Starter Builds
Quick shelters, day-one builds, and early-game survival structures.
The fastest possible shelter for surviving night one. Dig into a hillside or build a dirt box, light it up, and add a crafting table. Upgrade to a real house later.
A properly mob-proofed starter shelter with full lighting coverage, a door, and all essential crafting stations. Cobblestone walls take a creeper blast far better than dirt or wood.
A starter house with an attached farm plot. The house section has all crafting stations, and the farm area includes a water-fed crop field with fencing.
What a first-night shelter needs
The first night asks for very little: walls, a roof, a floor with no dark spots and a bed. Looks can wait until you have iron.
- Light
- In the Overworld, monsters spawn where the block light is 0 and the sky light is 7 or lower. A torch gives light level 14 and loses one level for every block you move away from it, so a single torch keeps a small room safe, and a few outside stop mobs from spawning at your door.
- Walls
- A normal creeper explodes with a power of 3. Cobblestone has a blast resistance of 6, against 3 for oak planks and 0.5 for dirt, which is why the mob-proof shelter is built from it and the day one bunker should be upgraded to it.
- Door
- Zombies only break wooden doors on Hard difficulty. On Easy and Normal a wooden door is enough; on Hard, use an iron door with a button or put a block in the doorway at night.
- Bed
- Sleeping skips the night and sets your spawn point at the bed, so dying no longer sends you back to world spawn. Trying to sleep in the Nether or the End makes the bed explode.
The starter farm house adds food. Farmland stays hydrated with water up to four blocks away, diagonals included, so one water block in the middle of a 9×9 plot keeps all of it wet.
Furnace, fuel and torches
A furnace needs 10 seconds for every item. One piece of coal or charcoal burns long enough for 8 items, a log or a plank for 1.5 and a stick for 0.5, and a lava bucket smelts 100 items before handing the empty bucket back. With no coal around, smelt logs into charcoal, which burns exactly as long as coal.
One coal or charcoal on top of a stick makes 4 torches. Put a copper nugget above that and you get 4 copper torches instead, with the same light level of 14.
Keeping mobs away from the door
Most monsters need a full, solid top surface to spawn on. Glass, leaves, trapdoors, scaffolding and copper grates don't count, so a glass roof or a floor of trapdoors stays free of spawns even in the dark, while a top slab or upside-down stairs still let mobs appear.
Fences have a collision box 1.5 blocks tall, which most mobs can't jump, and a carpet on a fence post lets you hop over while mobs still can't. Spiders climb walls but never along the underside of a block, so a one-block overhang at the top of a wall keeps them out.