If you are planning on staying in one area of the Minecraft world for a long time and don't want to deplete all your resources, read this tutorial.
Basic Survival
The first item you need to survive is wood. Once you have wood, you will need to make farms as quickly as possible. You first need to make sure you have the following items:
- 1 or 2 buckets, which require you to find iron (by mining or raiding a blacksmith's chest) to craft
- at least one sapling of some type (except dark oak saplings, in which case you need 4)
- access to at least one source of lava and water (a village with a blacksmith shop has both a lava pool and a well)
- melon or wheat seeds
An example of the cobblestone farm described in the text to the left.
After you have the basic survival supplies, the first thing you need to do is create a 'safe zone' (i.e., somewhere lava cannot set things on fire). As cobblestone is an important resource in the game, create a cobblestone farm. See the following steps:
- Make a 4 x 4 hole in the ground.
- Dig an additional block down for each block in the 2nd row of the hole.
- On each block in the 1st row of the hole, place water.
- On each block in the 4th row, place lava. You should see cobblestone forming in the 3rd row.
You may notice that sometimes when you mine the cobblestone, the cobblestone item goes into the lava and burns up. For an easy but very effective solution to this problem, place hoppers underneath where the cobblestone would generate, all leading into a chest. Now, anytime you mine the cobblestone, it should go into the chest.
A tree farm should also be set up so as to gain maximum yield harvest, so place your saplings around 3 - 5 blocks apart, with the exact distance between saplings depending on what tree you're planting. You now have a rather steady source of wood for repairs and pickaxes or other needful things. Now, if you're on any other difficulty except for peaceful mode, you will need to have a crop farm. If this is a wheat farm the best way to go about doing this is to make an infinite water supply.
A wheat farm should be set up as large as you care to take it so as to have max yield. If it is a melon farm, the following should be used:
Once you have these basic farms, you should be able to live in a single place indefinitely.
Iron Golem Farm
For additional common resources, such as iron, special advanced farms can be built. An iron golem farm is the best way to go pre-1.8. For that, you need to gather at least 2 villagers (using minecarts or similar tricks) and breed them using houses (a door with a block above counts as a house).
With 1.8, villager breeding has been changed, so now you need to trade with at least two of them to make them "willing". This can be considerably harder at times.
The best strategy to get easy villagers on maps without villages (such as Skyblock) is to get a blaze rod from the Nether. You then craft a brewing stand and brew a splash potion of Weakness. Then, capture a zombie villager and make sure it can't escape or get harmed by another zombie, but that you can still reach it. (In Skyblock, glass bottles can be gathered by killing witches that spawn occasionally). First, throw the splash potion of Weakness at the zombie villager. Then, you only need to feed it a golden apple and wait.
Do this again to another villager, and now you have all the supplies needed for an iron golem farm.
Alternately, one can build an iron golem farm directly in a village, eliminating the need to transport villagers. For a tutorial on how to make an iron golem farm, see Tutorials/Iron golem farming.
In SkyBlock
If you're in a SkyBlock world, gathering resources is a bit different, due to limited space and resources. The biggest thing is to never craft items or blocks unnecessarily, make farms out of any renewable resource before using up that resource, and being careful, since a careless player could easily fall into the void in SkyBlock. There are some items and block that need to be acquired differently than normal Survival, however.
For making potions, you will need glass bottles. However, glass bottles require sand, and sand is not renewable and may not spawn at all in a SkyBlock world. What you will have to do is get witches to spawn, as they have a chance of dropping glass bottles upon death. Keep in mind that they aren't as common as other mobs. The only way to acquire gold in SkyBlock, is to kill zombie pigmen, as gold ore does not generate.
One of the hardest parts of SkyBlock is finding a nether fortress. This is because SkyBlock only consists of a few blocks, which is not enough room for a nether fortress. However, mobs that only spawn in nether fortresses will spawn where a nether fortress would be if it were a normal map. One way to do this is to keep building platforms outwards, until nether fortress mobs start spawning. Note that this may take a very long time, as nether fortresses are often very far away from each other. Another way how to find a place where nether fortress mobs should spawn is to find seed of your skyblock world using /seed and then create a normal world, using the seed. Then enter the nether portal, find nether fortress, memorize the coordinates of it and then build a platform at the skyblock world exactly on these coordinates.