The Official Minecraft Guide for Beginners

How To Play

For this part of our guide, we will be teaching you the basics of playing Minecraft!

What you need:

- To have completed making an account, and downloading Minecraft.

Step 1: Go to your new "Minecraft Launcher" here it will probably require you to log in, just log in with your username or email, if you are using Minecraft Premium, you should log in with your username, if you are using Mojang account, then you log in with your email. If you don't use Mojang account, you should probably migrate your  Premium Account to Mojang, just go to Mojang and they should have it.

Step 2: Now that you have logged in, you should see a bunch of things, to get playing right away, just click play. If you want to not have a laggy first experience, you should do the optional steps I include.

Step 2.5 (Optional):  If you want to not have your game crash frequently on the first time, you can open up your Minecraft launcher, log in, OH, this one's awesome, click "Stay Logged In", if you don't write down your password or perhaps you do but you hate taking this time logging in, this will start you up already logged in, which is handy, if a hacker were to log in as you and change the password, it would have no effect given you stay logged in. Now to the main thing, click on Profile Settings, on the lower left corner on your lancher, click on it, you will see a menu screen which in the future is very useful, click "JVM Arguments" and click "Xmx1G" (WARNING: only do this if you got alot of ram on your computer) then click the checkmark. This will allocate ram, now click "Save", allocating ram gives a good performance boost. There are also on this plenty of other options you can mess with on here, for now it's safe to not mess with them, given one wrong move and you can ruin it. 

Step 3: Now, click "play" and your game will open, if you are using 1.7 or later then this will be easy to explain. Here is what everything does and means: Singleplayer is where you can play in creative mode, which gives you unlimited blocks to build with, and survival where you can try and survive without dying from the monsters that try and kill you. Multiplayer is something we will cover in a later part, for now, we will cover singleplayer, for we will need it to tell you how to do basic things. Minecraft Realms is another option, again, will be covered in a later part.

Step 4: Go on singleplayer, now you have a menu, click "Create New World" for now, we will set it to Creative mode, because if night comes and your in survival while learning this, you're screwed. Now, when you spawn in the world, here are things you should know, awsd is used to move, and for the mouse, if you move it around, you can move your head around. When you left click, you can break blocks or hit a player/mob, dealing damage. Right-click objects like chests to open them, or on Multiplayer use an item of some kind. If you click "E" then you open inventory, click "E" again to close inventory menu. 

Step 5: Get used to these controls, start playing, maybe even tackle on survival if you're that hardcore. After a while these controls just become second-nature.

Step 6: Congrats! You learned the basic controls of Minecraft!