...how to do the basics when first starting out in Minecraft (Part 1)As you can see, when you first start a new world in Minecraft, you have nothing on your hot bar or in your inventory.

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The hearts on the left side show how much health you have. The food on the right shows how hungry you are. In Peaceful mode, you do not need to worry about eating. When the game is on a higher difficulty level, you will need to make sure you have a good food supply. (more on that below)

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NOTE (Linda) If you chose to have a Bonus Chest before you created the game, you should look around you when you have appeared at your spawn point. Somewhere close by, there should be a chest with several torches set around it. To open the chest, right-click on it. There will be several wooden tools a little bit of wood, and a couple of food items, usually. This is why it's a "bonus" chest.
You can transfer the items from the chest to your inventory by either clicking on them and then clicking on a slot in your inventory, or by holding down the left-shift key and left-clicking on them to transfer them instantly to the first available spot in your inventory bar. Then you can move them around in your inventory as you like (you'll get your own established pattern for that as you play for a while).
To pick up the torches to keep them in your inventory for later use, left-click on each one, and they will "drop" as Carrie explains below.The first thing you're going to want to do is to find wood. This will allow you to create a crafting table for creating more complex objects. Go to the nearest tree and start punching away by pressing the left mouse button.
As you break each piece of wood, it will land on the ground or pop directly into your inventory, depending on how close you are to it when it falls. To get anything into your inventory, just walk close enough to it and it will automatically be picked up. As you can see, I have 7 pieces of wood so far.

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A huge part of the game play in Minecraft is crafting weapons, tools, materials, etc. For more information on crafting, please visit the
Minecraft Wiki.
Before you collect enough wood to make a crafting table, if you open your inventory window, you will see that you have 4 crafting slots. This is good to use when you are first starting out for crafting things like wood planks, sticks and torches. Since I have collected some wood, I will be turning them into wood planks so I can make a crafting table.

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Materials and ores like wood, cobblestone, sand, iron, gold, etc. come in stacks of 64.
I will be using wood planks to make a crafting table. To do this, select a stack of wood planks and right click to place one in each of the squares.
We have now created a crafting table.

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Left click on the crafting table to take it out of the box to the right of the arrow, then place it in your first hot bar slot.

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From left to right, your hot bar is numbered from 1 to 9. For example, if I would like to select the crafting table in slot #1 so I can place it, I would press the 1 key on my keyboard. As you can see, I am now holding it in my hand.

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To place the crafting table, right click on a piece of land in front of you.

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You can now right click on the crafting table to open up the crafting window. As you can see, we have more boxes for making weapons, tools, etc.

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In Minecraft, one of the main things (and most fun things!) you do is mine for cobblestone, sandstone, etc. and also ores, such as iron, gold and diamonds. To do this, we need to make tools. The first thing we're going to make is a pickaxe. This is the tool that is used the most for mining. Since we already have wood, we will use that to create our first pickaxe.
Open up your crafting table. Place two pieces of wood planks, one on top of the other. As you can see, it makes 4 sticks.

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Grab the sticks you just made and place them into your inventory. We will now use them to create our pickaxe, along with 3 wood planks.

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When crafting, you will notice that the tools, weapons, etc. that you create are basically the same shapes in the crafting table as they are once you craft them. Below are some examples. For more information on crafting, please visit the
Minecraft Wiki.
Sword (used for fighting mobs or killing animals)

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Shovel (used for breaking gravel and sand)

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Axe (used for breaking wooden items)

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*Note: All of your tools and weapons can be upgraded as you find other materials, such as stone (cobble), iron, gold and diamonds.
Since we have some tools, we can now go out and start exploring the area around us. The first thing we are going to look for is coal to make some torches. Torches are basically your best friend in this game. They protect you from mobs and also help you find your way around, especially at night.
Here you can see that I have found some good resources for coal. Caves are usually the best places to find coal and other ores, but coal and iron can also be found on the sides of mountains.

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When collecting coal, you also get experience (XP) points. The green bar below your health and hunger tells you how many XP levels you have. XP levels are used for enchanting items (more on that later).
Now that we have gotten some coal, we can craft some torches. The good thing about making torches is that it can be done without a crafting table.

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Click here for Part 2!