How to survive your first few nights in Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition

Playing Minecraft for the first time can be a daunting experience. You are dropped into a weird, foreign world and asked to survive.

To help you get through the first few nights, we wanted to put together a handy tutorial that walks you through the basics of making tools, building a house, making a spawn point, and feeding yourself.

Sure, the Vita version carries a full tutorial to the game. But this is your quick fire guide that will get you started and leave all the fun stuff - exploring, fighting, discovering - to you.



From the menu, choose 'Play Game', then 'Create New World'. You can then set a few options for your new environment like the name, and seed (a code that forces the random level generator the spit out a specific world. Keep it blank for now).

You can also pick a game mode - survival makes you seek out resources and food, and fills the game world with enemies. Creative gives you unlimited blocks and no dangers to deal with. We're going for survival here.

You can also set the difficulty, and tweak even more options - like whether you want this to be an online world, or if you want structures to appear on the map - by tapping on 'More Options'.

When you're ready, hit 'Create New World'.



You will be dropped into your new world. Your first order of business is to find a tree and mine it with the right shoulder button (it will look like you're punching it). You will eventually smash the tree to bits, at which point you can pick up little blocks of wood for your inventory.

Repeat until you have about 10 blocks.



Press the square button to open the crafting menu. Find the Wood Planks recipe (it may be called something slightly different, like Oak or Spruce Wood Planks, depending on which tree you mined) and press X to craft it.

This will turn one wood block into four planks. Repeat until all your wood has turned into planks.



Next, let's make a crafting table. Find the crafting table recipe in the crafting menu and press X to make one. It requires four wooden planks, which we made in the previous step.



Leave the crafting menu. Your newly manufactured crafting table will now be in your hand. Place it down on the floor with the left trigger button.

Once it's on the floor, press the left trigger button while looking at the crafting table to open it. This reveals a more in depth crafting menu where you can make bigger and better things.



First things first - sticks! Make a few bundles of sticks from your planks. Two planks makes four sticks, so you can get a nice pile of them without using up all your planks.



Next: a pick axe. Choose the 'Tools and Weapons' section of the crafting table menu and choose the wooden pick axe. This thing costs two planks and two sticks and while it's about as useful as chocolate underpants it will make a good starting point.

You see, different materials are stronger than others, and require more powerful tools to mine. That's why we could punch a soft wooden tree, but it would take forever to dislodge a stone block with our bare hands.

So that's why we have a wooden pickaxe. Exit the crafting table menu (and mine the table to put it in your inventory if you want to carry it with you) and go find some stone.



Here's some! Smash away at the stone with your wooden pick axe and pick up the little blocks to add them to your inventory. When you have a bunch, return to your crafting table.



Next, we're going to make a stone pick axe. It's much stronger than the wooden one, meaning it will mine blocks faster and last longer. Find the wooden pick axe in the crafting table menu and hit down.

This lets you cycle through different types of axe. In this case, we want to make a stone one. Make sure you have enough sticks and make the axe. Bang, now we know all about making stuff.



We're going to dig deep into the Earth now, and we're looking for two types of stone. One has black splotches, like above. Smash them apart to get chunks of coal.



With some coal and sticks you can craft coal torches (you don't need a crafting table for these) which illuminate dark caves, which help you find stuff when mining - and keep the monsters at bay.



Secondly, we want iron ore which looks like the image above - stone, with brown splotches. You need a stone pick axe to dislodge these, so don't even try with a wooden one.

This stuff can be very tricky to find. Just keep digging deeper and deeper until you get some. We'll wait.



Okay. Now plop down your crafting table (or make a new one, or go back and find your old one) and make a furnace from stone. It's under structures. Press down on the crafting table recipe to find it. Plop the furnace down and then use it.



Put the iron ore in the top slot (ingredient) and either coal or sticks in the bottom (fuel). After a while, iron ingots will appear. Drag them from the output section of the furnace interface and into your inventory.



These ingots let you craft iron tools (maybe make a pickaxe and a sword if you have loads of iron) and our next important item: the shears.



Find a sheep (listen out for that telltale "baaaa") and then use your shears, with the left shoulder button, to rip some wool off its back. Do it on another sheep so you have a nice stash. Don't worry, this will make sense soon.



Find a nice spot and make a house out of stone. Give it four walls and a roof. Craft a wooden door out of planks, and put your crafting table and furnace inside. A torch, too.



And here's why we made that wool. Use the crafting table to make a bed and plop it down. This is a super useful item - not only does it let you sleep through the night, but it also makes a respawn point so you'll warp back to your house if you die. Hooray!



Our final task is to make some food. First, mine any tufts of grass you see and sometimes seeds will pop out. Repeat until you have a nice stash.



Make a hoe on the crafting table and then use it while looking down at the grass to till the land. Plant the seeds using the left shoulder button and then wait.



Eventually the seeds will grow into wheat, like this. When you mine it you'll get some wheat and some seeds so you can grow more crops. It's the perfect self-sufficient food system.

When you get three lots of wheat you can make some bread in the crafting menu, which will satisfy your hunger.

There are loads of things to eat - you can make an iron bucket and milk a cow, get eggs from chickens, find fruit on trees, and kill animals to get meat (which can be cooked in a furnace).

Whatever the case, we are now ready to play Minecraft properly. We have a house, we know how to make tools, and we know how to feed ourselves. It's now just a case of digging, exploring, mining, and crafting. Good luck!