Gathering Resources - The Ultimate Player's Guide to Minecraft - page 56

Passive mobs —Chickens, pigs, and cows all provide a ready source of food, or at
least raw protein that can be cooked on the furnace and made more nutritious.
Cows also drop leather that you can use for your first armor, and when you have an
iron bucket, cows can be milked, giving you an instant cure for food poisoning.
Chickens also lay eggs, so gather any that you find.
Natural harvest —The harvest includes cocoa pods, apples, cactus, sugar cane,
carrots and potatoes (found in villages), and seeds. Knock down tall grass to find
seeds. When you plant the seeds, they mature into wheat within 5-8 day/night
cycles. From wheat, it's easy to bake bread, one of the simplest but most effective
sources of food, especially if there are no passive mobs nearby. See Chapter 6 ,
“ Crop Farming , ” for more on agricultural techniques.
FIGURE 3.6 Knock down grass to gather seeds to plant wheat, an easy crop to farm and
turn into bread—a handy food if you're stuck with no other edible options.
Construction resources —You can mine plenty of cobblestone quite safely by ex-
panding your original shelter, digging into the terrain. But some other resources
will definitely come in handy. Wood is always useful. If you see any sand, mine it
so you can smelt it into glass blocks to let light into your shelter, and provide a
view. (There's no point moving from your first cave into the outdoor equivalent of
another!) Also keep an eye out for coal. You can often see it in veins on the surface
of the walls of small caves or on the sides of cliffs. If you can safely get to it, make
like a miner and dig it out. Use the coal to make torches and to smelt other ores.