Minecraft Strategy Guide (Xbox 360)

When you first start off in a fresh new world, surviving the fist night / couple of days should follow a very similar path. i’m going to try to lay it out the safest and hopefully most efficient way to help you get an established camp.

First of all, you have a good amount of time until nightfall when you first start off, so what I recommend is to take a quick survey of the area that you’ve spawned in. The day / night cycle is roughly 20 minutes long from one to another, so keep that in mind so you don’t venture too far off. The key things you should be scouting for are resources (wood, coal, ores to mine later, etc..), food, and a place to set up a temporary base. The idea here is to get yourself set up as close as possible to your initial spawn, in case something goes wrong and you dies.

After you have gotten familiar with your immediate surroundings, you should start harvesting wood. Wood will be your most valuable resource for a while, so i suggest harvesting at least 12-14 blocks to start with. This will give you enough wood to last for a bit as long as you don’t waste it. From here, I would craft 4 blocks of wood into planks, and from those planks make a crafting table. Set the crafting table down and use it to turn a few more of those planks into sticks. Then use the new material to make 1 wooden pickaxe. Don’t worry about making other wooden tools for right now, as that will only waste resources. While your crafting table is still down, I would make 1 wooden door. if you don’t have enough planks, make another set of planks out of the raw wood. i’ll explain the advantage of your new door later, but for now break your crafting table and collect it.

By now at least 10 minutes may have gone by, so you should start thinking about setting up camp for the night. in your scouting if you noticed any surface coal, now would be the time to harvest a few blocks with your new pickaxe. if you weren’t lucky enough to find coal, don’t worry we’ll deal with that in a bit. if you see a few pigs running around kill 1-2 to get some food in case you get hurt. Same as the coal, if you don’t see any, don’t go hunting.

For actually setting up your camp, it helps to use the natural layout of your surroundings to your advantage. if you spawned in or near a hilly area, use the side of one of the hills as your base. This will let you only have to worry about 1-2 walls to seal you up for the night. Basically what you want to do for a room in a hill is to bore a room that is 4 blocks long, 3 blocks wide and 3 block tall. After you have that dug out, go inside and seal up the entrance leaving a 1 block wide, 2 blocks tall hole on the wall. This is where you want to place your door you made earlier. The advantages of a door here is the fact that monsters cannot enter if the door is shut, you can see through the opening in the door to see if it is day or night, also you do not have to break any blocks to enter / exit your camp.