Your first day: wood, tools and a shelter

How do I get wood, planks and sticks?

1. 1

   Punch a tree

   Aim at a trunk and hold the left button. With bare hands you break one 25 cm voxel at a time, about half a second each for wood. Any log works, wood or bark, of any tree. What you break drops as items that you pick up by walking over them.

2. 2

   Saw planks

   Open the inventory with E and put a log in the grid: a cell holds 16 voxels of log and gives 32 voxels of planks. A birch log gives birch planks, a redwood log redwood planks.

3. 3

   Split sticks

   Put two cells of planks one above the other: they give 4 sticks, the handle of every tool and sword.

Which tools should I make first, and when do I switch to stone?

• Pickaxe: three heads in a row on top, two sticks down the middle. Axe: three heads in an L, with a two-stick handle down the right side (the mirrored layout works too). Shovel: a head over two sticks. Chisel: a head over one stick. Sword: two heads over a stick.
• A pickaxe, a shovel or an axe breaks a whole 1 m cube at a time, and only of the matter you aim at. The pickaxe is made for rock, the shovel for soil, sand, gravel and snow, the axe for wood. Out of its own matter a tool is slow, sometimes painfully so. Bare hands and the chisel break one voxel.
• Make stone tools as soon as you hold rock: the same recipes, with any ordinary rock (stone, granite, basalt…) instead of planks. A 1 m cube of stone takes about 1.1 s with a wooden pickaxe and 0.8 s with a stone one, and a stone tool lasts about half as long again (about 108 blocks of stone against 71).
• Break gravel: about one block in ten gives a flint, the head of arrows and of a flint sword.

What should I do before the first dusk?

1. 1

   Eat

   Berries from bushes (they grow back) and apples from oak and birch leaves are quick snacks. For a real meal, kill a cow (2 to 3 raw steaks), a sheep or a fish and cook it on a campfire: sticks over a row of logs. Raw meat turns on the spit and is cooked in 12 s. A cooked steak keeps your food bar from dropping by itself for 5 minutes, a raw one for 30 seconds.

2. 2

   Make light

   A voxel of coal on a stick gives 4 torches. A torch lights about 14 m around it, in orange, and no monster spawns within that light: torches around your shelter keep it safe (see your first night).

3. 3

   Walls and a roof

   Dusk comes faster than you think: start while the sun is high. A hillside you can dig into is the quickest shelter. Otherwise close yourself in with walls and a roof, two blocks high inside. Shapes such as cubes, slabs and stairs are cut from whole blocks in the craft grid: see building voxel by voxel.

4. 4

   A door

   Six cells of planks (two wide, three high) give 3 doors. Right-click one to open or close it.

Updated 2026-10-22