Making a Crafting Table
Obtain wood. The first thing you need to do is to find a tree. When you find one, press and hold the left mouse button (PC), press the Left Bumper button (Xbox) while facing the trunk, or simply tap the trunk with your finger (PE). You’ll see your character’s hand punching at the wood and leaving cracks on it. Continue punching until one block of wood pops off, and it automatically goes to your hotbar. You can keep punching trees until you feel like you have enough wood for later, but for now, this single block of wood is all you need to make your crafting table.
Open your inventory/crafting menu. Press the E key (PC), the X button (Xbox), or the […] icon (PE) to view your inventory, and you’ll see, aside from several boxes where your items are stored in, there is also a set of four empty boxes arranged into a box formation with an arrow pointing towards a single empty box. That is your initial crafting grid, where you can make various things. However, seeing as it only has 4 slots in the grid, you can’t make anything complicated with it, which is why you need a crafting table.
Craft planks. Place your wood on one of the slots by selecting it (clicking on it for the PC versions, scrolling to it with the RB and LB buttons on the Xbox, and tapping it in PE), and you’ll see that an item appears on the single box. It’s a plank, and one block of wood is worth 4 planks right off the bat. If you’ve got more wood, feel free to convert it all to planks, but for now, all you’ll be needing are 4 wood planks
Use the planks to make a crafting table. Place one wood plank on each box of the four boxes in the crafting grid, and you’ll see another item on the rightmost box again. Take that item, and you now have a crafting table!
Learn to use the crafting table. To use the crafting table, simply drag it to your hotbar, “hold” it by using your mouse’s scroll button or by pressing the corresponding number on its hotbar placement. Place it on the ground by right-clicking while holding it, and then right-click it again. It will bring you to a window that has a 3x3 version of the crafting window in your inventory.
Creating Tools
Obtain more wood. Go on and punch some more trees and turn some of those wood into planks! Around 3–5 pieces of wood will suffice, depending on how many of these tools you’ll be making.
Open the crafting table. On the PC, all you need to do is right-click it. On the Xbox, press X. On PE, just tap it.
Craft sticks. Now, you’ll be needing some sticks, which you can make by crafting two planks placed vertically on the crafting window, and it will reward you with 4 sticks. You’ll be needing this to make the torches, pickaxes, and axes, which you will need to gather materials. At least 3 blocks worth of planks will suffice for the creation of many basic tools for your venture.
Craft a pickaxe. Fill up the first row of the crafting table’s grid with planks—or cobblestone, if you managed to get those and want a better pickaxe—then put two sticks on the middle column. It should look like this in the grid: X = empty space m = material s = stick m m m X s X X s X The resulting item will appear in the single box at the side of the grid.
Craft an axe. Making an axe is similar, but the third plank from the left is moved to the first block second row. It should look like this in the grid: X = empty space m = material s = stick m m X m s X X s X
Learn to use your tools. To use your tools, simply place them on your hotbar, which can hold up to 9 items at a time. Hold the item you want to use the tool on by scrolling to it with the mouse scroll button or pressing the number corresponding to it in your keyboard (PC), using the Left and/or Right Bumper buttons on your controller (Xbox), or tapping it with your finger (PE). Then use your tool by holding the left mouse button (PC), holding down the Left Trigger button of your controller (Xbox), or tapping and holding it (PE). You can use the axe to chop trees down faster and pickaxes to gather cobblestone by going to a hard (takes too long to crack when punching) gray block and hitting it with your pickaxe.
Gathering Materials
Use your axe to chop down more trees. Since this is a wooden house, your main resource is trees, and lots of it. So keep punching those trees until you have at least 2 full stacks (64 blocks each) of both Wood and Planks. If you can find other kinds of trees, even better! This will add variation and color to your house. There are different trees for different biomes, and biomes are scattered around the world. Oak and Birch are the most common trees. Birch has a white trunk with black stripes, and its planks are very pale in color. Oak is the usual kind, with a brown trunk and a lighter-brown grain. Spruce is a very tall tree with darker green leaves and is a little harder to find, usually in very cold Biomes or high up in mountains. The wood and grain is a very dark, rich brown. Acacia is a tree found in dry-looking areas called savannahs. The tree grows sideways, with a grayish trunk and a bright orange grain. Dark Oak is an unusually thick and large tree found in a Roofed Forest biome and is usually found near Giant Mushrooms. It’s got a darker trunk and dark, slightly muddier grain from regular oak, and the planks are a darker brown than spruce. Jungle Wood is the rarest type of wood currently in the game, due to the scarcity of Jungle biomes. Jungle trees are tall with unusual leaves (green speckled with oval yellowish “fruits”), and the planks have a brown-pink grain.
Craft a furnace. While not strictly necessary for the basic structure, furnaces are useful if you want to make glass for your windows, a brick roof, or use it to simply smelt iron for better tools. To make a furnace, gather some stone, go to your crafting table, and place stone on all sides of the crafting grid, leaving the middle slot free. m m m m X m m m m To smelt things, put the material you want converted, like sand or clay, on the top square, then put something flammable like wood or coal on the bottom square, and after a short wait, your item is converted to another! Iron and Gold ore need to be smelted before you can make items with them.
Craft your torches. One valuable material you can make whenever you want are torches, and for that you need coal and/or charcoal. Coal is somewhat easy to find, since it resembles stone with black spots on it, and when you gather it with a pickaxe, a piece of coal is dropped. Charcoal is also easy to make if you have a furnace and some wood. You simply smelt the wood, not planks but actual wood, and it turns into charcoal! Crafting torches is as simple as stacking a piece of coal over a stick on the crafting window, and you immediately get 4 torches, which is good, since you’ll need as many of them as you can to light the way and ward off monsters!
Making the Wooden House
Locate a free space. At the absolute minimum, you’ll be needing about a 5x5 square of free space to build your house. This is to accommodate a bed, a chest, and a crafting table without running out of room to move, but you can build a bigger house if you feel like it or if you have enough resources. If you want to clear out an area, simply start punching the ground blocks in the nearby area until you have a flat space. You might need a pickaxe or axe if the area is rocky or full of trees. At the very beginning, it’s best to build your house near the spawn point, which is where you first appear once you make your world, and where you end up in whenever you die. This will provide you a steady shelter from whatever monsters lurk in the night, and a place to keep all your stuff.
Create an outline. Line out your house’s shape by laying down wood blocks, which can be done by selecting your desired material and pressing the right mouse button, RT button, or tapping on where you think the house’s corners will be. This will not only help you keep track of your house and its size and shape, but it will also make your wood house look more sturdy, and looks nice once you start adding your walls. Connect the walls together with Wood Planks to create an outline, but remember to keep one space open to serve as your door so you can go in and out. Build up the wood posts by placing more blocks on top of the corner blocks until it’s at least 4 blocks tall. They’ll serve as the guide to how tall your house is, or even as a base for a second floor if you want.
Build up the walls. A house needs walls, so slowly fill in the spaces between the pillars with your Wood Planks by building on the outline of the house, but take care to leave the door space at least two blocks high and to leave a small window now and then to let in light.
Create a roof. A house also needs a roof, so fill in the top of the wall by placing blocks inwardly from the topmost blocks until the inside of your house is covered. Now if you don’t want a square-ish house, you can slope the roof a bit. The simplest way to do this, and the method that works best on a less-complicated house design, is to line a row of wood placed straight horizontally to create a “beam,” around the topmost block of the walls adjacent to your door, then stacking more beams on both sides diagonally until they meet. Another way to create a nice roof is by crafting stairs! To craft stairs, you need your trusty crafting table. Starting from the left, fill the entire leftmost column with wood planks. Fill the bottom row with the same material, and then place a block of the material on the middle block so it resembles a stair. X X m m X X X m m or m m X m m m m m m You’ll be rewarded with 4 stairs. You can then repeat the same process of stacking them diagonally on your house like in the blocky roof method, but if there is a single block of free space between them, make some slabs by lining a row with the same kind of wood you made stairs from, and use those to join the stairs. Make sure to line the bottom of your roof with the same kind of wood as your pillar, and fill the rest of the gap with the same kind of planks as your house! Out of the two methods for creating a roof, the stairs method is the most convincing and visually pleasing, but costs more time, materials, and effort.
Making a Home Out of the House
Craft a door. Making a door is both nice-looking and useful, since it prevents monsters and other creatures from invading your little hideout when you keep it closed. Take six wood planks, and access your crafting table. Fill two columns on the crafting space and you’ll get three doors. Go up to the house opening and install the door by placing it on the open space you left on the wall so you can protect your privacy! On PC, different kinds of wood make different styles of doors, so feel free to experiment!
Craft a bed. Beds are wonderful, soft things. The best part is that if you die, you just wake up beside it, though you drop all your stuff where you died and you’ll have to get it back. To make one, like the bottom row of your crafting table’s grid with planks, then the middle with wool, and take out your resulting bed! Now place it inside your house, and then at night, or during random thunderstorms, you can right-click it to sleep the danger away! Wool can be acquired by killing or shaving sheep. To kill sheep, keep punching a sheep or hitting it with your tool until it falls down. Killing yields 1 Wool. Shaving requires Shears, which can be acquired by smelting iron ore into iron ingots, then laying them diagonally in your inventory crafting grid or crafting table. Now select the Shears and go up to your sheep. In the PC version, you right-click it; on Xbox, you press LT; and on PE, you tap and hold. Shearing a sheep would leave you a bald-but-alive-sheep and 1–3 Wool.
Create flooring. Grass is nice, but not for indoors, so scoop out the first layer of dirt blocks on the inside of your house and replace them with any material you want. Remember, choosing a different material like stone or brick, or choosing a different kind of wood from your house’s main material, will add a dash of color and make your house look inviting.
Create windows in your walls. While you may have some holes punched on the walls for your windows, they’d look better (and be safer) if you put some glass on them. Simply smelt some sand, which you can usually find near water or a desert, and place it on the holes. Be careful when placing them inside the window gaps, though; they break too easily, and you can’t gather the glass back if you place the block wrong!
Place torches for lighting. When it gets dark, you’d prefer some light, so putting some torches along the walls would definitely brighten up the space! The windows do a fair enough job during the daytime, but when night comes, the light keeps the monsters from appearing in your house, so better invest on torches!
Surround the house with a picket fence. A picket fence is also nice to look at, and adds a layer of protection from the monsters. Line two stacks of planks on the left and the right columns of your crafting table, and line two stacks of sticks on the middle column. Take your fence and place it around your house, but be sure to leave a gap you can go through! The recipe for Xbox uses sticks and only sticks lining two rows of the crafting grid. Adding a fence gate makes it more secure, and the recipe is just the reverse of the fence itself: line the left and right column with two stacks of sticks each, then grab your brand-new fence gate and place it on the gap on your fence! Ta-da! A nice little picket fence with a sturdy gate! Minecraft PC and Pocket Edition now have fences made from different wood, so you can choose if you want a dark (Spruce, Dark Oak) fence, a light (Birch, Oak) fence, or a colorful (Jungle, Acacia) one!
Have fun with the house! Now that your home is complete and secure, take a moment to rejoice and think up of ways to spruce it up a bit! Feel free to fill the house with goodies, furniture, and such. Experimenting with slabs, stairs, blocks, and fences is the way to go with this one, so run wild and feel free to create whatever you want!
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