Build these ten things, in this order, and by roughly in-game day ten you will have a base that feeds you, stores your things, produces experience and opens the Nether. The order is chosen by payback time, not by ambition — a wheat farm planted on day three is worth more than a castle started on day three and abandoned on day nine.
1. A crafting table you never leave behind
Four planks. Place it, use it, break it, carry it. Every tool, every furnace and every piece of armour needs the 3×3 grid, and the moment you are 200 blocks from home without one is the moment you regret it. Keep a second crafting table permanently placed at your base beside the furnaces.
2. A bed
Three wool and three planks — the recipe, the wool sources and the sleep rules are in how to make a bed. The bed is the highest-value early block in the game because it does four separate jobs:
- Skips the night, removing two-thirds of your mob exposure
- Sets your respawn point, so death costs you a walk rather than a world
- Resets the phantom timer — phantoms start spawning after three in-game days without sleep
- Counts as a villager housing block later, when you start trading
Shear sheep rather than killing them: shears return 1–3 wool per sheep and the sheep regrows its coat while eating grass, so one flock supplies unlimited wool.
3. A furnace bank, not a furnace
One furnace is a bottleneck at 10 seconds per item. Build four in a row on day two and eight by day five. Feed them charcoal you make from your own logs.
As soon as you have iron to spare, add:
- A blast furnace for ore, at 5 seconds an item
- A smoker for food, also 5 seconds an item
A single smoker cooking a stack of raw beef finishes in about five and a half minutes; an ordinary furnace takes eleven.
4. A chest wall
Two chests side by side make a double chest with 54 slots. Build six double chests in a row before you think you need them, and label them by putting a representative item in an item frame above each one.
The categories that actually earn a chest each: ores and ingots, building blocks, wood, food, redstone and rails, and junk-that-might-be-useful. A barrel is the same 27 slots as a single chest and can be opened with a block on top, which makes it better in tight storage rooms.
5. A wheat farm, 9×9 with a centre water block
The classic layout: a 9×9 plot of farmland with one water source in the exact centre. Water hydrates farmland within 4 blocks horizontally, so a single source covers the whole plot.
- Till with a hoe, plant wheat seeds collected from grass
- Crops need light level 9 or above to grow, so add torches for night growth
- Fence it, or rabbits and trampling mobs will eat the young crops
Eighty wheat harvested is roughly 26 bread, and bread restores 5 hunger with 6 saturation. That is enough to stop food ever being your limiting factor again.
6. An animal pen with two of everything
Fence a 10×10 area near the farm and lure in two cows, two pigs, two sheep and four chickens. Cows follow wheat, pigs follow carrots, chickens follow seeds.
Cows are the priority. Breeding two cows costs two wheat and gives a calf that grows into 1–3 raw beef and 0–2 leather. Steak — the game's name for cooked beef — restores 8 hunger and 12.8 saturation, which is the joint-best in the game alongside Cooked Porkchop, and leather is the material for book covers, which you will need by the hundred for enchanting.
7. A lit staircase mine
Not a hole. A 2×1 staircase descending at 45 degrees from inside your base to around Y=-50, with torches every 6 blocks on the same wall the whole way down.
Why a staircase rather than a ladder shaft: you can run up it while being chased, you can push a minecart down it later, and you never take fall damage. Why "torches on one wall": when you are lost, the wall with torches points home.
Seal any cave you break into with cobblestone until you are ready to explore it deliberately. An unsealed cave in your staircase is a mob highway into your base.
8. Sugar cane and a bamboo patch
Sugar cane grows on sand or dirt adjacent to water and needs no light. Plant a row of nine along a water channel; it grows to three blocks tall and you harvest the top two, leaving the bottom to regrow.
Sugar cane makes paper, paper plus leather makes books, and books make bookshelves. You need 15 bookshelves for a full-power enchanting table, which is 45 books, 135 paper and 45 leather. Start the cane early; it is the slow part.
Bamboo, if your world has a jungle, is the best renewable fuel-and-scaffolding source and grows fast enough to be effectively unlimited.
9. A Nether portal
Ten obsidian makes a 4×5 frame with the corners left out. Mining obsidian needs a diamond pickaxe — nothing weaker drops it. You can skip that requirement entirely by casting the frame where it stands: pour a water bucket over a lava source in the exact portal shape so the obsidian forms in position, and never mine it at all. That is how a portal gets built before the first diamond.
Light it with flint and steel or a fire charge from a ruined portal chest.
The Nether gives you blaze rods for brewing and experience, nether wart for potions, quartz for redstone comparators and building, and gold for trading with piglins. It also travels eight times faster than the Overworld, so any long-distance route you will use twice should go through it.
10. An enchanting room
The last of the ten and the one that changes how you play. You need:
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| Enchanting table | 4 obsidian, 2 diamonds, 1 book |
| 15 bookshelves | 45 books + 90 planks |
| Anvil | 31 iron ingots (3 blocks + 4 ingots) |
| Grindstone | 2 sticks, 1 stone slab, 2 planks |
| Lapis lazuli | 3 per level-30 enchant |
Place the bookshelves in a ring two blocks out from the table, one shelf high, with the block between each shelf and the table left as air. That ring has sixteen positions; fill fifteen and leave the sixteenth as your doorway. Fifteen shelves gets you level-30 enchantments, which is the only tier worth using for good gear. Note that Chiseled Bookshelves look similar but provide no enchanting power at all. The complete enchanting guide has the full layout and costs.
What to build eleventh
Once the ten are done, the next builds are all about scaling: an iron golem farm for infinite iron, a villager trading hall for Mending, a mob farm for gunpowder and bones, and a storage system with hoppers feeding sorted chests. All four are much easier with the base above already running.
Frequently asked questions
Should I build my base underground or on the surface?
Underground bases are safer and warmer to build in, but they make farms awkward — crops need light you must supply, and animals need space. The common compromise is a surface base with an underground storage and enchanting level below it, connected by the staircase mine from step seven.
How many torches do I actually need?
More than you think. Hostile mobs in the Overworld only spawn where the block light level is 0, and a torch emits light level 14 falling by 1 per block, so one torch secures roughly a 6-block radius on flat ground. A modest base perimeter is 40–60 torches, and a staircase down to Y=-50 is another 20. Budget 30 coal before starting.
Is it worth building walls around the whole base?
Only if you intend to walk around outside at night. A two-block-high wall stops zombies and skeletons but not spiders, which climb. Adding an overhanging lip of slabs or an upside-down stair at the top stops spiders as well. Lighting the enclosed ground is cheaper and more effective than the wall itself.
When should I go to the Nether?
After you have iron armour, a shield, a stack of building blocks and some food — roughly day eight to ten. Going earlier is survivable but wasteful, because you will die to a ghast knockback or a piglin and lose the trip. Wear at least one piece of gold armour so piglins ignore you.
