For information about Coder Kids classes and camps, including online coding and gaming topics, visit register.coderkids.com/onlineclasses

How to Craft and Build Basic Houses, Weapons, and Armor in Minecraft – a Beginner’s Guide

As we have covered in previous articles, Minecraft is one of the top games you need to add to your collection, Minecraft is a widely popular game whose main component involves building and crafting the assorted objects that your character needs to survive in a hostile environment. However, our previous articles have only scratched the surface of Minecraft and they haven’t gone into detail about exactly how to build and craft in a game that is almost entirely about those two gameplay features. This article aims to fix that.

In this article, we will explore where to find the different raw materials, how to craft the raw materials into the necessary components to build with, and how to begin building and crafting your first weapons (both melee and ranged), first set of armor, and your first home. The path ahead is convoluted and difficult but stick with us (pun intended) and you’ll be building the Taj Mahal in Minecraft and crafting weapons and armor like the Romans in no time (figuratively, of course).

Preliminary Steps

You can’t just start building right away. First, you have to complete three steps that will allow you to gather and turn raw materials into building materials: crafting a crafting table, crafting a pickaxe, and crafting a furnace.

Crafting a Crafting Table

The ironic thing about Minecraft is that to start crafting, you first need to craft a crafting table. To build a crafting table, you first need to chop down a tree. Unrealistically, Minecraft Steve is magically strong enough to chop down an entire tree with his bare hands, so you don’t have to worry about acquiring a secondary tool to start chopping. Once you have chopped down a tree, you need to go into your crafting menu where you will see a 2x2 crafting grid. When you place any log of wood into the crafting grid, it will create four wooden planks – lucky for you, four wooden planks are all you need to build your crafting table! Simply distribute the pieces of wood into each of the four squares by clicking on them and there you have it, a fully functional crafting table. Place your crafting table in the world and you’re ready to move onto crafting your first pickaxe!

Crafting Your First Pickaxe

To craft a wooden pickaxe, you will need three planks of any wood. Each log of wood makes four planks, which means that you will only have to chop down one tree to make your first pickaxe.

Next, you need to go into your crafting menu which is comprised of a 3x3 square. To craft your pickaxe, you need to arrange your materials according to Minecraft’s “crafting” recipe (each buildable item in the game has one). The recipe for a wooden pickaxe is three planks going across the top row and the two sticks going downward from underneath the second wooden plank. A picture demonstration of how your crafting menu should look is provided below.

Once you’ve created your first pickaxe, drag it into your inventory and voila – you’re ready to start mining! Keep in mind that your wooden pickaxe is very fragile and because of Minecraft’s durability feature, it will eventually break and need to be replaced, so make sure that you have extra wood and planks handy and be prepared to craft a stone pickaxe or another stronger ax at the first opportunity!

Crafting a Furnace

Now that you’ve crafted your pickaxe, you need to mine eight pieces of cobblestone and arrange them around the perimeter of the 3x3 crafting grid, leaving an empty space in the second block of the second row (dead middle). Refer to the below image. This will craft a furnace which can be placed anywhere. The next step is to gather fuel for your furnace. The furnace needs a flammable material such as coal or wood to burn. Coal can be mined from the mountain regions, and you can find trees all around the surface. Coal gets you far more usage (eight times per lump of coal) versus the two that wooden objects give you, but with how plentiful wood is, it might balance out. Now that you have gathered the fuel for your furnace, you can now smelt ingots and get building!

Where to Gather Raw Materials

In the world of Minecraft, raw materials and other natural resources come in the form of “blocks” that are obtained by doing an assortment of tasks such as mining or chopping down trees, depending on what material you are trying to obtain.

Minecraft’s open world is broken down into 128 blocks or “layers” with different quantities and combinations of raw materials being found in each layer, and bedrock making up the bottom.

If you don’t want to go searching for the materials for your first home underground, you can use the items that are easily obtained near the surface such as sand, dirt, or cobblestone, which is by far the most plentiful building block you will find to build your first house. Cobblestone can be easily obtained and used as is to build your home or can be smelted into stone and smooth stone using the crafting recipe.

To craft a stone block, you need to place your cobblestone on the top row of the furnace crafting menu and the fuel (wood or coal) on the bottom row, which will create stone. Stone then can be smelted into smooth stone by adding the regular stone back to the crafting grid and adding more fuel to the furnace.

Another common building block is iron. Iron ore first appears in layer sixty-eight all the way down to the bedrock. The most populous layers to find iron ore veins would be at layer fifty or lower. You will need iron to craft your first set of armor, sword, and a better pickaxe. Keep in mind that your wooden pickaxe won’t cut it for iron ore – you’ll need a stone pickaxe or better to mine iron.

Several potential building blocks are made by smelting down other raw materials. To make brick blocks, you need to obtain a clay block by visiting a river or lake region. You then must break open the clay block to obtain clay balls, which then can be smelted into brick by combining the clay balls with a fuel in the furnace crafting menu.

·       Sand is found in desert regions or on the ocean floor.

·       Dirt is found under layers of grass in grassy areas.

·       You can also make a house out of wood, which is plentiful on the surface.

Now that you’ve gathered your building blocks of choice, it’s finally time to get building and crafting!

Building Your First Home

Your home is your base of operations in Minecraft. It’s a safe space that protects you from predators and allows you to store your belongings and take a much-needed load off. The first step you should take when building your home is to place torchers around the perimeter to light up the area to make building easier, and to keep spawns who prefer darkened corners at bay. Torches are crafted by combining coal or charcoal with a stick on the second and third block of the second row, with the coal on top and the stick on the bottom.

Next, you can start placing blocks in your desired location. First, place down the blocks that will serve as the foundation of your home in the desired shape and then continue to stack the blocks on top of one another until they are three or four blocks high. To build a roof, simply place blocks side-by-side on the top of your last layer of blocks. To make a door, you need six planks of wood. The crafting recipe for a door is a piece of wood in each of the boxes of the first two columns (starting from the left). You can now enter your home and change up the flooring if you wish by throwing down more blocks to cover the natural grassy flooring.

It is recommended that you build a bed as soon as possible, as having a bed will allow you to sleep at night when dangerous spawns come out and will also serve as a sort of save point that you respawn at if you die. Beds are made by crafting three pieces of wool with three planks of wood on the bottom two rows of the crafting table, wool on top and wood on bottom. Wool can be gathered by shearing sheep or by gathering string from spider spawns and then crafting the string into wool.

To make windows for your home, you need sand and a fuel source. Combine these two elements in the furnace and you’ve got yourself glass. Combine six glass blocks together in the crafting menu (completely fill out the first two rows) and you have a glass pane. Now get destructive and break the blocks of your house where you want the windows to go and now you have a home with plenty of natural light!

You should also consider making a chest in which to store your valuables and to avoid cluttering up your inventory with unneeded treasures. A chest requires eight wooden planks arranged around the perimeter of the crafting grid with a block left empty in the middle, just like for the furnace.

Other items like chairs and bookshelves can be crafted, but for your basic starter home, a bed and a chest are undeniably the top two necessities.

Crafting Your First Armor Set and Weapon

A full set of armor (helmet, chest piece, pants, and boots) consists of twenty-four blocks of either iron, gold, leather, or diamond. Since this is your first set, we’re going to start with iron. Once you have mined twenty-four iron ores and smelted them into ingots, it’s time to get crafting. The crafting recipe for each piece of armor are as follows:

Helmet

Chest Piece

Pants

Boots

Congratulations! You now have basic armor fit for a knight. Now, onto the final step – crafting your first weapons. In Minecraft, you can choose to fight with a sword, trident, axe, or crossbow. For this article, we’ll teach you how to make a basic iron sword and a crossbow for ranged combat.

To make your iron sword, you need two iron ingots and a stick. Position them in the second row with the first two blocks containing the iron and the bottom block containing the sword. You are now equipped with your first melee weapon!

To make a crossbow, you need to acquire three sticks, two strings, one iron, and one tripwire hook. Tripwire hooks are made by combining one iron, one stick, and one plank in that order in the second column of the crafting menu. The crafting recipe is more complex than any other recipes that we’ve covered, so a picture instead of a description can be found below.

An important thing to remember is that Minecraft does have a durability system, which means that your weapons and armor won’t last forever. To repair a damaged item, combine the item with a raw material of the same type (iron sword = iron ingot). You can repair an item in the crafting menu or at a grindstone.

Conclusion

And there you have it! You have officially crafted your first starter home, first armor set, and first weapons in Minecraft! Now you’re ready to move onto bigger and better things in the blocky world of Minecraft. Don’t worry though, once you are ready to upgrade your starter armor and weapons to stronger materials, you can still use this guide as the crafting formula itself does not change, just the ingredients!

Thanks for reading and tell us in the comments if you would like to see more Minecraft-related articles and be sure to check out our other articles on the best games for different systems! Until next time, keep mining!

As an Amazon Associate, Coder Kids earns from qualifying purchases.