When you are mining in Minecraft, you often find yourself wandering far afield from your home or shelter. This is good, because the more area you cover, the more resources you can have access to- but you will need to be careful. It’s a dangerous world out there, and dying at the wrong time or in the wrong place can leave valuables you have dug up or collected lying in a place you can’t reach- or can’t reach fast enough.
The simple solution to this, though, is the mining camp, or base camp.
A base camp is a group of tools and possibly a small shelter that you set up in a central or important location away from your home, so that you can keep your resources safe from accidents. Generally speaking, you will want to place a mining camp and then return to it every so often to drop off important things like diamonds or redstone, thereby keeping them from being burnt if you should fall in lava, or scattered willy-nilly if you die to a large slime, drowning, ambush by skeletons or zombies, or being suffocated in gravel or sand.
A base camp is very similar to a basic shelter, with the primary difference being that it is not where you want to spawn or spend most of your time.
The essential components of a base camp are:
A crafting table
A furnace
A box
And, of course,
Light.
You will want to keep a crafting table at your mining camp so that you can replace or upgrade tools frequently, saving yourself some inventory space for spare picks and shovels. The box, perhaps obviously, is there so that you can drop off valuable resources frequently and keep them out of your inventory- which will both keep you from running out of space in your pack and keep you from losing what you have dug up to an accident.
The furnace is very important as well- coal can be found everywhere underground, and is necessary to turn ore into bars of material. However, it takes more space to bring coal and blocks of ore back to your base than it does to bring smelted ingots back. So, to save time, you can use your mining camp to smelt the ore ‘in the field’, so to speak, and save yourself the trouble of bringing coal back to your base and then waiting while you’re there for the ore to finish.
Light is usually found in the form of torches and, by placing your torches creatively, you can mark the direction to your nearest mining base as well as the way back to your home.
Typically, a mining base is not a closed shelter- it is not intended to be a place where you keep everything, just a convenient storage location while you are mining and exploring the world. Properly using a mining camp or base camp can save you loads of time and frustration in lost materials, particularly since monsters will never bother any objects you lay out. It usually is not a good idea to place your bed in such a camp, though, as mines frequently open into large, dark ravines or series of caverns, and respwaning with a skeleton staring at you really just doesn’t work out well.
Base camps are an excellent convenience when you are exploring, digging, or harvesting far afield, so never forget to lay one out for yourself. It may not save your life too frequently, but it will often save your diamonds, and it will nearly always save you time. After all, it will be closer than your home is, and easier and possibly safer to reach when you need more tools.
