Surviving Your First Night in Minecraft

A full day and night lasts 20 real minutes, and every new world starts at the beginning of the day, so the first night is a fixed deadline. This plan spends seven minutes on wood, stone and coal, and the last three on food, a bed and a shelter.

How long you have

Caves ignore this clock. Monsters can spawn wherever the block light is 0 and the sky light is 7 or lower, which is true underground at noon.

Minutes 0 to 4: wood and a Crafting Table

Hold attack on a tree trunk to break logs. One log makes 4 planks in your inventory grid, and 4 planks make a Crafting Table. Six logs cover everything tonight if you find Coal: the table, a Wooden Pickaxe, the sticks for your stone tools and 16 torches, a door and a bed.

The essential crafting recipes show every layout except the door: six planks of one wood in two columns, which makes 3 doors.

Minutes 4 to 7: stone tools and coal

Craft one Wooden Pickaxe and mine the nearest stone, which drops Cobblestone. Three Cobblestone and two Sticks make a Stone Pickaxe, and two Cobblestone and one Stick make a Stone Sword. Skip the other wooden tools. The Stone Pickaxe also mines Iron Ore, which the wooden one cannot.

While you are at the stone, look for Coal Ore: stone with black specks. It generates up to the top of the world, so check hills and cliff faces. Any pickaxe mines it. One Coal and one Stick craft 4 Torches.

No coal in sight? Build a Furnace from 8 Cobblestone. Put a log in the top slot and planks in the fuel slot below it; each plank smelts 1.5 items. The log comes out as Charcoal, which crafts torches the same way and fuels the Furnace like Coal. Each item takes 10 seconds. Sixteen torches this way cost 4 more logs, plus a log or two for fuel.

Minutes 7 to 9: food and a bed

You start with a full hunger bar, but you only regenerate health while it shows 9 drumsticks or more. Kill two or three cows or pigs. Each drops 1 to 3 Raw Beef or Raw Porkchop, and a raw piece fills 1.5 drumsticks. Cooked into Steak or Cooked Porkchop, it fills 4. The best food guide covers what to eat after tonight.

A bed takes 3 wool of one colour and 3 planks of any wood. Shears need iron, so kill sheep instead: each drops one wool, and you need three of one colour (or 12 String from Spiders). Village houses have beds too, and a broken bed drops as an item.

The Straw Bed shortcut

Since 26.3, three Hay Bales in a row craft 4 Straw Beds. Hay Bales pile up around plains villages. Abandoned Camps almost always have Straw Beds in the tent, and about a third of their barrels hold a few more. Camps generate in 18 biomes, such as most forests, every taiga, Savanna, Swamp, and Sparse and Bamboo Jungles, but not the regular Jungle; the abandoned camps guide lists them all. A Straw Bed skips the night, then breaks with no drop when you get out, and never sets your respawn point.

Minutes 9 to 10: dig in before sunset

Monsters never spawn within 24 blocks of you. They spawn farther out and walk in, so a shelter only has to keep them out.

• Close every side, including the roof. Spiders climb walls made of any block.
• Use a door, or fill the doorway with a block. A closed wooden door holds Zombies back on Easy and Normal. On Hard, some Zombies can break one down in about 10 seconds: about 1 in 54 on a new world, rising to about 1 in 7 over time, so block the doorway instead.
• Put a Torch inside. A Torch gives off light level 14, so nothing spawns in the room while you are away tomorrow.

The fastest shelter is a hillside. Dig three blocks in and two high, then place a block in the opening behind you. Don't spend the night on a pillar: Spiders climb it, and Skeletons shoot from up to 15 blocks whenever they can see you.

For day two, the compact survival base is a 7×7 house laid out block by block.

Sleeping through it

Place a normal bed inside your shelter and use it straight away (a Straw Bed can't do this). In Java Edition, using a bed sets your respawn point even in daytime, and the game confirms it with "Respawn point set".

Besides the sleep times in the table, a thunderstorm lets you sleep at any hour. If a hostile mob is within 8 blocks of the bed horizontally and within 5 blocks vertically, the game refuses with "You may not rest now; there are monsters nearby".

Once everyone is asleep, the game waits 5 seconds and skips to the start of the next day. On a server every player in the Overworld must be in bed, unless an operator lowers the players_sleeping_percentage game rule from its default of 100. Sleeping also resets the timer that brings Phantoms after three in-game days without rest.

What is outside tonight

Health is in half-hearts, and you have 20. A point-blank Creeper blast on Normal deals up to 43, more than twice your health without armour. If you hear the hiss, back away: getting about 7 blocks from it cancels the fuse.

Without a bed, mine until morning

Stay inside and dig. Cut a staircase down from the shelter floor, so there is always a block under your feet, and place a Torch every few blocks. Wall off any cave you break into. By dawn you should have a stack of Cobblestone, more Coal and, with luck, some Raw Iron.

If you die tonight

Without a normal bed to set your spawn, you respawn at the world spawn point. Your items drop where you died and despawn after five minutes, though that timer only runs while the area is loaded. Walk straight back.

The morning after

A Spider in bright light stays neutral unless you hit it. Your next goal is iron for a pickaxe, a bucket and a shield. The ore height table shows where Iron Ore is most common.