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A nomadic experience is generally for experienced players or players looking for a fast-paced, thrilling gameplay experience. With the concern of hunger, this style is a challenging and engaging experience. This style is based on the real-life nomads who roam the Earth without a permanent residence. There are certain rules and styles for this way of playing.

The basic rules are:

  • Keep moving
  • Keep game on hard mode
  • Only build shelters for 1 night
  • Don't stay in one area for more than a night.

There are more specific styles which specify where you can go, where you stay, and even how you should survive.

Nomadic Experience Challenge[]

This tutorial assumes you are playing on Java Edition and only follow the basic rules. Most is same for bedrock edition. It is best to play this on hardcore mode.

Your first few days[]

Like usual survival, your goals on the first day is to get stone tools, a temporary shelter, some food, and possibly a bed. After that, go mining for resources. If you accumulate lots of cobblestone, you can throw some of it away because if you make a chest, you cannot come back to get it. You want to get enough iron for a full set of iron armor, tools, bucket, shears, and an anvil and some diamonds for a diamond pickaxe and enchanting table. If you find a dungeon, you can break the spawner if you want because you will never come back to it. Take the loot from the chests and throw out anything you don't need. The best things from a dungeon are golden apples, enchanted books, saddles, name tags, and resources. Try to gather enough string for a bow and at least 20 arrows. For the next days, you must leave the area you used. Kill all passive mobs you see because you cannot build a farm. If you find a village, take some beds and raid the chests. Kill the iron golem(Note: For Bedrock Edition, make sure you have completely raided the place before killing the iron golem as you may not have a chance after your popularity reaches -15). If it is a plains or desert village, gather all the hay bales and sell the wheat to a farmer villager. Do some trading to get some resources and take any useful workstations, such as blast furnaces and cauldrons. Take as much as you can and don't worry about the villagers' safety because you will never come back.

The nether[]

Your next goal is to go to the nether and get blaze rods and ender pearls. Make sure you have at least some armor and a weapon and some tools. Keep exploring until you find a nether fortress and bastion. Get at least 20 blaze rods from the fortress and get the nether wart as well. Find a bastion and kill the piglin brutes. Take as much gold, diamond, and netherite from the chests and toss the gold armor and weapons or put them in a furnace. Find a group of piglins and throw gold ingots at them and wait until they finish bartering. You need to have at least 32 ender pearls and 18 obsidian. If you get fire resistance potions, keep some of them. If you get soul speed boots, you can wear them. Keep as much items as you can and throw out anything else you don't need.

The end[]

After you get enough blaze rods and ender pearls, build your portal using the obsidian and leave. Craft eyes of ender. If you have more obsidian, craft an ender chest to store more items. Use the eyes of ender to find the stronghold. Find the end portal room and destroy the silverfish spawner because you don't need it. If you can, explore the other parts of the stronghold and find chests. If you found the library, break the bookshelves to get books (bookshelves with silk touch). If you find a silk touch book and you have an anvil, enchant a pickaxe with silk touch to get the bookshelves. Before you fight the ender dragon, make sure you have these things:

  • An iron sword or better, preferably enchanted.
  • A bow, preferably enchanted, and at least 128 arrows, one arrow if the bow has infinity.
  • A full set of iron or better armor, preferably enchanted with Protection.
  • At least 32 highly nutritious food like steak, cooked chicken, or bread.
  • At least 2 stacks of expendable blocks like dirt or cobblestone for pillaring and building bridges.
  • This is required for all missions. It can prevent fall damage, allow you to climb obsidian pillars, and repel enderman.
  • A pickaxe, iron or better is used to mine end stone or the iron bars around the end crystals.
  • A few golden apples can be used for emergency healing. Optional.

Kill the ender dragon the standard way or use beds to blow it up. If you are experienced enough, it should be easy. If you use beds, you need a obsidian block on the corner of the bedrock portal pillar so you can place your beds.

Once you have killed the ender dragon, use a torch to pick up the dragon egg and put it in your ender chest. Your next goal is to get shulker boxes and elytra. The reason you have to speedrun the game is to unlock shulker boxes faster. This allows for easier storage, a big problem with nomadic experiences. Use a trapdoor or ender pearl to go to the end gateway and find an end city. Kill all the shulkers, preferably with a Looting III sword to get shulker shells. Take all the chests and loot. If there is an end ship, ender pearl or bridge there and kill the shulkers. Get the elytra, the two chests, and the dragon head. Raid more end cities for more shulker boxes. Discard anything that has curse of vanishing or curse of binding because you don't need it. Bring the anvil to upgrade your armor with the end city armor. Find a return gateway to leave the end. You will end up at world spawn or at a bed or respawn anchor that you used.

Advanced Global Progression[]

After you have defeated the ender dragon and gotten shulker boxes, you have completed the basic global progression, but there are still many things you can do in a nomadic world.

Storage[]

Your most important step is to expand your storage. The ender chest has 27 slots and pairing it with 27 shulker boxes can give you 729 slots, which is enough to store 729-46656 items (depending on stack size). Even though this is a lot, it is still limited. You will need to get as many donkeys and/or llamas as you can and get leads. To get the leads, kill some wandering traders. Equip the trader llamas with chests and check their storage. If it is less than 12 slots, kill it and try again with another llama. If you want a donkey, you can find it in plains biomes. Equip it with a chest. It is guaranteed to have 15 slots. If you put shulker boxes in the animals, you can store much more items. Just make sure your lead doesn't break and you lose all your diamonds. Put valuables in the ender chest's shulker boxes, and put bulk materials, like dirt and cobblestone, in the animals. If you have name tags, name the animals so you can tell which one carries which, such as naming them, "Mob Drops", "Bulk Materials", "Potions". It is also a good idea to dye the shulker boxes and name them with the anvil.

Nomadic Moving Base[]

This base is built in a flying machine and moves. This base follows all the basic rules and can move in two directions. It contains 12 minecart chests for storage, 4 villager storage, and crafting tables. In order to move in other directions, the base has to be taken down and reoriented.

All pistons are sticky in Java Edition. For Bedrock Edition the pistons facing right are not. The ones facing left are. The machine moves right.

Resource Production[]

Since you cannot build farms, you have to manually produce resources. You cannot farm crops and trees without using bone meal because you don't have time for them to grow. In order to get bone meal, compost extra seeds or kill skeletons for bones. If you see the wandering trader, buy as much items as you can because you don't have time to farm those items and the wandering trader makes those items renewable. To get honey, you have to bring a silk touch pickaxe to get a bee nest and place it during the day and wait for the bees to produce honey. You should get an average of one honey bottle a day, so you have to go through many days to build the nomadic flying base. If you find more bee nests, silk touch them. If you got honeycombs, you can also craft beehives and breed bees, but you have to pick them up at night because you cannot move them with pistons. If you need resources from the nether, you need to set up the nether portal and return to that portal before the 20 minutes passes, or you have to build a new portal and lose your base. If you need to go to the end, set your spawn point in your base and use eyes of ender to find the nearest stronghold and find the end portal. If you go through the return portal, you will end back at your base, which doesn't count returning back to previous locations because the end exit portal will always take you to your spawn point. The flying machine will allow you to bring villagers, although you have to break the minecarts during the day to let the villagers work. You must not place blocks on the flying machine, except the ones already in the blueprint, or the machine will break. To get villagers, you have to be quick to get them from a nearby village before the 20 minutes passes. Use a staircase or elevator to move them up and place them in minecarts and place workstations. If you want animals, you will need to expand the flying machine to allow animals. The base is built out of honey blocks, so the animals won't move around too much. You can still breed them and kill them for their drops. You can bring as many villagers as you want for your nomadic base, as long as you have enough space for them. You can also add more minecart with chest for storage. These are the basics of this tutorial. However, there are many other things you can do besides building, in a nomadic world.

Challenges:

  • Expand your base and add more villagers and animals.
  • Explore generated structures like temples.
  • Gather every single block and item.
  • Take on a village raid.
  • Max out all your villagers' trades.
  • Defeat a woodland mansion.
  • Conquer a bastion remnant.
  • Raid an ocean monument for sponges and prismarine.
  • Complete all the advancements.
  • Use Fundy's custom difficulties, such as Impossible, Impossible++, Nightmare, and Cursed. These will add challenges to your nomadic world.
  • Try Ultra-Hardcore or Half Heart Hardcore. You must not take risks!
  • Make a diamond or netherite beacon.
  • Try nomadic experience in SuperFlat, Caves, Floating Biomes, or Single Biome (preferably a challenging biome like desert or ice spikes).
  • Try nomadic experience starting in the nether or the end outer islands.

Nomadic shelters[]

Nomadic shelters can range anywhere from absolute simplicity to an easily deployable craft station. In principle, Nomadic shelters should be easy to make and accessible from almost anywhere on the various maps of Minecraft. Below is a list of Shelters that are organized by complexity. The most basic utility for the nomad is the bed. It's easy to make - just 3 blocks of wool and 3 blocks of wooden planks are needed to craft it.

Bed[]

Place a bed before sunset and go to sleep as early as possible to prevent monsters from spawning. Keep away from caves, as they supply no protection.

Instant shelter[]

Instant shelters are the absolute basic, and while they keep you safe, you lack many luxuries and abilities. These shelters are useful when exploring a map or finding rare resources like clay or cacti. They are meant to be built in 5 to 10 seconds, anywhere on the Overworld or in a cave.

There are 2 types of instant shelters you can do :

The first one is simply a hole in the ground. This is exactly what it sounds like. All you need is to dig a hole according to the schematics below.


Ingredients Crafting recipe Description
Matching Wool +
Any Planks

Wool color must match. planks do not need to match.

This design protects you from mobs even if you build the shelter at midnight. You should stay careful when going out of it, as a mob may fall into your hole. If there are any mobs on top of your hole, you might not be able to sleep due to them being too close. If you do not place a torch inside to light the shelter, it will be dark enough for a mob to spawn.


The second type of instant shelter is a pillar on which you can sleep. This method will only work if there are no mobs nearby.


This shelter is useful if you don't want to be surprised on your wake by mobs and see the sun (you can clean the area around with a bow and an arrow). However, building a pillar without overhangs is not advisable since spiders can climb the pillar. This is easily circumvented by making overhangs on top of the pillar to prevent spiders from climbing up the pillar and harming the player sleeping in bed.

Huge mushroom shelter or PSS (Portable 'Shroom Shelter')[]

There is another instant shelter that is easy to make; all you need is 1 red mushroom, some bonemeal, 1 block of ground, 12 blocks of choice, a torch or two, and 1 bed.

First plant your red mushroom on a dirt block, then use your bonemeal on that mushroom. Remove the central stalk to make it easier to maneuver. Fill the area between the edges of the mushroom and the ground with your blocks of choice, place a torch or two, place your bed, and you've finished your makeshift base. Some people like to think of it as a tent. It also has the plus side of producing even more mushrooms to make food. As of Java Edition 1.2.4, you need to plant the mushroom on Mycelium to build the shelter unless the mushroom can't see the sun.

If you dig a 1-block hole in the ground to plant the mushroom in, it will usually (but not always) grow its walls all the way to the ground.

Brown mushrooms can also be used as a safe place to snipe mobs from with the bow and arrows.

Basic hut[]

It's just what it sounds like. It's a ground level structure that can be a bit bigger than the Instant Shelter. Just place your bed and build a space around it that mobs cannot penetrate.

Mountainside hut[]

This is built on a mountainside for maximum protection. Simply dig into a cliff, hill, or mountainside enough to fit a bed and room to wake up without danger of suffocation.

Tree house[]

This might be one of the most efficient, and safest, ways of making a one-night shelter. All you do is go up in a tree and barricade yourself with any material. This works especially well with larger trees (the ones with branches). Note that spiders may be able to get up the smaller trees. Also, a plus-side to this shelter is that you have a natural way to see outside.

With the use of jungle trees, you can make a really high tree house or even make a tree village in a jungle biome connecting each tree via a walkway/bridge. However, making an entire village is not the easiest thing to do when you have to keep on moving.

Cave dwelling[]

If you happen to have a pickaxe with you, this is an easy one. If you stumble upon a cave, you only have to barricade the entrance and you're done. Of course, barricading the side of the cave that leads into the earth is also a good idea, since lots of hostile mobs might spawn. Like always, proper lighting is a must-have.

Forest Roof Shelter[]

Go on to the leaves on top of a Dark Forest and build your shelter there. Be careful: mobs cannot spawn on leaves, but they can climb there!

Dirt Tower[]

This peculiar structure allows sunlight in while keeping the mobs out. Basic design:

Since spiders can sneak through the cracks and endermen can pick up dirt, it is advised you build your temporary dwelling out of cobblestone or something of the like, with 1 block wide openings.

NOTE: Baby Zombies can still get into your holes. Baby Zombies are not good for your health. Nor are Cave Spiders, which can fit in small holes.

The overhang keeps spiders out.

Icy Dwelling[]

If you happen to be in that biome, you can make your house in an ice spike. The packed ice doesn't melt or produce water. Carve a small room and be sure to light up the entrance. And if you don't have a bed, take out the first block in the one block wide pillar. Mobs can't get through and you can tell the time.

Trapdoor Ground Bed[]

This is a simple design where you break two blocks of ground and place a bed. Then, place two trapdoors above it. You can now open the trapdoors and sleep.

Covered Ground Bed[]

This method of making a simple bed is as easy as it gets. All you need is a bed, 4 dirt, and optionally a trapdoor and a torch.

Dig a hole in the ground for a bed. Then, place the bed down. Next, place two dirt on top of the blocks next to the base of the bed. Fourthly, place a block of dirt directly on top of the pillow side of the bed. After that, you can place a final block of dirt 2 blocks above the base of the bed. Place the trapdoor on the block in front of the base of the bed. Then, close it before getting in bed. If you have a torch, you can place it above the base of the bed on any of the dirt blocks.

You can also alter this design, saving one block of dirt, by using the bottom log in a tree as what is normally the dirt block on top of the pillow side of the bed.

Enterable Covered Ground Bed[]

This design is similar to the Covered Ground Bed, except that you can enter it and there is a layer of protection.

Dig a hole in the ground of the bed, like the Covered Ground Bed. Then, place the bed down. Next, place two dirt on top of the blocks next to the base of the bed. Fourthly, place a block of dirt directly on top of the pillow side of the bed. After that, you can place a slab 2 blocks above the base of the bed. Remove the dirt in front of the base of the bed and place a slab. You can now walk into your shelter for the night, and place a trapdoor on the block in front of the base of the bed above the cobblestone slab for protection. Close it so no mobs can get in. However, you have to destroy this trapdoor to get out. The section above the trapdoor when closed can be used for archery, or can be replaced with another trapdoor. If you have a torch, you can place it above the base of the bed on any of the dirt blocks.

Inventory management[]

The biggest part of this experience is the traveling. You'll need to pick up all your gear every morning and leave your base for the night. Storing your goods in chests won't help you, but ender chests help with carrying extra resources. As long as you have a tool with Silk Touch, you can use and mine your ender chest without worry, but if it breaks make sure to get a replacement before you mine the ender chest without thinking and get only obsidian. Shulker boxes will also make a good storage setup, granted you can get your hands on a couple; however, bundles[upcoming] will provide a more accessible alternative, while also allowing multiple types of items to be carried in one stack.

You also need to pack in the most economic way possible. Try to only carry the base materials, that way you can hold more per stack. For instance, carrying wood instead of planks will allow you to hold four times as many materials. Carrying wood (logs) instead of sticks will allow you to hold eight times more! Only craft as many items as you need and carry the rest in raw materials. Also, try not to mix things like the different types of wood or planks, as that takes up space, too. Although it isn't as compact, you could craft the mixed wood into sticks, as they will match then. If you are using shulker boxes, it is advisable to use the different colors of shulker box for categorization.

Then you have to decide what is worth taking and what is easy to make more of later on. Is taking up a whole slot for your crafting table worth it, or is four planks easy enough to come by to build another? What else could you carry instead of that stack of wood? Another weapon or pickaxe?

Another good tip is to use the rare materials early. Using a couple of iron ingots to make a faster axe or pickaxe will save you a lot of time when chopping wood. That time is crucial when you're fighting the clock each day and night.

If you like inventory management but think a whole chest-full is too much space, you can add additional limits such as only holding items in your inventory bar (that you can access without pressing e) or setting off each day with only 9 items. Excess items could be incinerated, buried, placed, or otherwise discarded.

Another way to carry around a lot of items would be to have a donkey or llama. Put a chest on it and have him store the extra things while you use a lead to have them follow you around. Having an ender chest and a donkey or llama with chest (plus your own normal amount of storage slots) will give you the third most amount of storage, the second most being shulker boxes within a donkey or llama chest and the most being storing an ender chest full of shulker boxes. Be sure to store the ender chest in your own inventory (not in the animal’s chest) so that if something happens to them, you don't lose as many items.

Tips & tricks[]

  • Placing a bed is one of the basic things to do to your shelter, as this will make it your new spawn point, and it provides a unique opportunity to skip the night.
  • Passive mobs such as cows and pigs should be killed on sight to get their resources, as you will not have time to set up an animal farm.
  • Make sure your shelter is properly lit. If you don't, then you'll probably have the living daylights scared out of you when you hear the hissing sound of a creeper right beside you. However, mobs don't always spawn when you are in a bed, assuming you sleep as soon as you are able. Note that things like wheat, trees and other stuff won't grow any quicker when sleeping. It's only the time of day that is skipped.
  • It's always a good idea to have a hole in the wall of your shelter, or have a clock with you. That way, you'll be able to see when it's day again. Remember that spiders can't enter holes one block in width, though cave spiders can. However, creepers can see you through the hole and may explode if you are close enough to the hole, so be careful in small shelters.
  • You can use glass for windows, but 16 glass panes can be made from 6 glass blocks, so glass panes are a more economic choice. Using glass is a luxury and will be a waste of resources and time as you cannot retrieve any glass after placing them unless you have a silk touch tool. You can obtain both glass and glass panes with silk touch.
  • If you have enough to do so, use fences as windows, as you can see out and mobs cannot see in. This does not work on spiders, though.[verify]
  • Make some shears. Always shear sheep of their wool, so you can keep your previous bed where it is. This way, if you die, you won't spawn back at the world spawn.
  • Horses and donkeys spawn in plains biomes. If you are lucky enough to find a saddle, you can tame and ride a horse or donkey, greatly increasing your travel speed.
  • If you cannot find a saddle, you can try fishing, which will give you a good food source as well as the chance to get saddles.
  • If you find a donkey you can attach a chest to it, allowing for extra mobile inventory space.
  • Shulker Boxes are one of the best ways to maximize your storage.
  • If you are using a donkey consider using F3 to plan your route. Following a line (i.e.: "x increases, z stays 0") can help you get back to your donkey if you die (assuming you're leaving your bed behind every night and building a new one so you spawn there and not back at the worldspawn). If you do follow a line during your nomadic experience consider starting your journey from the Origin (x=0 z=0). A quick teleport code at the beginning of the game can get you there no matter where the original spawn was, and you can use /setworldspawn once you get there to make the origin the worldspawn.
  • Llamas spawn in mountains and plateau variants of biomes, and can transport up to 150 items per lead you use thanks to their ability to form caravans.
  • You should consider using the cheat code /gamerule keepInventory true. This will make it so you don't lose anything when killed. Not only will you not drop any of your items, but you also won't lose experience points because that would count as “dropping experience orbs". It does however take the sting out of dying, to the point where some players may find the game less interesting that way.
  • Lastly, for a real challenge, consider playing nomad style on hardcore.

Video[]

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