Settling In

Once you've addressed your immediate needs for survival, it's time to consider how to make good use of the resources readily available on the surface. The most useful resources early on are wood, cobblestone, string, iron, slime, and bonemeal.

You must first be mindful of your food and water stockpile. When winter comes, crops will die and the fruit on trees will no longer grow. Even stockpiled food will inevitably rot away. Luckily, bonemeal is especially versatile in this magical world. Crops, tree fruits, sugar cane, cacti, and baby cows alike can be coaxed to grow with it.

Once you have a bed, string can then be used to craft your first mesh for your sieve. Sugar cane seeds, redstone, and various magical materials can be acquired from sifting, although the dust which yields more magical materials must be pulverized from an iron hammer. If you have string left over, you may consider crafting it into bait for traps, for an alternative source of animal drops and fish. A trap must be surrounded by adequate grass, water, and sunlight to attract prey.

The best use of your first piece of iron is a shield. Depending on how much ore you have, you may also want to craft an iron hammer to increase your metal yield. The ore must first be crafted into chunks, then the crushed ore repeatedly crafted into blocks and pulverized with the hammer until it is a fine dust. This can be quite time-consuming, however. Quite early on, you should have the materials necessary to craft a divining rod, which can be used to probe for ores. Higher tiers of the rod have a higher max range. [You can change the range of a higher tier rod with a ProjectE keybinding.]

Four types of armor are available to you early on: leather, chainmail, jelled slime, and iron. Two pieces of string crafted together make a good substitute material for leather armor, while chainmail can be crafted with copper ingots. Unfortunately, most armor weighs you down, making it necessary to store it on an armor stand while indoors. [A simple shift-right-click will allow you to swap your armor and shield to and from the armor stand. Shift-right clicking the base of the armor stand swaps your sword or current main held item.]

Once you have acquired a reasonable amount of metal and redstone, you should consider investing in a presser, which will allow you to easily create paper from wood. You will need lots of paper if you want to upgrade the size of your maps, which will be essential for exploring and finding your way back home. Maps can be easily copied, and a copy of a map can be placed in an item frame, where it can act as a waypoint back to your base.

Last but not least, you should strongly consider crafting a shovel. Whispers from other worlds mention the story of a legendary engineer named Direwolf20, who became accustomed to harvesting all blocks with an Industrial mining drill. After several iterations of Redstone Flux technology, his mining drill stopped working after a software update, but then he proceeded to harvest all blocks with a single pickaxe. This habit would lead to his demise. Don't be Direwolf20. Craft a shovel.