Now that you have installed Minecraft, it is probably important to learn how to play it. If you are looking for how to install Minecraft: Pi Edition, please follow the previous guide. For those of you who have played Minecraft on a Mac or PC before then you can skip this section as the controls and principles of this version are similar enough for you to pick it up. If this is your first time playing Minecraft on a computer, keep reading!
When you start up Minecraft, you will be greeted with an option to either “Start Game” or “Join Game”. For now, we will select “Start Game”. Just a word of warning, the cursor can be a bit off sometimes so be patient! If this is the first time that you are running Minecraft on the Pi, then you will only have one option- “Create New”. Click this, and it will tell you that it is building the world and there should be a progress bar. If Minecraft has been run on that Pi before, then you can either double-click a world to load it or you can also select “Create New”.
Once you loaded up your world, you will need to now how to move. Minecraft uses the “WASD” controls, which means that you use the “WASD” keys to move. W is forward, A is left, S is back and D is right. As well as this, you can also crouch by holding down the shift key, jump by pressing space bar, and fly by quickly double tapping the space bar. When in flying mode, hold space bar to ascend and hold shift to descend: the other direction keys stay the same.
Being able to run/fly around the world is fun, but it’s even better if you can place/destroy things. When looking at a block, hold down left-click to destroy the block. You will also notice that you have a bar at the bottom of your screen. The highlighted box is what your character is currently holding and each box represents a block or item. If you right-click while looking at another block and while holding a block, you will place it. In this version, you are always in creative mode, which means you have unlimited resources. You can swap between the nine items in your “hot bar” (the name of the bar a the bottom of the screen) by either scrolling or pressing the number key corresponding to that item/block’s position. For example, if I had stone in my sixth slot, I could select it by pressing 6.
Having nine items soon gets boring, so why not have more. To do this, select the slot you want to put your new item/block in using the scroll wheel or the number keys, then press the “e” key. This brings your inventory screen up, where every block/item in the game that is available to you is displayed. Simply click the item that you want and it will now be in the highlighted slot in your inventory.
That concludes the section on regular (so called vanilla) Minecraft for the Pi. Next time, we will get stuck into using python to change things in the Minecraft world.
Written By Mathew Monk MinecraftMastery | @minecraftmasterybook