Tips and tricks for survival in Minecraft

1. Use the coordinates feature

In the game settings, turn on the coordinates. Whenever you’re playing, sit down with a notepad or take screenshots of important places so that you have their coordinates and can come back if you need to. These important places could be your main base, a village, a stronghold or any other structure to which you intend to return to.

2. Need a clock or a compass? You don’t have to craft them to use them

This is a trick everyone should know. Clocks and compasses aren’t used all that often but take up space in your inventory and require resources. Instead of crafting them, simply head over to your crafting recipes and the clock and compass over there can work even without crafting them.

3. Stay safe underground

Being resource-rich, caves are also equally dangerous. Always use torches to keep areas lit, keep a weapon on your hotbar at all times and wear armour. If you want to take extra precautions, a shield won’t hurt.

4. Always carry a water bucket

One should make it a point to carry a water bucket in Minecraft. Whether it be to get down a ravine, walk over lava or save yourself from a tall fall. Water buckets are a multipurpose tool that you should always carry.

5. Keep an eye on the durability of your tools

It’s always very frustrating when you’re mining and your last pickaxe breaks or you’re trying to take down a horde of zombies when your sword breaks or your elytra breaks while you’re flying around in your world. Remember it’s cheaper to fix up your gear instead of making a new one when it breaks. As the saying goes “A stitch in time saves nine”.

6. Trap in villagers every time you find a village

This one might sound a bit cruel… But if you want to find villagers to trade with, trapping them in would stop them from wandering off or getting killed and some of the ways of doing this are walling up the village or blocking the doors of the houses as the villagers go to sleep. You’re just protecting them from zombies after all!

7. Walls and torches save lives

Building walls is something very important if you want to stay safe. Be it to protect your house or to stop creepers from sneaking up behind you while you’re tending to your crops. Walling up areas stops mobs from getting in while lighting up those areas will stop mobs from spawning in.

8. Storage Wars

Having an efficient and neat storage system would increase your productivity and make life in Minecraft much simpler. Keep your mining tools close to your mines, keep your food in a separate chest from your wood and if you’re good at Redstone, you can even make machines that sort out your items.

9. Plan out your builds

Let’s say you’re making a new base or renovating your existing one. The process would be much easier if you plan it out and do things like making a block palette or make a skeleton for your build with dirt before you use other materials. Remember, these should be the bare bones of your build made to set the aesthetics- not something intricate and difficult to understand. If you want, you can even use graph sheets to make physical designs of your builds!

10. The best fuel source: Lava

So you made it to the Nether or maybe there’s a surplus of lava in your closest lava pit. In that case, ditch all that grimy coal and get a bucket of lava and throw it in your furnace. A single bucket of lava can smelt 100 items while a whole block of coal can smelt just 80 items.

11. Automate your work

We talked about machines to sort your items earlier. But that’s not where it stops. You can make automatic farms, automatic item smelters and a lot more! This makes your work easier and is a cool thing to have in your world.

12. The Mushroom Biome is the safest and most peaceful place to be

Want some peace and calm? Head over to your closest Mushroom Biome where hostile mobs won’t spawn in unless there’s a mob spawner nearby or you didn’t sleep for 3 days, in which case phantoms would start pursuing you.

13. Use the right potions

You now have the resources you need to brew some potions. In that case, depending on what kind of work you need to do, prepare some potions so that your work becomes easier. Use water breathing potions to stay underwater for longer periods of time, fire resistance potions to stop yourself from going up in flames or a health potion to fix yourself up.

14. Make use of the most efficient mining tools

Using an axe, pickaxe or shovel enchanted with Fortune III will allow you to collect more drops per block. This means that with a Fortune III Pickaxe, you can get multiple drops from a single block of diamond ore rather than a single drop per diamond ore. Similarly, the Efficiency Enchantment allows you to break down blocks more efficiently.

15. Explore!

Once you have a base and enough resources, go out into the wild to truly enjoy the game and expand your world. Just remember the bare essentials you need to survive in the wild and untamed lands and you’re good to go.