How To Play Minecraft

Is your Brisbane Kid asking about Minecraft and you don’t even know how to explain it? Minecraft is a game for kids without instructions, unless you count the books and youtube videos that will assist with Minecraft Tutorials. In the meantime we asked one of our team, Ben, who is 7 years old to explain Minecraft like he is a… 7 year old.

The Basics of Minecraft

Minecraft is a good game for kids because it teaches them about stuff like obsidian, trees, mining and strategies. When you start you have nothing and you have to break wood with your hands, then build tools like a wooden pickaxe, wooden axe, wooden sword and wooden hoe then collect wood with the axe and build a house. But before you get tools and a house you have to turn the wood into planks. Then turn the planks into sticks and build tools and use the other planks to build a house then try to survive the night. The next day you should build a farm to get food and kill some animals. Pigs, chickens and cows all drop meat and sheep drop wool which can be made into beds which you can sleep through the night in, so zombies don’t kill you.

Things to look for in Minecraft

Surface coal, surface iron, gravel (because it gives you flint) villages, rock hills, caves and ravines.

Tips for beginners

1. When you find a rock hill there is normally coal and lava
2. At lava level there are diamonds (at level 18 in depth)
3. Mine in caves
4. Eat food when you are hungry – you can tell you are hungry because your hunger bars go right down

Mining

There are four ways to mine. You can staircase mine from the surface, you can cave mine in caves, you can strip mine where you make a very long tunnel or you can ravine mine where you find a ravine and put a ladder there and mine out the ravine.

Survival and creative modes or hardcore mode

In creative mode of Minecraft you can fly and get what you want and you don’t get hurt so creative mode is good for young kids who just want to test Minecraft and find out about it. It is good if they want to just play and not get hurt.

In survival mode of Minecraft you have to do tasks to get items like wood, iron and coal and then use them to make new items that can help you get even more items. You can’t fly in survival mode and things can hurt you and when you die you came back. Zombies, creepers, zombie villages, zombie pigmen, skeletons, spiders, cave spiders, silverfish, ender men are all things that can hurt you (there are about a zillion more things though). There are different modes in survival, like peaceful, easy, medium and hard. Survival is good for a challenge but can be hard if you set it to a mode that is too high. I recommend you start on peaceful and try out weapons on pigs and cows because they can’t hurt you.

Hardcore Mode is like survival but you don’t come back to life if you die. Older kids like 10-15 year olds might be good for hardcore, it would be a challenge for them. I would recommend only using hardcore once you have mastered survival because it is automatically hard mode and you can’t change it.

Minecraft is a good teaching game for kids. There are many different ways it can be played and strategies that kids need to work out to play it properly. If your child alreayd loves Minecraft then check out our Ultimate Guide to having a Minecraft Party

By BenjaminF

Resources that might help Minecraft Learners

• Written Minecraft Tutorial from beginnings by Gamepedia
• Youtube Tutorial for Minecraft Beginners