How to Survive in Minecraft/Requirements

How to Survive in Minecraft

Introduction—Requirements—Starting a World—Your First Day—Second Day—Day 3—Mid-Game—The Nether—The End—Bosses in Minecraft—Appendix

Note: If your computer has been bought before 2010, is still running Windows XP or an equivalent version of Mac, and/or has 2GB of RAM or less, I would recommend not to play Minecraft and save your money.
Note: This tutorial is using the 2.0 launcher, which differs greatly from the 1.x Launchers.

Obtain a copy of Minecraft

First of all, you need to create a Mojang account. Go to The Minecraft.net registration website and fill in the information.

After you have created the account, click on the Store to buy Minecraft. If you do not want to buy Minecraft, you can play with the Demo version. However, this only lets you play on a world for 1 hour and 40 minutes, then does not let you access the world. You also cannot turn on cheats or start on Creative Mode.

When you are done buying, click on Download, and download the minecraft made for your system. If you cannot find it, just download the Linux/Other version.

The Launcher

If you did not use the green button to download, or run Linux, you are going to need Java. Otherwise, install minecraft, and start the launcher. It will download the Java runtime and the launcher. They are 40Mb, and could take up to a minute or two depending on your internet.

When the launcher starts up, you will need to log in. After you are logged in, you can start Minecraft. It is best to play with what Minecraft comes with on Default. Hit "Play" and wait for minecraft to download all required files. As the files are up to 100MB, this could take a while depending on your internet speed.

The Client

To run the client, you are going to need:

At least 150MB of free space to start your world
At least 1.5GB of unused RAM, and more RAM as your world grows larger
More free space as the world grows larger.
A good 1/3 of your CPU

I recommend at least 500MB of free space.

When you start the client, you are going to see 3 buttons (2 on demo). They say Singleplayer, Multiplayer, and Realms (Start Demo World and Reset Demo World on Demo). This book focuses on singleplayer, and it assumes that you do not have a world created. Proceed to the next chapter.

How to make your Minecraft faster

After building a lot of stuff in your world, you are going to notice that Minecraft gets laggier. This is due to several factors, which are usually lack of RAM and a CPU that cannot handle it.

Minecraft cannot access all of your RAM, it can only access what you have allocated it. In default Minecraft, this is 1GB. You are going to want to allocate more RAM. NOTE: DO NOT ADD MORE THAN 1GB OF RAM IF YOUR COMPUTER HAS 4GB OF RAM, UNLESS YOU ARE ONLY RUNNING MINECRAFT. A recommended amount of RAM is 3GB. To add more RAM, we are going to tweak the Java coding on your profile, which is easy.

To open up your profile, you have to exit Minecraft and go into your launcher. You then click on "Launch Options", and then turn on "Advanced Settings". After that, click on the profile, and turn on "JVM Arguments". From there, find the code -Xmx1G. Replace the 1 with 3, for 3 gigabytes, or any other number from 2-4. There is no need to add more than 4GB, because Minecraft will not use the RAM, and it will go to waste.

Then launch minecraft.