Your First Night in Minecraft — A Beginner Survival Guide

The first 5 minutes are everything

When you spawn you have roughly 10 minutes of daylight before monsters come out. Do not waste a single second. The moment you spawn punch a tree. Punch it until you have at least 20 wood logs. New players often spend too long exploring and run out of daylight before they have basic tools.

Your first crafting priority

Wood logs into a Crafting table first. Then craft a wooden pickaxe and wooden axe. Find stone immediately and upgrade to stone tools — they last much longer than wood and mine significantly faster.

Find or build shelter before dark

You have two options for your first night. Option one — dig into a hillside. Find any hill or mountain and dig straight in 6 to 8 blocks. Place your crafting table inside and seal the entrance with dirt. Ugly but effective. Option two — build a small box. 5x5 area, 3 blocks high with a roof. Use whatever you have — dirt, wood, stone.

The one thing new players always forget

Food. You start losing hunger almost immediately and once your hunger bar empties you stop healing. Punch chickens, cows, or pigs before dark and cook the meat in a furnace. Cooked food restores far more hunger than raw food.

Your night one checklist

Before you end your first day make sure you have collected 20 or more wood logs, crafted a stone pickaxe and stone axe, built or found shelter, crafted a furnace, cooked and eaten food, and mined enough coal to make at least 10 torches. If you wake up on day two with all of this done you are ready to go deeper.