Make a House in Minecraft

As with all survival sandbox games, building a house or base of operations is vital if you want to survive past the first night of the game. It gives you a place to hide your stuff in, a place to craft in, and provides you shelter from the rain, snow, and the monsters appearing at night. Minecraft is no exception, and using simple materials you can gather during the first day, you can make your starter house!

Steps

Making a Crafting Table

  1. Make your crafting table. Before you start, the most important thing is to make a crafting table. It’s the single most important amenity in the game because it lets you create most of the items you’ll be needing throughout your gameplay!
  2. Get at least 4-5 stacks of 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.
    • Make it big enough to put enough rooms.
  3. Open your inventory/crafting menu. Press the “E” button (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. But 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.
  4. Make 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
  5. 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!
  6. 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.
  7. Make sure you have at least three wools in your inventory.

Creating Tools

  1. Get more wood. Feel free to punch some more trees and turn some of those wood into planks! Around 3–5 pieces of wood would suffice, depending on how many of these you’ll be making.
  2. 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.
  3. Create 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 would suffice for the creation of many basic tools for your venture.
  4. Make 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. Take that, and congratulations! Your first tool!
  5. Create 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
  6. 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 (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 gray block and hitting it with your pickaxe!

Gathering Materials

  1. Consider your house material. Now, in Minecraft, practically everything around you could be used to build a house! Most blocks can be stacked together and on top of each other to make your house, though some exceptions include sand, gravel, cacti, and regular ice blocks. If you’re aiming for the simplest house you can build, dirt blocks are efficient enough until you can gather more materials, like stone and wood, but a better (and nicer-looking) house normally has different materials.
  2. Gather the necessities. Having at least a full stack (64 is the maximum amount per stack) of each material you want to use is always a good idea, though more complex structures need more materials, depending on what kind of house you want.
    • Blocks like wood, sand, dirt, gravel (a darker gray block with a rougher texture than stone) and clay (grayish blocks with a texture like sand sometimes found in bodies of water) can be gathered without tools, while harder materials like stone (pure gray “streaked” material) and ores (stone with colored speckles) need a pickaxe to gather, since just punching them or using other tools would just “break” the block and not give you any material.
    • Gravel can be acquired underground or poking from hills and mountains. Dirt can be found everywhere in the world except the surface of the desert. Sand is dominantly found on deserts as a surface material. Clay can be found underwater. Wood can be found almost everywhere in the surface world.
    • Stone-based and other “hard” material have to be mined with a pickaxe. They’re normally available underground or poking out of hills and mountains. Sometimes, they have different-colored materials dotting the surface. Those are ores, and when mined, they break up into smaller items you can’t place. Ores are essential for long-term survival. Coal (distinguishable by black speckling in stone) is the most common encounter when mining, but you’ll occasionally find Iron (pinkish orange) or rarer ores like Gold (bright yellow) and Diamond (bright cyan) if you’re extremely lucky or have dug deep enough.
    • Most of the time, you’ll be spawning in places with trees nearby, and stone and dirt are always abundant if you dig down. Sometimes, though, you’ll be stuck in a desert with nothing but sand as your building material, which isn’t ideal because you can’t make a roof with sand since it’s affected by gravity (falls down when placed above ground). An easy way to remedy this problem is to go to your inventory, then place sand in all four boxes of the crafting grid to make sandstone! You can also encounter sandstone if you dig downwards, but you won’t be able to gather it without pickaxes.
    • Clay is a bit of a troublesome material as well since it breaks up into items instead of blocks, but you can make clay blocks the same way you make sandstone blocks, and then smelt them in a furnace to make hardened clay blocks! Or you could smelt the clay items into bricks, and then create brick blocks the same way you make sandstone and clay blocks.
    • You can tell if it’s a hard material if punching it doesn't immediately show “cracks” in the surface.
  3. Make a furnace. Certain blocks have to be made, however. Blocks like glass, bricks, and hardened clay need a furnace, and you can make one by using the crafting table and filling up all the squares in the grid but the centre square with cobblestone, and it requires wood or coal to use.
    • To smelt things, you 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!
    • You can also smelt ore into other materials for later, too!
  4. Make your torches. Now, 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 Starter House

  1. Find 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 would provide you a steady shelter from whatever monsters lurk in the night, and a place to keep all your stuff.
  2. Create an outline. Line out your house’s shape by laying down blocks, which can be done by selecting your desired material and pressing the right mouse button (PC), RT (Xbox), or tapping it, on where you think the house corners would be. It should preferably be different from the main material you plan on using. This is both to keep track of the size and shape of your building and to keep it looking nice.
    • Lay out the outline of your house with your prefered main building material, but remember to keep one space open to serve as your door so you can go in and out. Build up the corner blocks 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.
  3. Build up the walls. A house needs walls, so slowly fill in the spaces between the pillars 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.
  4. Add 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 blocks around the topmost block of the walls adjacent to your door, then stacking the blocks 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 stone, wood, or brick. 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 materials you made stairs from and use those to join the stairs. Make sure to line the bottom of your “roof” with the same material as your pillar, and fill the rest of the gap with the main building material!
    • 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

  1. Make 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!
  2. Make 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.
  3. Put in 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 from your main building material, or choosing a different kind of wood if you’re using a certain kind of wood as your main building material, would add a dash of color and make your house look inviting.
  4. Put panes on your windows. While you may have some holes punched on the walls for your windows, they’d look lovelier (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!
  5. Place torches for lighting. Now, 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!
  6. 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, then place it around your house, but be sure to leave a gap you can go through!
    • The recipe for PE and 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!
    • Now all you need to do is fill the house with goodies, furniture, and such. Experimenting with slabs, stairs, blocks, and fences are the way to go with this one, so run wild and feel free to create whatever you want!

Tips

  • When placing a bed, make sure it has some space around it so you can get to it easily and you won't suffocate when you wake up.
  • Always take a couple of spare pickaxes mining so you can stay mining for longer.
  • Don't forget to put torches on your roof and around your house if you can.
  • Put up some torches for light and to stop mobs from spawning next to your house.
  • Zombies will try to break your door if it is wooden, and will succeed if you are on hard difficulty. They can also hit you through the door. It's best to open the door and kill them as quickly as possible, or to use an iron door.
  • On your first night in Minecraft, try to get some wool as quickly as possible and make a bed.
  • If you live in a mountain, try mining in there because you're already in stone.
  • If it is sunset and you have not even started making your house, it's best to dig out a place in a hill as a shelter and place some torches, otherwise you might die.
  • You should probably play in creative mode if you want to build without interruption from mobs.
  • Having too much space in your house will create patches of dark spots in your house. But you will want to make it big enough to place everything, so try to find places other than the walls to put torches.
  • Build your house out of cobblestone or brick because it can resist explosions.
  • Place the door(s) and window(s) from the outside of your house so skeletons can't shoot arrows inside.
  • Put torches outside so if you go for resources it's easier to find it at night.
  • Digging a house on the side of a mountain is normally a good starting point and it's more likely that you will spawn near mountains than near a big space for a house!
  • If it is night, do not go outside your house without armor, weapons, and food, because you will be attacked by mobs and maybe die.
  • Don't put too many torches or you won't have enough space for furniture.
  • Don't build at nighttime if you don't have good armor and tools.
  • If you have allowed cheats using the "/gamemode creative" code may help from using up resources, though if you want a cheat-free game play don't use this code.
  • Making a door will allow you to see outside if you don't have enough wool to make a bed.
  • If you want a specific world type in a seed.
  • Make sure you don't run into mobs when you build the house.

Warnings

  • When you finish your house make one hiding spot (far from walls, and not visible from the door) because if any creeper or whatsoever sees you, then it can blow up or kill you!
  • If possible, build your house next to water. Try to build your house on a flat space.
  • Use overhangs, as otherwise, spiders may find a gap and go climb in! (only on survival mode)
  • Do not build your house next to or in a cave. If a creeper comes and blows up your house, then all your hard work goes to waste. If you do build a house in a cave make sure it is high enough to the point where mobs cannot come in and put it on the walls of the cave.
  • Never build your house in an open space because it's likely that you will build it on top of a cave and will not be able to get to sleep because of mobs.
  • Do not put your bed directly in front of the door. If possible, put your bed in the side of your house.

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