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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The easy way to get started with Minecraft Want to creep into the biggest video game of all time? Grab your pickaxe and let's go! Minecraft Basics For Dummies helps you (or your kids) get started and join the infinite online world that keeps millions of players of all ages engaged every day. Inside this portable-trim book, crafters will get all the tips and tricks needed to get started--on their own or with multiple players--in each of the three gameplay modes. * Choose a platform and download the game * Navigate, collect resources, and build structures * Defend your creations against monsters * Manage parental controls to keep kids safe while playing online * Become a Minecraft master by defeating the Ender Dragon Unleash your creativity, elevate family game night, and have a ton of fun joining more than 141 million players in the online world of Minecraft!
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Seitenzahl: 289
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Minecraft® Basics For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944079
ISBN: 978-1-119-90748-0 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-90749-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-90750-3 (ebk)
Minecraft® Basics For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Minecraft Basics For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Part 1: Getting Started with Minecraft
Chapter 1: Minecraft Is for Everyone — But What Is It?
Playing Minecraft with the Children in Your Life
Letting Minecraft Help You Teach
Knowing Where to Get Started with Minecraft
Keeping Your Kids Safe
Teaching Proper Minecraft Etiquette
Chapter 2: Scratching the Surface of Minecraft
Figuring Out Where to Play Minecraft: Console Round-Up
Purchasing and Installing Minecraft
Playing the Game
Discovering Tools
Interacting with Various Blocks
Chapter 3: Let’s Go! Playing the Game and Surviving the First Night
Viewing the World Around You
Operating the Basic Minecraft Controls
Watching the Heads-Up Display (HUD)
Preparing for Your First Night
Completing Optional Day 1 Activities
Surviving the Night
Part 2: Getting a Handle on the Basic Skills
Chapter 4: Surviving Hunger
Keeping Hunger at Bay
Chapter 5: Discovering Blocks and Items
Starting in the Wooden Age
Pillaging and Plundering
Surviving the Stone Age
Advancing to the Iron Age
Using Utility Blocks
Building an Effective House or Base
Knowing Where to Store Items
Chapter 6: Exploring Biomes
Knowing What’s What with Biomes
Excavating Structures
Part 3: Expanding Your Skills
Chapter 7: Creating Farms in Your World
Working with Crops and Animals
Setting Up Basic Farms
Automating Farms
Chapter 8: Exploring the Minecraft Underground by Mining and Caving
Exploring the Mines
Mining Efficiently
Staying Safe While Mining
Chapter 9: Leading Your Village
Trading in Villages
Trading Your Way to Wealth
Raiding and Illagers
Chapter 10: Powering Up with Weapons and Potions
Enchanting Weapons, Tools, and Armor
Brewing Potions
Chapter 11: Advancing to the Nether, The End, and Beyond
Reaching the Nether
Advancing in the Nether
Adventuring to The End
Ending with The End
Going Beyond the Ender Dragon
Surviving the Afterglow of The End
Building the Beacon
Chapter 12: Expanding Your Minecraft Experience
Starting and Joining a Private Multiplayer World
Joining Public Servers
“Cheating” for Minecraft
Checking Out External Sites and Resources
Part 4: The Part of Tens
Chapter 13: Ten Things Adults Should Try in Minecraft (Adults Only!)
Grasp the Basics of the Game
Play with Your Children
Know Who Your Children Play With
Stay Safe in Minecraft
Use Minecraft as a Teaching Tool
Divorced with Kids? Coparent Better by Using Minecraft
Learn about Minecraft
See Minecraft as More than a Game
Host a Server
Teach a Class
Chapter 14: Ten Helpful Survival Tips
Dig Safely
Cook Efficiently
Obtain Obsidian and Build Portals Quickly
Mine in the Right Location
Avoid Overexertion
Defeat Basic Mobs
Obtain Experience Points
Craft Quickly
Check Basic Equipment
Find Natural Comfort
Glossary
Index
About the Authors
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
TABLE 2-1 Slang Terms, Defined
TABLE 2-2 Passive Mobs
TABLE 2-3 Neutral Mobs
TABLE 2-4 Hostile Mobs
Chapter 3
TABLE 3-1 Basic Actions
TABLE 3-2 Schedule for Surviving the First Night
TABLE 3-3 Basic Stone- and Coal-Based Items
TABLE 3-4 Enemies and How to Defeat Them
Chapter 4
TABLE 4-1 The Effects of Famine on Your Character
TABLE 4-2 Useful Foodstuffs
Chapter 5
TABLE 5-1 Wood Types
TABLE 5-2 Useful Items from Looting
TABLE 5-3 How to Craft Armor
TABLE 5-4 How to Craft Weapons
TABLE 5-5 Smelters and Cookers
Chapter 6
TABLE 6-1 Biomes
TABLE 6-2 Structures, Structures Everywhere
Chapter 7
TABLE 7-1 Breedable Mobs
Chapter 8
TABLE 8-1 Mining Resources
Chapter 9
TABLE 9-1 Villager Features
TABLE 9-2 Illagers
Chapter 10
TABLE 10-1 Enchantments: Pickaxe, Axe, Shovel
TABLE 10-2 Enchantments: Sword
TABLE 10-3 Enchantments: Armor
TABLE 10-4 Enchantments: Bow, Crossbow
TABLE 10-5 Enchantments Used on Anything
TABLE 10-6 Basic Potions
TABLE 10-7 Brewing Negative Potions
Chapter 11
TABLE 11-1 The Nether Biomes
TABLE 11-2 Important Nether Block
TABLE 11-3 The Nether’s Mobs
TABLE 11-4 Stronghold Rooms
TABLE 11-5 Beacon Icons and Powers
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1-1: A hostile mob in Minecraft.
FIGURE 1-2: Selecting Creative mode as you start Minecraft.
FIGURE 1-3: The first concept that your kids explore in Minecraft is likely to ...
FIGURE 1-4: We used two mating sheep in Minecraft to announce an upcoming birth...
FIGURE 1-5: The
Minecraft For Dummies
YouTube channel.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2-1: The main menu in both editions.
FIGURE 2-2: Steve and Alex.
FIGURE 2-3: The Overworld, the Nether, and The End.
FIGURE 2-4: The look and feel of Minecraft.
FIGURE 2-5: What the various materials look like.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3-1: Where we first spawned in the world.
FIGURE 3-2: The Heads-Up Display.
FIGURE 3-3: Using the Help Crafting menu.
FIGURE 3-4: Starting your base.
FIGURE 3-5: The dugout base we made on Day 1.
FIGURE 3-6: Crafting recipes for wooden tools.
FIGURE 3-7: Crafting a bed.
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: Varioius sizes of trees found in Minecraft.
FIGURE 5-2: A shipwreck in the ocean.
FIGURE 5-3: Raw iron and iron ore.
FIGURE 5-4: A base we made.
FIGURE 5-5: A barrel by the bedside.
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6-1: Gold Mineshaft biome.
FIGURE 6-2: A plethora of pandas, parrots, and ocelots.
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7-1: Growing melons and pumpkins.
FIGURE 7-2: Growing sugar cane and cacti.
FIGURE 7-3: Pet slime looks like this.
FIGURE 7-4: Animals in a pen.
FIGURE 7-5: Redstone-powered blocks.
FIGURE 7-6: An automatic sugar cane farm.
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8-1: A lush cave.
FIGURE 8-2: Pinwheel branch mine.
FIGURE 8-3: Tiered branch mine.
FIGURE 8-4: A classic quarry, for ascending and descending.
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9-1: Trading inventory.
FIGURE 9-2: Discounted trades.
FIGURE 9-3: Raid boss bar <insert dramatic music>.
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10-1: A powerful enchanting table in our underground base.
FIGURE 10-2: The Anvil menu.
FIGURE 10-3: The name tag Grumm creates a horse that runs upside-down.
FIGURE 10-4: Potion of strength.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11-1: A nether portal.
FIGURE 11-2: Nether fortress.
FIGURE 11-3: Inside a treasure room.
FIGURE 11-4: Blaze killing machine.
FIGURE 11-5: An activated end portal.
FIGURE 11-6: Firing arrows at the crystal.
FIGURE 11-7: The End City.
FIGURE 11-8: Setting up a beacon.
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12-1: Inviting a player to the game in Bedrock Edition.
FIGURE 12-2: Java Edition LAN world settings screen.
FIGURE 12-3: This resource pack makes the game look and feel more medieval.
FIGURE 12-4: I’m eatin’ a sandwich.
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14-1: Crafting an axe, a hoe, and a shovel.
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Glossary
Index
About the Authors
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Introduction
If you enjoy games about building, survival, engineering, or adventuring, the game of Minecraft is for you. Having attracted more than 141 million monthly active players (and selling 238 million copies at the time we wrote this book), it is the most-often-downloaded game on the Internet — and it’s the most widely used metaverse (an online, immersive and simulated digital world, played by real humans) ever created. Minecraft is a loose-ended yet adventurous sandbox game that becomes whatever you make of it.
As a family of two divorced coparents and seven kids, we all quickly became aware of the influence that Minecraft has on families — together or apart. When the kids would invite their friends over, and after all of them were engrossed in using a tablet or a Kindle device, they would explore and play and sometimes nag each other in the game. “Dad, Alex just blew up my house!” is a common phrase in our household.
Perhaps, in your own family structure or with the kids in your life, you’ve seen a similar situation, wondering what in the world these kids are talking about and whether you should be concerned. Or perhaps you’re one of the children who is playing and you want to better understand how to build the largest village or automate your entire world by using farms, iron golems, or even redstone contraptions and circuitry. This benefit has led to most of the older children in our family developing an interest in, and even competing in, FIRST Robotics League, where they build real-life robots in high school.
Minecraft is all about gathering resources and building structures while facing monsters. The world of Minecraft is composed of cubic blocks, which you can break and replace to build houses and craft items — that’s all there is to it. The game has evolved to become so balanced and complex that it has attracted hundreds of millions of satisfied fans. While skimming or scouring Minecraft Basics For Dummies, you can apply every bit of Minecraft information you need to start playing the game to your liking.
About This Book
We wrote this book as a family. Jesse is the dad; Joseph is the 17-year-old in college a year early, some of that due to his experience playing Minecraft as a kid; and (in the position held by Joseph in the previous edition of this book, Minecraft For Dummies) his 11-year-old younger brother, Alex, with icons labeled throughout this book from his perspective. And Thomas, the now 20-year-old, wrote most of the previous edition of this book! This book was a family project, and our hope is that other families and family-type units can benefit from this book, just as we have.
This book, in a sense, operates much like Minecraft does: After you have the basic ingredients, you can take your game wherever you want. Skip to The End. Advance to the Nether. Just pick a chapter and start reading.
Take this book and share it with a close friend. Let your parents read it. Let your children or the kids in your life read it. Share it with a school classroom. Invite us to join you. (Just email [email protected] and we’ll give it our best!) Minecraft, whether it’s played with friends or the mobs in your own single-player virtual world, is truly a social experience and is best played with people you know. We hope that you can share the knowledge in this book with the same people you play with in the game.
Foolish Assumptions
Minecraft continually releases new updates and features — this book is accurate to Minecraft version 1.18. Because later Minecraft updates are unlikely to change the primary game mechanics, this book encompasses most of Minecraft’s main features. Check out our Minecraft For Dummies YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/minecraftdummiesbook, where we’ll address any future updates to Minecraft, or the Minecraft Wiki at http://Minecraft.gamepedia.com, if you ever have questions not addressed in this book.
Rather than try to consider every single type of reader who might pick up this book, we’ve made certain assumptions about you, the reader:
You have a computer or mobile device (or, optionally, your favorite gaming console), and you know how to use it.
You know what a web browser is, and you can surf the web.
You have an email address, and you know how to use it.
Your computer can download and run Java programs.
You have a functioning keyboard and computer mouse.
Icons Used in This Book
We’ve placed various icons in the margins of this book to point out specific information that you may find useful:
This icon calls attention to any tip or trick that you can use to enhance the gameplay.
These tips, written by Joseph’s 11-year-old brother, Alex, reflect the mindset of the younger generation of Minecraft players (11 years and younger).
This icon emphasizes information that you should attempt to retain in your memory. If you can remember these special points, you’ll become a better player.
If you see this icon, read its information! Warnings can prevent you from making a big mistake that can be hazardous to your Minecraft world (or your computer). We don’t want you to learn these lessons the hard way — like we undoubtedly did.
You can safely skip this geeky stuff. However, it deserved a place in the book, so you may be interested in reading it.
Conventions Used in This Book
In Minecraft Basics For Dummies, we use numbered steps, bullet lists, and screen shots for your reference. We also provide a few sidebars containing information that’s nonessential but may help you understand a topic a little better. Web addresses appear in a special monotype font that looks like this:
www.youtube.com/minecraftdummiesbook
Beyond the Book
Understanding Minecraft goes beyond these pages and onto the Internet, where you can access additional information:
Cheat Sheet:
You can find this book’s online Cheat Sheet at
www.dummies.com/extras/minecraft
.
You also can follow this book’s YouTube channel, as well as the book’s Facebook Page. We’ve also set up a Facebook Group for you to collaborate with, and learn from, each other. Here’s how to find them all:
Minecraft For Dummies
YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/minecraftdummiesbook
Minecraft For Dummies
Facebook Page:
https://facebook.com/minecraftfd
Minecraft For Dummies
Facebook Group:
https://facebook.com/groups/minecraftfordummies
More than anything, get out there and play Minecraft. We hope to see you sometime — look under the username jessestay for Jesse, TheRealStayman for Thomas, expelymarndo for Joseph, and Alex_Stay for Alex. See you in the Nether!
Part 1
Getting Started with Minecraft
IN THIS PART …
Understanding what Minecraft is
Getting started with Minecraft
Surviving your first night
Chapter 1
Minecraft Is for Everyone — But What Is It?
IN THIS CHAPTER
Following along with the game the children in your life are playing
Letting Minecraft serve as a teaching tool
Getting started with Minecraft
Staying safe on Minecraft
Increasing your Minecraft knowledge via YouTube
Minecraft is what you make of it. It can be a complete waste of time, or it can be a place to learn, explore, create, and compete — at all ages and coming from various backgrounds. I wrote an entire book about it, with my kids! It’s not just for kids. Minecraft is for everyone!
Although the rest of the book is coauthored by my son, Joseph, with some tips interspersed by another of my children, Alex, this chapter has been written entirely by me, the dad, who’s familiar with the concerns of parenting a Minecraft “Steve” or “Alex” — which are the names of the default male and female characters everyone assumes when they begin to play Minecraft.
I, Jesse’s 11-year-old son, am named Alex, but in addition to “Steve,” who identifies as he/him and is a boy in the game, you can also choose to start as a she/her girl character named “Alex” in the game. Don’t get me confused with the default girl Minecraft character, though, when you read the “Alex’s Corners.”
When my friends and other parental figures find out that I helped write the book Minecraft For Dummies with my children, I’m usually flooded with millions of questions: “What is Minecraft?” “Is it safe for children?” “My kids are always on Minecraft — isn’t it a waste of time?” “I need your book! Will you sign a copy for me?”
I always smile whenever they ask that last question. I hope that you’re one of these people, and that I, and my kids, have signed your book.
The truth is that Minecraft is an amazing teaching tool and a product that every parent can use to encourage exploratory learning, where children get to explore new concepts in a controlled environment.
Playing Minecraft with the Children in Your Life
The best thing you can do in Minecraft as a parent, coparent, guardian, or that favorite uncle or aunt for the kids in your life is play with them. They’ll bond with you in ways you never anticipated, and you’ll get to know the game — and find new ways to teach the kids by using the game. Minecraft is an excellent educational tool for kids, and the gameplay is full of opportunities for parental figures and teachers to participate in the learning process. I personally — as a single, divorced coparent — enjoy using the game as a way to bond remotely with my kids when they aren’t at my house and they’re with their mom instead.
Rather than refer you to Chapter 2 to get started, I present a few highlights and cross-references in this section so that you can hit the ground running with the kids in your life.
Getting a handle on the basics
Peruse the official Minecraft wiki at https://minecraft.fandom.com. It has up-to-date information about Minecraft — more than you’ve ever wanted to know. Ads and downloads that are available on the wiki can introduce malware to your computer if you’re not careful, so consider letting your kids focus on the information in this book and reserving the wiki for yourself.
Minecraft has two main modes: Creative and Survival. In Survival mode, you can still play with other players, but dangerous mobs abound (usually, evil characters that can kill you) and you can die (see Figure 1-1). If you play in Survival mode, check out the section in Chapter 3 about setting up for your first night. Few people survive the first night on their first attempt.
FIGURE 1-1: A hostile mob in Minecraft.
If you truly want to play the game and dodge evil, Survival mode might be for you. But if you simply want to explore and learn by playing with your kids, try out Creative mode, as explained in the following section.
Playing in Creative mode
In Creative mode in Minecraft, you can truly do anything you want without having to risk dying — in this mode, nothing can kill you except yourself. And you have access to almost every resource in order to build anything you want. And you can even fly!
To get started in Creative mode, you can either select it as you start gameplay (see Figure 1-2) or, within Survival mode, if cheats are enabled, type /gamemode creative and it automatically switches to Creative mode. Refer to Chapter 2 to see what you can do within Creative mode.
FIGURE 1-2: Selecting Creative mode as you start Minecraft.
Winning the game
After you’ve had some practice in Creative mode, you can start playing in Survival mode to win the game — though the truth is that you never actually win the game. Minecraft is a sandbox game: It has no true beginning or end, so the focus of the game is entirely on exploring, and on surviving, as you explore the game.
You’ll want to achieve some initial goals, however, as described in the following list, before you move on to plain ol’ exploration (refer to Chapter 11 for details on each step).
Letting Minecraft Help You Teach
I asked my sons, Joseph and Alex (and before that, Thomas, in the previous edition) to write most of this book because I wanted them to be the ones to show me what topics pique their interest and to explain why those topics are interesting to them. If you spend some time reading the chapters in this book, you’ll quickly realize that Minecraft is much more than a silly-looking game. In fact, I mentioned this to one of my children’s schoolteachers and they invited my children to come talk about Minecraft to their class, for this very reason! Minecraft lets you explore an entire world where you experience life by engaging in these types of activities:
Mining and geography/geology: The sole premise of Minecraft is that you dig into your world’s natural resources and gather different types of stone, precious metals, ore, and wood in order to build and create structures, as shown in Figure 1-3. The more you mine, the more you can build and create.
FIGURE 1-3: The first concept that your kids explore in Minecraft is likely to be geology and the process of mining to “create” structures.
Kids can quickly see that certain types of metal and stone cut faster than others. Wood can burn if placed near a flame or lava. Lava lurks deep within the earth. And dangerous creatures roam among the trees and plants!
Farming: Our family announced our latest pregnancy by taking a screen shot of a pink sheep and a blue sheep that had just produced a random pink sheep. (Yes, it was a girl. See Figure 1-4 to see the announcement.) In Minecraft farming, you get to learn about the birds and the bees by viewing animals in 8-bit format — a format that’s safe for young kids to view (and fun, too).
FIGURE 1-4: We used two mating sheep in Minecraft to announce an upcoming birth.
On a Minecraft farm, you learn about growing plants and about needing to water plants to make them grow. You learn about preventing pests and other creatures that can harm your plants and animals. You also learn that the meat you eat comes from real-life animals that you have to kill before eating them. (Don’t worry: It’s all in 8-bit format, so kids don’t see real violence.)
On a Minecraft farm, you can do things like shear sheep and collect wool. Thomas even created a farm that automatically breeds, hatches, collects, kills, and cooks chickens for eating later.
Nutrition:
In Minecraft, you have to keep your character healthy. (Every default user is named Steve for boys, and Alex for girls.) Gathering nutritious foods best maintains your health. Try some beetroot soup. Or have an apple. Keeping your character’s nutrition level stable helps the character last longer in the game.
Art and architecture: From full-tilt architecture to simply building fun designs and contraptions, you can express the artist in you in Minecraft. You can create dye from objects such as beets and flowers that you collect throughout the game. You can then use the dye to create panels to decorate your house, for example, or to color wool for other types of items in your house or dwelling place.
Players have created extravagant items such as ships and castles and even entire reproductions of various landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Millennium Falcon (from Star Wars). Entire cities have been reproduced in Minecraft. The sky is, quite literally, the limit.
Logic and math:
This is one of our favorite features because we’re computer nerds. Joseph and Thomas (who wrote the previous edition of this book with me) are studying computer science and engineering in college, and my entire career has been in the tech world! Minecraft uses binary logic to implement contraptions from an electricity-like dust called
redstone dust.
You can use redstone to create logic-based devices that react in different ways based on power supplied to them. Even if your children don’t realize it, creating redstone contraptions helps them learn binary logic, which is a primary element of programming and electronics that can be applied later in life. Check out
Chapter 8
to see more about the topics your child can learn about with redstone.
Electronics: When you’re working with redstone, you’re creating simple electronic and mechanical devices. Many of the devices work as transistors, capacitors, and even resistors to some extent, which are the basic building blocks of any electronic device or chip. If you can figure out how to compare the different redstone devices, you’ll be able to help your child apply these contraptions to real life to build their own real-life robots and other fun, electronic devices.
We’re big fans of LEGO Mindstorms. Using the concepts he learns about in Minecraft, Thomas builds real-life circuitry using LEGO blocks, a little programming, and some simple logic.
Computer programming: Computer programming and electronics truly go hand in hand. Like electronics, computer programming uses logic to decide what happens in the computer program. Because the redstone circuits in Minecraft are virtual, each circuit is, in essence, a computer program.
In addition, you can do some fun things with actual computer programming if you want to let your kids experiment outside of Minecraft. For example, many players create their own mods of Minecraft to do fun things that are not natural to the game. Or you might let your kids set up their own Minecraft server and learn a little about systems administration in the process.
Knowing Where to Get Started with Minecraft
If you have kids or you work with kids (Minecraft is useful for teachers as a learning platform!), there’s a good chance they’re approaching you and asking you to buy Minecraft for them. Likely, they’ll direct you to http://minecraft.net and ask you to buy them an account. This account is required if they want to play the PC version. If your kids are playing on a phone or on a game console like the Xbox or PlayStation, they don’t need an account, but you still need to purchase the app to allow full gameplay.
In Chapter 2, we walk you through the entire process of setting up an account, including explaining the different types of Minecraft — whether you’re on an Xbox or a PlayStation, a mobile device, a VR headset, or a PC or Mac. Go to Chapter 2 to find out more about getting started with Minecraft for the first time.
Keeping Your Kids Safe
As a single coparent of yes, seven children, I can relate to the constant, nagging feeling of wondering whether your kids are safe online. This feeling doesn’t fade when your kids play Minecraft. Though I believe that Minecraft is a safer environment than lots of other games you can buy, I would at least follow a few principles to be sure that your children are staying out of trouble.
Knowing with whom your kids are playing
The biggest worry you should have as a parent of a child playing Minecraft, or perhaps any game or program, is not what they’re playing but rather whom they are playing with. In the stand-alone game, players play alone, but if your children play on a server, they can be playing with anyone, anywhere around the world. And, in a game played mostly by children, predators are undoubtedly trying to take advantage of this situation.
Another concern about children playing games online is whom they’re playing with in person. Knowing who is physically present at their friends’ houses when they play can be critical information.
Here are a few tips to keep your kids safe as they play Minecraft with other people:
Pay attention to whom they’re chatting with.
Most interaction with players in Minecraft happens within the chat system. Your kids may even experience forms of cyberbullying (called
griefing
) that can trouble them, if you’re not aware. You might want to look over your kids’ shoulders every so often to understand what they’re saying in chat and to ask them whom they’re chatting with. You should know, and be comfortable with, every person your kids interact with in Minecraft.
Establish a list of safe servers.
The easiest way to avoid griefing on Minecraft is to establish a safe list of servers that your kids can join. Find a server or two that you’re comfortable with, and work with your children to ensure that they connect only with those servers.
Set up your own server and establish rules on who can join.
This process may require a little more skill than you’re willing to contribute, and the topic is well beyond the scope of this book. You can find many tutorials online, however, to show you how to set up your own Minecraft server. Doing so gives you the benefit of controlling what happens within the game and who is allowed to join. You can bar cursing and set gameplay rules, for example. My children play mostly on a server that our neighbors have set up, and the kids definitely know the rules that have been established.
Don’t play with strangers.
The old adage “Don’t talk to strangers” applies to Minecraft as well. Though players have opportunities to meet new people in the game, these opportunities can be dangerous for minors if they don’t know whom they’re chatting with.
Play with your kids.
