Minecraft Tutorial

You've seen a ton of those massive build videos on Youtube, and you noticed that they're doing it in Survival mode. How? How do they get all these resources? How are they placing down hundreds of iron blocks while you're struggling to simply maintain your iron gear? Well, they more than likely used a variety of farm or various other automation. You can do it as well - just follow these steps.

1. Gathering the resources required

There's always an initial resource investment with these farmers. To even get started, you'll likely need iron for hoppers and a bunch of redstone, as is customary with anything automated. The most efficient way to find minerals is to go exploring in caves, as minerals are more likely to be exposed in a larger cave. However, if you're just starting off and too weak to contend with monsters, then branch mining is the way to go.

The premise is simple. Dig out a "main" branch first, however wide or tall you need it to be. Then, dig a 1x2 tunnel directly out from it. Count out 37 blocks, then stop. Move over four blocks and begin mining another 37 block long tunnel. Rinse and repeat.

You can have the tunnels meet at the end so you don't have to constantly walk back to start over. This is the mathematically optimized mining. If you start digging at the bedrock layer, you'll have diamonds, redstone, gold and iron in spades.

2. Create Easy Transportation to Key Resources

One of the most important blocks in building an aesthetically pleasing room is glass. However, unless you settled in a Desert Biome (Not recommended for beginners), then sand will be a little harder to access than most. That beach is only going to last you so long, and diving underwater to dig at them is annoying more than anything. If you have found a Desert Biome nearby, then you might consider making a railway straight there.

There are a few things to keep in mind for railways. Always start with three gold rails, as that will give you maximum acceleration. Always put a stop block down, unless you fancy flying off the tracks. Going diagonal will give you more speed than going straight, so try to go diagonal as much as possible. 

Finally, know how many powered rails to put down per normal rail to maintain max speed. One of the most optimal setups is one powered rail every 37 normal rails when you're going straight. This will result in a slight dip below maximum speed, but be lighter on the resources while only being slower by 2% when compared to one powered rail every 35 rails. When you're going diagonal, you can get away with one powered rail every 40 normal rails, as your speed is faster while going diagonal.

3. Build an iron farm

This is one of the more annoying things to build in survival mode, but oh so worth it. With this, you can easily transition to using full iron gear permanently and even start using iron blocks in construction. 

The concept is simple. You're going to abuse the villager mechanics in-game. When four villagers see a zombie or other hostile mobs, they'll panic and summon an iron golem. This iron golem, when killed, will drop 3-5 iron ingots. By trapping four villagers and a zombie in midair to minimize the places where a golem can spawn, and setting up a kill area to automatically kill the golem while also setting up hoppers to collect its drops, you can get a massive amount of iron ingots over time, negating the need to ever look for it in the mines ever again.

Here are some step by step guides on creating an iron throne. Here is a guide on creating a basic fully automatic farm, and here is a guide to fix a design flaw. Once you have this set up, you're good to go on iron essentially forever.

And that's it! The easiest way to gather the most important resources in Minecraft. There are a ton of other farms, but these are the most important in giving you a boost in your adventures.