Steps 3 - 6

Written by Ellsworth
Edited by Darren Polkowski

Step 3: Craft wooden axes, shovels, and pickaxes.

To craft wooden tools, you need wooden planks and sticks (Fig. 4). Axes are used to cut down trees (Fig. 5). Shovels can be crafted to gather dirt and gravel (Fig. 6), and pickaxes are used to mine stone, iron, coal, etc, (Fig. 7). To start crafting, right click on your crafting table to open it. Next, place the wooden planks and sticks inside, as shown in the figures below. You should have enough wooden planks and sticks to create three of each tool.
Don't worry about crafting a weapon yet.

Step 4: Gather lots of dirt and a bit of cobblestone.

Once you have crafted your tools, harvest as much dirt as possible with the shovels. Three shovels should allow you to gather almost three full stacks of dirt before they are destroyed. It's a good idea to gather dirt either near or directly on the plot of land where you plan to build your safehouse. Clear out the dirt so you have a flat area to work with. While doing so, you're likely to run into some stone. If not, look around for any in the immediate area, or dig down a few tiles into the dirt. You'll probably find plenty of stone, but for now, all you need is eight pieces of cobblestone. You will use the cobblestone later to craft a furnace for the safehouse.

Step 5: Build dirt walls.

Use the dirt you gathered to build temporary walls for your safehouse. Don't take too much time counting tiles or planning the layout, just throw up the walls around the general area where you wish to build. You don't have that much dirt, so don't build the walls anymore than ten tiles long. I built my walls 10x10 for this tutorial.

Build your walls three tiles high, and place an extra row at the top to create an overhang, as seen in the image below. This will prevent spiders from crawling up and over the walls. Be sure that the immediate perimeter of the walls are clear of any tiles that may enable monsters to walk over them.

You now have a safe place to retreat to when night falls. If you have six wooden planks, you can build a door for your dirt walls (Fig. 8). If not, just dig out a couple of tiles of dirt for an entrance, and replace them when you need to hide. If you haven't already, make sure you place your crafting table inside your dirt walls. If you need to move it, left click on it, preferably with an axe, until it is destroyed. The crafting table will then drop so that you may pick it up.

Step 6: Craft a furnace and torches.

By now, the sun is probably setting. Rather than stand around inside your dirt walls waiting for morning, you can take this opportunity to dig for cobblestone for your safehouse. In order to see what you're doing, you're going to need some torches. So, craft a furnace out of the cobblestone you gathered (Fig. 9). A furnace is used for smelting. In this case, you will be smelting wood into charcoal. Place some of your wooden planks, which will act as your fuel for smelting, into the bottom box of your furnace. To smelt wood into charcoal, place some wood into the top box of your furnace (Fig. 10) and then use the charcoal and sticks to craft some torches. Make sure you save some sticks for additional tools (Fig. 11).

Next, inside your safehouse, dig some steps down into the dirt until you hit stone, and spend the entire night mining out a storage room. When you've collected a little bit of cobblestone, craft some stone tools. The crafting recipe for stone tools is the same as wood tools, however, you use cobblestone instead of wooden planks. Stone tools work much quicker than wooden tools, and will last a lot longer. Mining out a storage room will give you the necessary cobblestone to build your safehouse. Two full stacks of cobblestone should be enough.