Operation Manual

Your Mission: Food, Resources, and Reconnaissance
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Move carefully so you don’t lose your bearings. The sun rises in the east and sets in the
west, and the clouds always travel from east to west, so you can always at least get your
bearings. Following a compass cardinal point (north, south, east, or west) using the sun
and clouds as a reference can lead you away and reasonably accurately back home again.
TIP
Finding Your Way
It’s easy to become lost in Minecraft. Run helter-skelter from your base, chase a herd
of livestock, discover a natural cave system, or take a shot across the sea like that
famed Norseman, Leif Eriksson. It’s all part of the Minecraft charm. But don’t become
Columbus in the process.
A few quick tips:
Q When you are able, craft a compass. It takes some redstone and iron, and both
are relatively easy to obtain with some assiduous mining. The only problem with a
compass is that it always points to your original world spawn point. Think of that
point as the magnetic north pole—it’s not a GPS. Sleeping in a bed resets your
spawn point but not your compass, so this method falls out of date as soon as
you move to new dwellings and update your spawn point.
Q A compass is actually more useful when crafted into a map, see Chapter 10,
“Enchanting, Anvils, and Brewing” page 195.
Q Don’t forget that you can always use the built-in GPS available through the debug
screen (mentioned under the “Introducing the HUD” section earlier in this chap-
ter).
Food on the Run
If you are getting dangerously hungry, head to the nearest equivalent of a fast food outlet—
a passive mob—sword at the ready. Your best bet is to look for cows and pigs because they
each can drop up to three pieces of raw meat, with each piece restoring 3 hunger units and
1.8 in saturation. They’re an excellent target of opportunity. You can also eat raw chicken,
although with a 30% chance of developing food poisoning, or you can try rotten meat har-
vested from zombies, which is guaranteed to give you a taste of the stomach aches. But you
can also cure any type of food poisoning by drinking milk obtained with a bucket clicked on
a cow, and you can eat any amount of poisoned meat, gaining the restorative benefits, and
curing the whole lot with one serving of milk. So keep that rotten flesh the zombies drop
around! And the bucket o’ milk.