The backbone of Minecraft survival mode is the ability to craft your own weapons from the materials around you, all the while eating sweet, sweet bacon to refill your precious health. You'll need tools to carve out a safe haven from the nightly beasts, a work bench to make those tools, a furnace to cook food and smelt ore, and probably a few chests to withhold your amassed items. The initial difficulty of the Minecraft survival mode dies down once you have found enough coal to make torches as well as a decent location. This initial wandering phase is made more difficult for the player as you cannot change your spawn location at this time. Commonly a suitable location is within minutes of the spawn point, but when your character dies, you drop all the items you had on you for about five minutes. If it takes two minutes to find your base from your spawn point, and an additional two minutes to get down to where you died, you'll have about a minute of play to not only get your items back, but contend with whatever killed you in the first place with, potentially, just your bare hands.
