Minecraft – Island Life

A long time ago in a Minecraft server far far away, there were two little people, a Steve and an Alex. They spawned on a little island, with nothing more than grass and a couple of trees. But Steve and Alex worked hard and created a small island paradise, complete with a full armory, multiple farms, a field filled with animals and chests full of diamonds…

Normally, an island spawn in a Minecraft world isn’t great, especially if you’re playing anything above Normal. There’s rarely any food, there’s often only a handful of trees and rarely is there any coal available. Quite often, if you can’t get torches up, you will get zombies spawning on your first night and you won’t have the space to out-maneuver them. Skeletons are the worst on islands, probably worse than Creepers, simply because there’s very little to hide behind. Luckily, when daylight comes and once you have some torches, you can light the island up, no issue.

Everything else though, from finding resources to obtaining food, can be very difficult. Often it’s easier just to build a boat and get the hell off the starting island, because it’s easier and more fun.

But surviving and thriving on an island is perfectly doable.

Your first step is to get food. On Hard difficulty, your hunger bar drops fast. If there’s no mobs on the island, then you have two options: break leaves and hope for apples, or break grass and get seeds to grow wheat. In the short term, apples will have to do, but you should start growing wheat as fast as possible. Even if you decide to leave, bread may not be the best food source but at least it’s easy to make, especially in small spaces.

After you’ve worked out food, you need to get a tree farm growing. Luckily saplings drop quite easily now, but you will want to gather them all up anyway. If you can’t find any coal, you can create charcoal by putting wooden logs in a furnace, and spare saplings work as a basic fuel source if you have nothing else. You can actually grow trees quite close to each other, but I always make sure there are 2-3 blocks between each planted sapling, just to make sure they grow. When you have torches, lighting the area helps as trees do need a light source to grow and won’t during the night.

The most awkward thing about island life is mining. Many caves on islands will be close to the sea and one wrong block can mean accidentally drowning yourself. And on a small island, a cave is probably where 99% of all zombies will spawn on the first night. A quick 2-block high wall blocking or around any cave entrances will at least keep zombies and skeletons at bay until you can make your tools and better arm yourself. Depending on the size of the island, there might not be any caves at all. So just dig your own. The best way to do so is to dig a staircase going downwards in a 9×9 square. A straight staircase will often make you dig into water, and is simply a pain in the ass to deal with.

Of course, not having any animals may be a problem. Now, you could just make a boat, swim to the nearest landmass and slay some animals, but since animals don’t really respawn any more, getting animal resources will become more of a pain in the ass. Luckily, if you have a boat, then you have the means to transport animals to your island. It’s awkward as heck pushing animals into boats and you will need multiple trips (since you need 2 animals for breeding) but once you’ve got two, the world’s your oyster. The most important animals to grab are sheep and cows, since they produce more valuable resources. You can also just throw chicken eggs at the ground for that 1/8 chance to spawn a baby chicken, but make sure you put your animals in a fenced area.

Another ally is building vertically. A tower takes up far less space than a normal house and has the added bonus of being easy to see. You can build upwards incredibly high, and this makes exploring a much easier process if you don’t have a compass or map yet.

At the end of the day, the trick about island life really is to use your space wisely and just put torches down. You actually have a huge amount of control on an island, to the point that you can almost control how enemies spawn. On a large island, you could section off an area to allow mobs to spawn, and create an easy way of killing them. On a small island, you can stop zombies and skeletons from spawning completely with enough torches.

Really, in Minecraft, everything is doable. Some things are just more preferable to others. It may seem like a great idea to get away from island spawns, but they make an interesting change in gameplay.