Great intro, I finally got round to playing minecraft about a week ago and it is already stealing my life away from me.

You should always place doors from the outside though, that way you can fire out, but mobs can’t fire inwards.

Tip?
Either you go and chop some wood until you think you’ve got enough for whatever you want to do or you write an excel sheet that tells you how much raw wood you need. Quite easy and helps fill time at work :I

When you go adventuring take the following:
– 64 torches
– 64 raw wood
– 64 sticks
– 64 (char)coal
– extra tools (pick, axe, shovel)
– no extra weapons (store these at your expeditions starting point in case you get killed and need to beat some zombies to get your stuff back)
– best armor you can get at that time
– crafting table (speaking of which: wasn’t it a right click to use it?)

When you want to go mining you should take a load of stairs with you (makes travel up easier/faster).

And build your house in LoS of your spawn point with some extra entrances.
My mountain top home has three extra doors leading to the mines stairwell below the house. All marked with torches above the door to be easily spotted in the night.
So even if I get swamped by zombies or blown up by creepers: no problem getting back home :)

I don’t care about actual mining as much as I do just making my castle look awesome. Last time I made a 4 layered castle that extended under ice.

|__|__|___|__…….___|__|___|__|
——————-/””””””\——————–
——————_________________—–
—_____*_____________*_________/
\________*____________*_________

Thats basically what mine looked like all the |s are 10 layer tall walls which ringed the entire ice base. then the …… was the ice that went over my base. then it expanded downwards and they would extend over really far… and then I would make a small downwards staircase so I was only 2ish layers further down then went the other direction.
then the *s were staircases that went straight to the bottom they all met down at the bottom for one giant (I am talking GIANT) room.

Unfortunately… my hard drive crashed. :( I don’t even have the links to my screen shots. Just trust me it was beautiful.

Oh, and I also forgot to mention a really, really fantastic series by The Yogscast. It’s not very informational (these guys, many hours later, are still pretty bad at the game), but they are hilarious and have a great chemistry going on between them.

Their Let’s Play takes an epic turn starting around episode 22. I’m not using “epic” in a casual way here. Seriously, I think you’d really like where they go with the series. They have a few hundred thousand people tuning in each episode, so you know it has to be interesting.

As for tips and tricks… spiral staircases are an excellent way of digging really deep down – pick a central column then go down by one block every time you go 1 around the column, removing at least 3 blocks (the 2 in front of you and one down) but at some point you’ll want to go back and take out a 4th from the ceiling so you don’t knock your head as you jump up the stairs.

I’m a bit of a mine-rat – tend to only come out on the surface during daylight, to gather wood for more pickaxes/torches. The best stuff can be found by going down ‘n down until you hit bedrock, then counting up about 10 steps. That said, if you don’t like digging blind, there’s a variety of fine mapping programs to show you what’s in the ground, one layer at a time. Good for finding elusive diamonds.

Or there’s the approach I went for on my second world, of building expanding concentric rings of walls to keep the monsters out, and carpeting everywhere outside of them (eventually up to about a 100 block radius) with enough torches to stop anything spawning.

Walls want to be 3 blocks high, and have a lip around the outside edge (like an L shaped tetris piece, turned pointy-end down and facing outwards). The lip is to keep spiders out now that they can climb walls. Single-block windows are ok, but only in flat faces of wall – if you take a block out on a diagonal you get a sqrt(2) wide hole, which spiders can get in through. Unless you glass it over of course, but then you can’t hit things through the window.

Once you’re all set up, have a project – visit the nether, set up a minecart railway or a mob trap, build 1:1 replicas of 8bit video game sprites using blocks as pixels; you need something to occupy yourself other than the struggle for survival, because survival ceases to be a struggle after the first little while.

I think the easiest way to get started is to just watch the first couple episodes of a good Let’s Play series. These are my two favorite series, though their “pilot” episodes are a bit outdated at this point,

* X’s Adventures in Minecraft — It’s 10 hours long in total, and finished. It gets very exciting towards the end of the series.

* Coe’s Quest — 30 hours long, and ongoing. This one can get a bit dry, but he does some really cool things. Episodes 51-55 are probably my favorite, showing the original, scarier Nether that no longer exists.

I’ve seriously spent more time watching people play Minecraft than I have playing it myself.

I tend to just turn my spawn-point shelter into a dugout base – expand downward and inland (you always spawn on sand, which tends to mean coastline) until I hit stone and start mining from there.

First world, I did exactly what you described and ran off to an interesting looking mountain to make my base… from then on, any time I died I had to run a gauntlet of monsters to get back home.