Nov 23, 2011 10:54 AM

Careers advice: What to do next in Minecraft

There are a million guides out there explaining how to survive your first night in the dangerous world of Minecraft, but what do you do after that?

With multiple dimensions to access, plants to grow, animals to breed, caves to explore, enchantments to collect, potions to brew, circuits to design, buildings to construct and an Enderdragon to track down, the game can be a bit overwhelming.

But the blocky, procedurally-generated landscape is your oyster, and there's no reason to be intimidated by the game's complexity.

Instead, carpe stipes. Here are five careers that might want to pursue in Notch's blocky megahit.

Architect

Most people who haven't played Minecraft know it as "that game where people build stuff", mainly because of the huge range of

incredible constructions that people have made in the game's Creative Mode.

In Creative Mode, you can fly, you've got an unlimited supply of blocks, and your construction won't be hampered by the occasional Creeper explosion. Replicating those constructions in the game's Survival Mode is trickier, but it's eminently possible.

First off, you'll need a rich supply of raw materials. Locating your building site near a natural or artificial forest is a good bet if you're going to be using a lot of wood, and a sizeable strip-mine can be handy for collecting dirt, gravel, sand and stone. You'll definitely need an impressive-looking set of furnaces to smelt ores and fuse cobblestone back into stone, and essential tools are pickaxes, shovels and axes. Use your stripmine to collect the coal you need, or turn wood into charcoal for the same purpose.

Alternately, if you want to make things a bit more colourful, you're going to need to experiment with wool dyes. There's an intricate production chain for obtaining exactly the shade of colour that you want, involving primary, secondary and even tertiary dyes. Happily, though, if you dye a pair of sheep one colour and then get them to breed (See the Agricultural scientist section, on the next page) then all their offspring will be the same colour, which is probably the best way of creating large amounts of dyed wool in bulk.

That's the nitty-gritty mechanics, now what about your inspiration? You've got two options -- replicating things from the real world, and creating completely new stuff. Replication is reasonably simple, and there are several third party tools that can help you out. MCEdit is probably the most useful -- it lets you generate objects in 3D and copy and import them into your game. There are a few other useful ones too.

MCSmeltingHelper lets you see how much fuel you need to smelt different things, Minecraft Structure Planner lets you you generate plans for certain things -- like bridges, glass domes and tunnels. Perfect Sphere does the same thing for spheres and ellipsoids. Finally, for giant statues and the like, Binvox will read in a three-dimensional model file and converts it to building plans.

Finally, if you've exhausted all the possibilities for building structures in-world, how about using those structures as the setting for a story? There's a range of user-created maps that you can download to experience something a bit like Little Big Planet. Some great examples, suggested by hymrr on the Minecraft subreddit, are Kingdom of the Sky, Aramis, Vechs' SUPER HOSTILE series, and the intriguing-sounding, sci-fi-themed Deep Space Turtle Chase.

Agricultural scientist

In Minecraft survival mode, you have to feed yourself.

One way to do that is slaughtering those cute little pigs, cows and chickens, and roasting their flesh. That's not very nice, so how about becoming a farmer instead?

There's a surprising amount of depth in Minecraft's plant-growing subsystems. By punching grass until seeds fall out, then planting them in ground raked by a hoe (and ideally next to a water source), you can grow wheat. There's a clever algorithm that works out how fast the wheat grows depending on several factors -- some patterns are more effective than others. Working that out will take you some time. Or you could just look it up on the Wiki, but that's no fun, is it?

Then there are other things to grow. Watermelon, sugarcane, cacti, trees of different types and pumpkins are all able to be farmed, and again -- different techniques will yield more or less impressive results. A bit of experimentation will pretty swiftly reveal the best approach to take. If you're having difficulty, then a bit of bonemeal, ground down from a skeleton bone, will work wonders.

Then what do you do with all that food once you've harvested it?

Cacti can be used for elaborate traps, sugarcane can be turned into books, maps, and cakes, watermelon can be eaten, and pumpkins can be worn on your head, or combined with a candle for spooky halloween lighting. That just leaves wheat, which can be used for the other side of farming: animal husbandry.

Pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and mooshrooms can all be bred. Get an animal to follow you by holding wheat out in front of it, then lure it into a pen with some others of the same species. Feed it that wheat to put it in "love mode", whereupon it'll make a bee-like towards any animal of the same species that is also in love mode. After a second or two, a baby animal spawns next to one of the parents, which then can't breed again for another five minutes. It's a great, highly efficient way of accumulating animal-related resources

If you want to get really technical, you can even build breeding machines. The creations we've seen are terrifyingly efficient industrial towers, which wouldn't go down well at a Peta meeting, but if you want to practice the Minecraft equivalent of eugenics, then it's up to you. Me? I'll stick with my organic, free-range, virtual chickens, thanks.

Engineer

Over the past year, several impressive creations have been put together by engineers working with a substance called Redstone, which is found deep underground but in reasonable quantities. It's the Minecraft equivalent of electrical wiring, but has been used to create all manner of incredible creations -- including a 16-bit Arithmatic Logic Unit, a calculator, and even a working representation of one of Minecraft creator Notch's other games, Prelude of the Chambered.

To get started, you'll need to understand some basics. The Minecraft Wiki's Redstone Circuits For Dummies guide is probably a good place to start, and introduces you to all of the components that you'll need to be familiar with. It also explains the format that many Redstone circuit diagrams use, which are crucial to replicating designs and sharing them with other people.

If constructing full-scale computers isn't your thing, you might prefer something more mechanical -- the Minecraft equivalent of a Heath Robinson/Rupe Goldberg machine. There's plenty of fun you can have with Minecraft's Piston system, including a mechanical Nyan Cat, spiral staircases that pop out of the walls, and secret doors.

Finally, if you're feeling musical then you can use note blocks to recreate your favourite tune. Here's Dragonforce's epic Through the Fire and Flames to give you some encouragement.

Adventurer

Enough with the creating, you want to do some killing. Being a hardcore adventurer in Minecraft is all about preparation, having an eye for danger, and a lot of luck.

You'll likely have already started exploring the caves around where you've built your house. Perhaps you'll have marked them with torches, or even signposts, so you know whether they're two-chamber dead ends or elaborate vertiginous networks that reach down to the very bedrock of the world. Get comfortable with the sounds that you hear down in the depths -- the clatter of a skeleton, the sizzle of lava, the hiss of a creeper that's crept up behind you. Being able to hear what's happening saves you a few precious seconds of time that turning around takes, and will save not only your life, but also that precious diamond pickaxe.

Deciding what to take with you is crucial. Don't take anything important, because the odds of falling into a lava lake or off a vertiginous ledge are high. Leave the diamond pickaxe at home unless you absolutely need to mine some obsidian, and even then, it's probably better to bring the lava up to the surface in a cheap bucket and then turn it into obsidian with water there. What you will need is a small pile of food to keep your health up, some armour, plenty of arrows, a few logs (for emergency crafting of extra equipment) and full stack of torches. If you're passing the same route from the surface often, it's almost worth keeping the kit in a chest at a handy stop-off point, so you can just grab it as necessary.

Once you've conquered your local cave system, strike out further afield, perhaps down into a ravine. Use an in-game map (made from paper and a compass) to keep track of where you've been. If you're extra-lucky, you'll find an abandoned mineshaft, which will be full of tougher spiders and treasure chests full of more unusual resources.

By this point, you'll want to start thinking about enchanting.

A complex system governs the enchanting process, and you'll want to surround the enchanting table (which is built from obsidian, diamonds and a book) with as many bookcases as possible to increase its power. Once complete, you can trade in experience points for special bonuses -- like extra damage, super-durability, and other useful perks. Very handy in a tight spot.

If you're super-super lucky, then during your exploration you might find a Stronghold -- which is the adventurer's holy grail.

Strongholds are large filled with all types of rooms -- libraries, store-rooms, prison cells and more. Unique enemies and blocks can be found inside, along with the portal to The End -- more on which shortly. There are only ever three strongholds in the entire world, so make the most of them.

Dimensional Voyager

Eventually, even the most hardened adventurer will want a change of scenery from caves, hills, deserts and forests. Time to head to a different dimension entirely. We're going to the Nether.

Build a frame of obsidian, four blocks wide and five blocks tall, leaving a two by three block hole in the middle. Then set it on fire, using a flint and steel. If you've done it right, then it'll begin glowing purple, emitting spooky particles and making weird noises. Remove absolutely everything from your inventory, stick it in a chest, then step through.

After some wobbling and a loading screen, you'll be in the fiery realm of the Nether, with the sound of zombie pigmen grunting, the wail of huge floating, crying head-things called ghasts, and the sizzle of huge seas of lava filling your ears. Have a poke around, and don't be afraid to take a few risks -- you've got nothing on you, after all, so a death won't mean too much lost progress.

Once you're fairly happy with the area around your portal, start bringing some supplies in and construct a base station around that portal. Make it fairly sturdy, cobblestone is a good bet, as the ghast's fireball attack can easily penetrate the flammable netherrack that most of the zone is comprised of. You'll need the staples -- a good set of armour, a decent enchanted sword (and probably a bow), and plenty of food. You should also take a few stacks of cobblestone -- for the same reasons as above. The Nether is full of steep drops, and having something ghast-proof that you can build bridges across chasms out of is invaluable.

After trekking around the Nether a bit, you'll come across a set of huge structures, known as a Nether Fortress. These contain lava wells, fences, stairs and walls made out of Nether brick, a unique type of plant called the Nether wart, and a whole heap of smoky, flaming baddies called Blazes.

They're tough -- they can fly, fire fast, and their attacks are ranged and can't be blocked. The best way to take them down is to reel them into sword-range with a fishing rod and fight them up close. Fire resistance potions will help too, but you'll need to kill at least one Blaze before you can build potion-brewing equipment.

After collecting a big stack of blaze rods, and plenty of ender pearls (from the creepy, slender, teleporting Endermen in the Overworld), it's time to head to The End. To do that, you'll need to find an End Portal in the Overworld, located within a stronghold. The best way to track one down is with an Eye of Ender, which -- when thrown into the air -- shows the direction to the nearest stronghold. In one of the rooms of that stronghold, there'll be a End Portal, which needs an Eye of Ender inserted into each socket to activate. When activated, you can step through into The End.

What's in there? Well, that would be spoiling things, wouldn't it? We'll let you find out that one for yourself. Good luck, Dimensional Voyager.

Don't miss: Full review of Minecraft's desktop release---

Got any favourite pastimes in Minecraft *that you'd like to share, or tips for tackling any of the challenges above?

Tell us in the comments below.*

This article was originally published by WIRED UK