Minecraft 2022: 5 great tips for skyblock survival

Minecraft skyblock is a challenge mode that requires almost no introduction. First conceived by Noobcrew in 2011 for beta 1.7.3, the map has seen consistent play and updating throughout the game's history, with the island mainly remaining unchanged over time. However, some new items and smaller tertiary islands have been added.

The challenge of skyblock is starting with nothing and building up a huge island base over the void. The game mode will push players, both new and old, to their limits: challenging both the player’s knowledge of the game and their problem-solving skills. Detailed below are five tips for skyblock’s early game.

Tips for a new Minecraft skyblock survival world

5) Don’t wait for leaves

An example of decaying leaves after the log of the tree was mined (Image via Minecraft)

A common rumor throughout the Minecraft community is that allowing a tree’s leaves to disappear naturally will have a higher chance of dropping saplings. There is no difference between breaking leaves with a fist or waiting for leaves to vanish naturally, at least in terms of the chance for saplings and apples.

This means that players should not wait for leaves to vanish. The process can take several real-world minutes, and the length of a Minecraft day can represent a large portion of the first day. Waiting also means that players would not be able to plant a new sapling until the leaves break, as if the tree grows, it will spawn less new leaves, causing the player to have less potential for saplings.

While this is not a huge deal for players in a normal world, skyblock, especially near the start, is all about min-maxing the available resources to help jumpstart the expansion of the initial dirt block.

4) Make a cobblestone generator

One of the first things that players will notice when loading into a skyblock world for the first time is how little space they have to work with. One of the first things that skyblock players tend to do, and should do, is expand the island.

While this can be done with trees and wood, it is not cost or time-efficient. Instead, players should make a cobblestone generator. This is a slight build that takes advantage of the different flow speeds of water and lava and how they create cobblestone when flowing into each other to create a source of infinite cobblestone.

3) Slabs, slabs, slabs

The crafting recipe for the more cost-effective slab (Image via Minecraft)

Continuing with the topic of expanding the starting island, it would be natural to use the full blocks from trees or the cobblestone generator to expand the base. However, players should not use these full blocks as their expansion material.

Instead, players should always turn their blocks into slabs. For example, placing down three cobblestone blocks does just that: it adds three blocks to the island. However, players could instead take those three cobblestone blocks and use them to craft six slabs, which would allow for six half-block expansions to the island.

This means that expansion to the island when using slabs is either twice as cheap or half as costly, depending on the player’s perspective.

2) Build a general mob farm

One of the most important rules of resource gathering in the game is that mobs are a vital and required way to get some resources. This is doubly so on skyblock. For example, while in a normal survival world, players can find plenty of bones in many of Minecraft’s structures, such as desert temples or dungeons, in skyblock, the only way to get bones is by killing skeletons.

An area to spawn hostile mobs and a general mob farm are almost required in skyblock. Having an area that spawns hostile mobs, but does not kill them, allows players to get zombie villagers, which could be converted back to villagers for trading, or to build an iron farm.

A general mob farm is useful, especially early on, as it will function as an XP farm and give players the chance to get carrots, potatoes, and iron from zombies, bones, arrows, and bows from skeletons, and even gunpowder from creepers. These crops are vital for food, as there is no grass to break for wheat seeds, and until an iron farm, zombies are one of the only ways to get iron.

1) Collect Everything

An example of a player's junk chest in a normal survival world (Image via Minecraft)

In regular Minecraft, players can throw away a lot of the random items they find while exploring to make room for more useful things, as those random filler items tend to be common and easy to find, should the player needs them later.

However, in a skyblock world, every item is potentially handy and hard to find. For example, a player in a normal world might drop a single iron ingot to make room for raw iron instead. But in a skyblock world, almost every item is hard to get, so players should make enough storage to keep everything they find, just in case it becomes useful later.