VioletApril's Guide to Living the Minecraft dream!

Here are some tips to surviving your first few days in minecraft. There are pictures below to demonstrate corresponding numbered tips in Minecraft.
1. The first thing to do when you start a new world is get wood. Get lots of wood. Do this by finding a tree, standing in front of it, and destroying it.
2. The next thing to do is to craft a Crafting table. This is done by going into the inventory and either finding the picture of wood planks, as shown in picture A, and then finding the picture of the crafting table, as you can see in picture B. You can also do this by placing 1 wood block on one of the four dark-grey boxes in the top right-hand corner of the screen, then picking up the 4 wood planks from the single box to the right of the first four boxes. Then, you need to place the 4 wood planks in the 2x2 square, 1 plank per box, and a crafting table should appear in the single box to the right of the planks. As you pick up the crafting table, the wooden planks should disappear. Do not worry, this is supposed to happen. Now you will have a crafting table, so you can craft almost anything. (If you are using a computer you may not know how to craft different objects as you will not know what materials to use and which boxes to put them in. But don't worry! All you need to do is go to www.minecraft-crafting.net and it will show you how to craft whatever you need help with.
3. By the time you have managed to create a crafting table, it is likely that night-time will be coming. If you aren't on peaceful mode, you will need to build a shelter, because monsters spawn in the dark! You can choose many ways to build your first home, but here are the ways I think are easiest: 1. If you have spawned near some mountains, you can dig a home into the side of it. 2. If you spawned near a lot of trees, you may have been cutting down a lot of trees. If this is so, you can craft wooden planks from the wood blocks (because 1 wood block equals 4 wooden planks, and you want to get as many blocks as possible from the least amount of work) and and place the wood planks in a cube shape, leaving an empty interior. 3. If you have spawned in the middle of nowhere, you can either build a home into a hill (but not into a sand hill, sand, and for future reference, gravel, are both affected by gravity and will fall when the block beneath them is destroyed), or you can collect dirt or some other block that isn't affected by gravity and can be found in large quantities, and you can build a house from it. As well as that, you will need wood to build a door. If you can't find wood, you may need to block up any entrances until daylight, so you can go and find wood (and build a new house).
4. After you have survived the night (if you have) you might be seeing that most of the monsters will be burning in the sunlight or hiding in the shade. This is because monsters cannot survive in sunlight (with the exception of spiders). You also might have noticed that there won't be any more monsters spawning. This is because monsters can't spawn in light, whether sunlight or torchlight. Using this theory, people who have aquired wood can create torches so their homes don't have monsters spawning inside at night. You can do this either by: 1. Creating a wooden pickaxe, mining 8 stone (becomes cobblestone in inventory) and then crafting a furnace. In the furnace, you can burn a wood block to create charcoal. Craft 4 torches with 1 charcoal above 1 stick. 2. You can try your luck mining for coal. You can find out about the different ores at Minecraftopia.com-Ores. If you find coal, you can craft 4 torches with 1 coal over 1 stick.
5. By the time a couple of days have passed, you may be getting tired of fighting all those monsters, and you will be happy to know there is a way to skip night completely! The only problem is, you need wool to craft beds, and to do that, you need to find sheep... so, the first thing to do is find one. You might be lucky, and have spawned near some. Other times, you will just have to search for a while. Either way, once you find one, you will need to kill it (preferably with a sword to make it easier) and then find 2 other sheep. But if you have 2 iron, you can craft shears and shear sheep 3 times. Make sure the sheep can eat grass, this is how it regrows its wool.

Here is a video showing a first day in Minecraft.