Improving Your Tools 53

CAUTION
Don’t Let Tools Wear Down to Nothing!

Try not to let a tool become so worn it actually breaks down completely and disap-
pears. Instead, place two of the same type of worn tools in the crafting grid to com-
bine their remaining strength into another and give it a second shot at life, or busting
blocks.

The recipes for crafting tools from all materials are identical, save for the replacement of the
head of the implement with the material of choice.
Q To make a stone pick, you need two wooden sticks for the handle and three cobble-
stone blocks.

Q Replace in the same way for the axe and the sword.

Q You might also want to add a shovel to your collection, because it’s about four times
faster than using hands to harvest softer materials such as dirt, gravel, sand, clay, and
snow, and helps some of those blocks deliver resources rather than just breaking down.

As you craft more items, you need to find somewhere to store those you don’t need to use
right away. You should also store other resources and food you come across on your travels.
That comes next.
54 CHAPTER 3: Gathering Resources

Chests: Safely Stash Your Stuff

Whenever you head away from your secure shelter, there is always a reasonably high risk of
death. Creepers, lava pits, long falls—they can all do you in. Respawning is only a moment
away, but the real danger here is that any items you’ve collected and carry in your charac-
ter’s inventory drop at the location of your untimely death and may prove impossible to
retrieve in the 5 minutes you have to get back to them before they disappear forever.
Chests act as an insurance policy. Put everything you don’t need in a chest before you
embark on a mission, and those things will be there when you get back or after you
respawn.
The natural place to leave chests is in your shelter, but you can also leave them elsewhere,
perhaps as a staging point as you work away in a mine, or even outside. Mobs will leave
them alone, and the only real risk you face is leaving them out in the open on a multiplayer
server or getting blown up from behind by a creeper in singleplayer mode while you’re rum-
maging around inside.
Chests come in two sizes: single and double. A single chest can store 27 stacks of items.
Create a double chest by placing two single chests side by side. The double chest stores up
to 54 stacks of items. Given that a stack can be up to 64 items high, that’s an astonishing
potential total of 3,510 blocks in a crate that takes just 2×1 blocks of floor space. If you’ve
ever followed the Doctor Who TV series, consider chests the Tardis of storage!
Create a chest at your crafting table with eight blocks of wooden planks arranged around
the outside, leaving a space in the middle.

Place and then right-click the chest to open. You can then move items back and forth
between your inventory and the chest. In Figure 3.4, I’ve transferred all the items I don’t
need for the next expedition.
Before you head out, there are two other things you should know: how to avoid monsters
and how to deal with hunger. Read on.
56 CHAPTER 3: Gathering Resources

There are 14 types of hostile mobs in the Overworld. These are the ones you might meet on
your second day outside:
Q Zombies—Zombies burn up in sunlight but can still survive in shadows or rain, or when
wearing a helmet, and, of course, in dark caves all hours of the day or night. They are
relatively easy to defeat, and if any come after you, just head to a well-lit area and keep
your distance while they burn up in the sun.
Q Skeletons—Skeletons also burn up in sunlight unless they are wearing a helmet, and they
can survive at any time in lower light conditions. They’re quite deadly with a bow and
arrow and best avoided until you have an iron sword and sufficient cover to avoid their
line of fire.
Q Spiders—Spiders come in two variants: large or blue. You’ll probably only see the larger
spiders at this stage. They are passive during the day but become hostile in shadow and
can attack at any time if provoked. They’ll climb, they’ll jump, and they are pretty darn
fast. Fortunately, they’re also easy to kill with some swift sword attacks. The blue spi-
ders are a smaller, poisonous variant called cave spiders. They live only in abandoned
mine shafts underground, but in substantial numbers. If you suffer from arachnopho-
bia, I don’t have much good news for you, except that with a little time you’ll get used
to them and they won’t seem quite so nasty.
Q Creepers—Creepers have a well-earned reputation as the Minecraft bad guys. They are
packed to their green gills with gunpowder, and they’ll start their very short 1.5-second
fuse as soon as they are within three blocks of you. Their explosion can cause a lot of
real damage to you, nearby structures, and the environment in general. If you hear a
creeper’s fuse—a soft hissing noise—but can’t see it, run like heck in the direction you’re
facing. Remember to sprint by double-tapping and holding your W key. With a little
luck, you’ll get three blocks away and the creeper’s fuse will reset. Creepers are usually
best dealt with using a ranged attack from a bow and arrow, but if you sprint at them
with an iron or diamond sword and take a swipe at just the right moment, you can send
them flying back out of their suicidal detonation range, causing the fuse to reset. Most
creepers despawn around noon, leaving the afternoon generally free of their particular
brand of terror.
Q Slimes—Slimes appear in the swamp biome and in some places underground. They ini-
tially spawn as quite large Jello-like green blocks and are more than capable of causing
damage. Attacking eventually breaks them up into 2–4 new medium-sized slimes. These
can still attack but are relatively easily killed, only to spawn a further 2–4 tiny slimes
each! These last don’t cause any attack damage, but may still push you into peril if
you’re unlucky.

If you come across a lone spider, a zombie, or even a slime, now is as good a time as any to
get in some sword practice. Just point your crosshairs at the creature and strike with the left
 Avoiding Monsters 57

mouse button. Keep clicking as fast as you can, and you’ve got a very good chance of killing
the mob and picking up any items it drops before it lands too many blows. Try to avoid the
other mobs for now.

TIP
Switch to Peaceful Mode to Get a Break

Getting mobbed by mobs? Click Esc to open the Options window and change your
difficulty level to Peaceful. This despawns all hostile mobs and allows your health to
regenerate. But do try to switch the level back to Normal as soon as you can.

So how do you avoid mobs? Use these tips to survive:

Q Stay in the open as much as you can, avoiding heavily wooded areas if possible.
Q Most mobs have a 16-block detection radar. If they can also draw a line of sight to
your position, they will enter pursuit mode. (Spiders can always detect you, even through
other blocks.) At that point they’ll relentlessly plot and follow a path to your position,
tracking you through other blocks without requiring a line of sight. Pursuit mode stays
engaged much farther than 16 blocks.
Q Keep your sound turned up because you’ll also hear mobs within 16 blocks, although
creepers, befitting their name, are creepily quiet.
Q Avoid skirting along the edges of hilly terrain. Creepers can drop on you from above
with their fuse already ticking. Try to head directly up and down hills so you have a
good view of the terrain ahead.
Q Mobs are quite slow, so you can easily put some distance between them and yourself by
keeping up a steady pace and circling around to get back to your shelter. Sprint mode
will leave them far behind.

CAUTION
Sprinting Makes You Hungry
Sprint mode burns up hunger points, so try to use it only in emergencies.
58 CHAPTER 3: Gathering Resources

Hunger Management
Hunger plays a permanent role in Minecraft, much as in real life. While it’s only possible
to starve to death on Hard difficulty, hunger does affect your character in other ways, so
it’s always important to ensure you have the equivalent of a couple of sandwiches packed
before heading deep into a mine or on a long trek.
Hunger is a combination of two values: the one shown in the HUD’s hunger bar, as well
as a hidden value called saturation. The latter provides a buffer to the hunger bar, decreas-
ing first. In fact, your hunger bar doesn’t decrease at all until saturation reaches 0. At that
point, you see the hunger bar start to jitter, and after a short while it takes its first hit.
Saturation cannot exceed the value of the hunger bar, so with a full hunger bar of 20 points,
it’s possible to have up to 20 points of saturation. However, a hunger level of 6 points also
only provides a maximum of 6 points of saturation, and that makes you vulnerable.
You’ll find some key information about the hunger system here:
Q On Easy and Normal Survival modes, there is no need to worry too much about hunger
because your character won’t drop dead from it. If you’re close to home and pottering
around in your farm or constructing some building extensions, you’re fairly safe, but
your health starts to drop. Eat something as soon as you can to fill your hunger bar,
and rebuild your health.
Q Sprinting isn’t possible when the hunger bar drops below 6 hunger points, or 3 shanks,
as shown in the HUD.
Q Keeping a relatively full stomach at 18 hunger points (9 shanks in the HUD) allows
health to regenerate at 1 point (half a heart) every 4 seconds.
Q Health depletes if the hunger bar drops to 0, increasing the risk of dying from one of the
many imaginative ways Minecraft has on offer (see Figure 3.5).
Q There are some limits to the amount health can drop according to the difficulty level.
On Easy, health cannot deplete from hunger further than 10 points, or half the full
quotient. On Normal, it drops to 1 point, which is an extreme level of vulnerability. On
Hard difficulty, there are no limits; don’t ignore the hunger bar, or death from starva-
tion could be just moments away. See “Food on the Run” later in this chapter to help
avoid this.