Minecraft Forums

in general what do you do on every map/house/cave/whatever? some things you feel like you have to do or you aren't playing "right" (right to YOU, since there's no right way to play the game really).

houses: i have to make a wood frame, i 'm not much of a skilled builder and wood frames make me feel better about my house than to have just a cobblestone (or whatever) box to live in. i always put an attic in for my bedroom. i always have my main floor as my living room type place. i alawys dig out a basement for my crafting room/mine entrance. i have a chest for each type of thing. building materials, crafting materials, cobblestone/dirt/sand, and then one chest for the other stuff (flint, food, saplings, string, dyes...things like that.) i also build a slime farm at every house. for some reason i really enjoy building slime farms.

caves: i always put torches on the right as a guide so i don't get TOO lost. if there's a branching path, i'll put 2 or 3 torches on the wall so i know which way i came in.


seeds: i'll build multiple houses on every seed. i'll start out around the spawn point and try to, as thoroughly as possible, mine all around and explore caves. then i'll move to another spot on the map and do it all again. i usually do 4-7 houses on a seed following the same plan.


materials: i turn all my iron/gold ingots and diamonds into blocks.

nether portal: i'll find a cave nearby to put my portal in, then i cover the cave in netherrack so it looks like the cave is part of the nether. if there's not a cave near my house, i'll put the portal into a wall and put netherrack randomly around. so it looks like the nether is coming through the portal and slowly taking over the world.

mine: i'll dig a two wide stair case down to bedrock, then i'll go back up to 12 and i'll branch mine from there. one path straight out from my stairs every 3 blocks.


that's a long post and i don't expect everyone to read it, but what do YOU do?!

I just walk around my world for along time till I deside what huge thing I want to build for the next 3+ days. Then I start gathering my supply's by DUPING LOL. Then I make one chest to start and one workbench, then make the door for the entrance. And just continue till its done.

I have a habit of putting stairs everywhere in caves so i can go up and down them with ease. So in a sense it looks like the crazy stairways in the David Bowie movie Labyrinth. And by doing that i manage to find my way around, unless of course the place way huge to begin with. I get lost in most of my caves and actually enjoy that time trying to figure out how i go in in the first place.

Other than that i usually build with the terrain, as in what ever feels right in that/those specific spot(s). When it is my own house i usually find a hole somewhere and tend to build dirt around the edge and make a doorway complete with wooden door, and upgrade it later when i can. Going with the moment as each I enter.

i've still never played on hard. pretty much the only time i go off peaceful is when i need bonemeal or slimes.

First thing I do look at my map, grab wood, get coal, make house and live through the night.

that's what everyone does first, isn't it? >_>

Hehe when I read the name of the thread all I could think about was in Napolean Dynamite, when Napolean was talking about his cousin getting attacked by wolverines. What would YOU do.

For Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, I have been flattening large champaigns, and then building something massive out of all previously collected resources. However, I prematurely plan with lots and lots of blueprints.

I usually play on hard and I have a system.

1st Day: build a dirt shack, furnace and bed. Gather as much wood/cobble as possible
2nd Day: convert my shack to wood and set a huge torch perimeter around my house.
3rd Day: build 60-70 ladders and 7-8 stone pickaxe and descend to bedrock.

Sometimes my descent begins on the 2nd day but realistically I always aim to be at bedrock by the end of the 3rd day

I always build a tiny shack by the spawn, just in case. Then it's off to exploring and finding a good location for my house. Besides the shelter, one of my first priorities is to build a mob trap close to my home. I never play on peaceful, and never have to go hunting for mob drops. I'm always amazed when I visit a world that doesn't have one as it seems like the most logical first step beyond basic survival. Free loot AND less random mobs near my home? WIN!

First thing is to take a good look around the map (if I'm not in survival mode) and see if it's something I will want to play on. If it's a keeper then I will look for a prime building spot, usually a place I saw in my travels. I normally have a small cache of stuff by this time as I'm gather and go. A little coal, maybe some iron, a half stack of wood, a handful of birch saplings, some flowers, sugar cane, cactus, seeds and pumpkins. I don't like to cart materials so will choose spots that have an easy entry point to a potential mine. Either a cave, or shaft or a stone spot on at the base of a mountain. Depending on what I see the area becoming, I might make a small hut with a small sugar cane field and wheat garden until I'm ready to make something bigger. I'll, then, start a stairway to BR and clear out a 20x20 room near the top for storage and another at BR for resource gathering. I'll then dig a tunnel every second or third stair up to level 18 just to see what's around.

Everything else is a decide as I go. Except food, I'm always on the lookout for food sources and will develop those first right along with my permanent base of operations.

1) I carry and a stack of dirt with me wherever I go and fill in the little trip holes that seem to generate initially in a world. I created a new world from my primary seed last night just to compare how things had changed, and I found it surprising how much of a difference there was in how easily I could walk about just by doing these quick little bits of land fill on each exploration of the surface. If I encounter a "floating sand" area, I generally set it off so it doesn't catch me off guard later.

2) I mine several different ways. I do use the drift mining system the OP described, but I've also used a cave to get closer to bedrock and then started a staircase from the bottom of that and then drifts and later cross-drifts depending on what I find. I don't much mining above level 16, since I seem to be finding ample iron, coal, gold and lapis below level 16 and I prefer to spend my time in a layer range where I also having the possibility of finding diamonds.

3) Whenever I chop down a tree as a wood source, I generally replant one of the saplings that falls in the same spot. However, this sort came back to bite me in that my forest areas got too dense to allow some of the passive mobs to spawn. I'm currently doing some thinning and my passive mob spawn rates in those areas seems to be increasing. Obivously, I don't replant if I'm clearing land for building.

4) I tend to make my little monster traps and such a long distance (more than 128 blocks) from my home base and major structures. (I don't have a real mob grinder as yet.) I have just a small hut in my "monster" zone. This way, when I go out of peaceful mode to allow monsters to spawn, it is unlikely that creepers will wind up blowing holes in my nicer buildings since they should despawn when they get more than 128 blocks from me.

5) I tend to disable my nether portal after I return from a nether mining trip (by removing 1 block of obsidian). When I feel the urge to go back to get more glowstone, I'll replace the block, light the portal and go. That way I have my flint and steel and some more obsidian on me in case the portal gets disabled from the other side.