone and diamonds. Skipping straight to stone is the standard opening for a reason.
7. Get coal. Coal ore is common in exposed hillsides and cliff faces and shows as black flecks in stone. You want a decent handful — coal plus sticks gives torches, and torches are the actual objective of the first day.
8. Kill a few animals if any are nearby. Sheep give wool, which you need three of for a bed. Cows give leather and beef. Do this while it is still light.

Surviving the first night

When the sky goes orange you have about a minute before things start spawning. Do not try to finish one more task; you will not make it.

The reliable option is to dig into a hillside. Three blocks in, seal the entrance behind you, place a torch and a crafting table, and wait it out. It is not glamorous, but it works. Do not dig straight down — the standard warning is standard because falling into a lava pool or a ravine with your entire inventory is a genuinely common way to lose everything on day one.

If you gathered three wool, craft a bed, place it and use it (right-click or tap) — placing it alone does not set your respawn point. The straw bed added in 26.3 skips the night but does not set your spawn. Even when sleeping does not skip the night on a busy server, the bed sets your respawn point, which means dying later returns you to your base instead of to spawn hundreds of blocks away. That alone justifies it.

While you are sealed in, use the time: smelt some cobblestone if you have a furnace, cook whatever meat you gathered, and dig a small branch tunnel to look for iron and coal. A night spent mining is a night not wasted.

Day two: iron, food, and a chest

Three priorities, roughly in order.

Iron

Iron ore appears as pale tan flecks in stone and needs at least a stone pickaxe. Smelt it in a furnace with coal as fuel. Your first iron should become, in this order: a bucket, a pickaxe, then armour. The bucket first is not an obvious choice, but water is how you deal with lava, how you break falls, and how you build a rudimentary farm.

Food

Hunger is a slow problem that becomes an urgent one. Animals run out fast if you rely on hunting alone, so get wheat going early: find grass, break tall grass until you get seeds, till dirt beside water with a hoe, plant, wait. Wheat becomes bread, and bread means you stop thinking about food.

Cook everything. Cooked meat restores substantially more hunger than raw, and raw chicken has a 30% chance of giving you the Hunger effect.

A chest, and not carrying everything

Craft a chest and leave things in it. When you die, your inventory drops where you fell, and those items despawn after five minutes, although the timer only runs while someone is near enough to keep that area loaded. Either way, do not count on getting them back. Carrying your entire life savings into a cave is how people lose it. Take what the trip needs and leave the rest at home.

Five mistakes that cost people their base

1. Building at spawn. It is the busiest, most-visited, most-scrutinised spot on the entire map. Build a few hundred blocks out, at minimum.
2. Not writing down coordinates. A lost base is entirely preventable with ten seconds of effort.
3. Digging straight down. Lava, ravines, caves full of things that were waiting for you. Dig a staircase or a two-block-wide shaft instead.
4. Leaving the base unlit. Mobs spawn in any dark space, including the corner of your own house and the cave you accidentally opened into your basement. Light everything.
5. Not sealing the door properly. A doorway with a gap above it, or a base with an open back, is an invitation. On Hard difficulty some zombies can break down wooden doors; iron doors with a button cannot be opened by mobs at all.

Fitting in

A few things that are worth knowing on any community server, and that make the difference between a good first week and an awkward one.

Say hello in chat. Genuinely. Established players will point you towards unclaimed land, tell you where the community farms are, and often hand over spare tools. People are far more helpful than new players expect.

Ask before you settle nearby. If you find a promising valley and there is already a base at the far end of it, ask before building. Almost everyone says yes, and the ones who say no will tell you about somewhere better.

Take nothing. Not from chests, not from farms, not from a death pile you found. If a build looks abandoned, it probably belongs to someone who is on holiday.

Ask what the server actually has. Different servers run different plugins — land claiming, homes, warps, shops. Ask in chat what is available and how to use it rather than assuming, and if there is a claiming system, use it on your base the moment you have one worth keeping.

The rest is just Minecraft. Read the server's rules once, and then go build something.

Frequently asked questions