Not counting time reading min-max wikis, forum posts and aborted attempts, I figure I’ve played the game for 12 hours total. I could shave it to 6 now that I know everything. How to replicate:
DAY ONE
Punch a tree, make a crafting table, make a wooden pick, go get cobblestone and make a couple stone axes, picks, and shovels. Don’t even bother looking for coal; it’s faster and more reliable to just make a little bit of charcoal for your first-night cave torches. Punch enough sheep to get the 3 wool for a bed. Dig out the cave, place the torches, sleep.
It’s actually kind of tough to get this all done in the first day. Don’t do the sheep at the very beginning, they take a while to spawn.
STOCKPILING DAYS
For god’s sake, don’t dig down yet. Stockpile 192 unprocessed wood and a dozen stone axes, picks, and shovels. Make about 40 ladders.
JULES VERNE TIME
Don’t dig straight down; do the alternating left-right pattern. Put ladders every other block on one side. Dig down to level 11. You can find the level you’re standing on top of by pressing F3 and subtracting 2.6 from the Y counter. Less cheaty but more tedious, as you have to dig out a biggish square area to see it, the top level of bedrock is a level 5.
STOCKPILING IRON
Do branch mining with the floor under you as level 11. The only tweak I do is I go way, way farther than 20 in each direction; I’m usually stopped by lava or a cave I don’t want to explore yet far before I start getting nervous about the distance. From a single fill-up-inventory run I end up with something like 30 iron. It’s slow going at first, but you’ll once you get a stockpile of iron and convert to iron tools you’ll be the reincarnation of DigDug.
DIAMONDS
You won’t find a lot, but they’re incredibly frequent per minute compared to digging around in the lava or exploring caves without a good set of combat equipment.
COMBAT
Do not try exploring caves or fighting anything until you have a full set of iron armor and sword. Caves are tremendously productive for finding ore because of all the pre-exposed faces, but you’ll just get your ass handed to you by mobs, and you’re likely to lose everything in a lava-related incident.
MAPPING
Whenever you’re moving away from the vertical shaft, place torches on the right side of tunnels. This makes it easy to identify the branches and follow the left-side torches back to the surface.
STARTER CAVE
Don’t move it too far from your re-spawn location, or you’ll make the compass useless.
MINING RISKS
Carry a stack of 64 cobblestone in a quickbar slot. You usually have about 1.5 seconds from exposing lava to plug up the hole again. Another way to minimize the lava risk is to dig out the head-level three blocks in front of you in order, then the three foot-level blocks; rather than always having lava 1 block away when exposed it’s an average of 2 blocks away at breakthrough.
