Minecraft

[Sharon]

my 12 year old son plays every minute that I do not expressly forbid it.

he has at least one location where he has built or found (I don't exactly understand the game mechanics) thirty cats & dogs. it's like a virtual rescue shelter.

[Tiarali]

Drills, chainsaws and oil wells? I'm pleased th have finally found some iron! Still haven't found the elusive sheep though.

Tonight I discovered that the random seeds I've been picking up are, in fact, wheat seeds. I also successfully planted sugar cane for the first time

I got bored hiding in my house at night. So I undermined it. Afterwards I blocked the opening with stone blocks. I put torches through the tunnel, but I still feel like my house is haunted, lol! Also, I found some iron ore deposits without even leaving my home. I thought that was awesome

[C_Fresh]

I'm thinking I need to build a chicken pen and start raising them so I can get feathers for making arrows. To bad you can't sheer them like sheep. On a related note, I have a very colorful sheep pen. I dyed several sheep so I'm now getting red, blue, orange, yellow, purple and a couple other colors of wool. Dying the sheep beats dying individual wool blocks.

[JordanMaria]

Ok, I don't get the survival mode AT ALL.

What are you supposed to do and how do I make things?

I don't get it.

I suck.

If I walk around digging holes, I'll collect dirt, but nothing else. Why does this happen?

[C_Fresh]

This ended up getting kind of long!

The game could really use better in-game explanations. Some stuff you can break by hand and get items: Dirt, sand, wood. Most stuff takes some kind of tool to break into an item. There are several basic tools:
Pickaxe is the most important as most material will drop blocks when destroyed by this
Sword helps kill monsters/animals faster
Axe cuts wood faster
Shovel digs through sand/dirt/clay faster
Hoe is used to till dirt for planting seeds
http://www.minecraftwiki.net should be a good source to explain a lot of the vanilla game stuff. Honestly I've played the modded version so much I had to think how the game would work with a plain version. Playing on the peaceful difficulty setting would let you learn the game without having to deal with hostile monsters and worrying about starving to death.

In order to make tools you need a crafting table. Gather a couple of wood blocks and open your inventory. There are four squares near the image of your character that are separate from the other inventory. Take the wood blocks and move them to one of the four slots. You should see a new item called planks appear in the single space next to the 2x2 spot. Click on the planks to convert the wood into them. From memory, I think that 1 wood block = 4 planks so two stacked wood blocks would give you 8 planks. next take the planks and put one in each of the 4 slots. That will give you a crafting table. Move the crafting table to one of your bottom slots so you can hold it. Switch to it and right click to place on the ground. Right click again to open the crafting table interface. This will be a 3x3 grid which you can use to make any other stuff. To make a tool you'll need to make sticks. These can be made by putting planks in two slots one above the other. So like the bottom right and center right slots. You'll need at least 4 sticks to make your starter tool set as well as some more planks. 2 sticks and 3 planks can be used to make a wooden pickaxe. The wood planks go in the top 3 slots and the 2 sticks go in the other two middle slots so it makes a T shape. Move the pick to one of your usable slots and use it to break some stone blocks. Using 3 cobblestone and 2 sticks you can make a stone pick which will drop items from most underground blocks. Notable exceptions to this would be Redstone, gold and diamonds which need at least an iron pick. Obsidian can only be mined with a diamond pick. Remember that tools have a limited number of uses before they break. Once you use it for the first time you will see a green bar that gets shorter and turnd yellow, then red, and finally breaks. Making extra tools to carry is a good idea. Diamond tools last the longest, then iron, stone and wood being the weakest. Also, the better the tool, the faster it breaks blocks.

Some other useful items are chests and a furnace. Chests are made with 8 planks arranged in a circle on the crafting table. A furnace is made the same way but uses 8 cobblestone. Furnaces must be fueled to smelt so you'll be needing to gather a lot of wood. The most fuel-efficient method is to turn wood into planks. 2 planks generate enough heat to smelt 3 items without wasting anything. You can burn planks to turn wood into charcoal which generate enough heat for 8 items.

Another important note: KNOW WHERE YOUR CAMP IS LOCATED. Vanilla minecraft doesn't display map coordinates but you can find them by pressing F3 to bring up a sort-of debug screen. Grid coordinates are listed on the left side. Write these down (including the '-' if they are there)! One of the mods I have gives you an overhead map and the ability to save/name waypoints to make navigation much easier. If you don't know your camp coordinates it can be easy to get lost and never find it again. This is especially prone to happen if you go exploring in a cave network and end up surfacing somewhere else. You can also use this to find your way back to other things like if you find diamonds before you have the necessary iron pick to mine them.

For cave exploring it is a good plan to carry a load of torches. I think that in vanilla minecraft the darkness can go total or near total. Not something I deal with thanks to mods, just dimness but passable. Anyway, torches are made using charcoal or coal above sticks. Right click while holding to place on a wall or ground. As a general rule it is a good idea to carry a stack of wood for making tools/torches,etc while away from camp.

[JordanMaria]

Dude....

Wow, how are people supposed to figure this out???

Thanks!!!

[C_Fresh]

I think that was originally part of the challenge. People who've been playing since the beginning only had to figure out the occasional new recipe. For new people there's now a lot of things they have to learn. A lot of it starts to make sense once you get the hang of the reasoning behind it. Like a shovel is a plank/stone with two sticks below it (Like the pick but without the other two blocks. I still refer to wikis a lot.