How to survive in Minecraft?

[InDarkestNight]

I am beyond utterly revolted sick of being ignored on here. Reddit is nothing but trolls. Stack exchange is run by trolls. Every forum is dead on the internet other than this. I know I won't get a single damned reply on here, no matter how much I beg, BUT WHAT CHOICE DO I HAVE? The mods will probably delete this without notice AND THEN REFUSE TO TELL ME WHY NO MATTER HOW MUCH I BEG THEM.

Anyway, been spending the past few days trying to learn to play minecraft. This game is more brutal than I ever expected.

Spawned in a jungle on top of a tree, annoying. Kept dying for stupid reasons, most often fall damage because you can't fall more than 1 block without dying instantly. And yes, I'm playing on 'normal' difficulty. Somehow, I managed to get a house set up in a nearby savana biome. Even manged to get some wool somehow so I could make a bed to set my spawn point so I wouldn't have to keep trying to navigate down that damned tree and through a bamboo maze every single time I died.

Nothing went right that run. I died over a dozen times at this shipwreck because I can't figure out for the life of me how the swimming controls work. It seems the only way to ascend is to hold space, but half the time it doesn't work for no apparent reason. After dozens of attempts, I got all the loot out of that damned shipwreck, though that was because I leveled the entire thing just to make sure I could get out. A lot of my deaths were due to me not being able to exit the doorway i came in. Wtf?

Penned some cows and sheep, but that's the only thing that went right. I tried mining for diamonds, because I couldn't handle seemingly anything in combat. All I could find is iron after scouring every single cave.

I did get lucky on find a treasure map on that ship, but I got hopelessly lost trying to find it. Spent hours sailing around the map trying to find my way home. Funny enough, I did finally stumble upon the treasure somehow, and got 2 diamonds out of it. That's the only diamonds I ever saw.

Having failed to find anything mining, I decided to set up some villagers close by. All the villagers I could find were ultra far away. Nothing about that went right. I brought home one, but by the time I got the second one that one had been turned into a zombie. f*#@ my life. And yes, they had a house, though they utterly refused to go to it for some reason. I tried sailing to the left because I thought I ran into another village that was closer by. I just got hopelessly lost again, and never did find the other village. And you know what happened next? When i finally did find my home again, I realized that my diamond sword was missing! I was struggling enough against mobs with that damned thing. I had traveled too long a path to retrace my steps to find it. I then went to the original village to retrieve another villager. Got him home, and you know what? He ran away from my house and back towards his original village. Wtf? I chased him trying to trap him in a boat, but he moved far too erratically for me to do that. It was night time too so I was struggling against stinking spiders and zombies. He ultimately got blown up by a creeper despite my damnedest efforts to save him. And yes, I had set up torches on the ground all around my base. He was well outside of them. Still, for some reason I kept having zombies spawn in my base, and even stinking creepers blowing up everything. Fun times. Keep in mind, it probably took me 10 minutes to get to that village ONE WAY.

I finally lost it. I set fire to the villager's home, and my own. Killed the one villager I did get, which was a 'nitwit' anyway I found out trying to find info. I brought him home because I liked his shirt. Game gave me no clue he was useless. I don't even know if he could breed, honestly. I then jumped in lava to delete all my gear. I have nothing, square one. Before I was wishing I had set up close to a village so I wouldn't have to do all that s#*!.

What went wrong? How are you supposed to fight mobs? They're stupid over powered. I can barely even handle zombies. And yes, I had a shield, and was using it. Only time I managed to kill a creeper before it blew up was with a bow and arrow, but it took me forever to get the string to craft because you have to kill spiders for it, and they're even more OP than zombies. I searched for diamonds for HOURS only to come up completely empty handed. I have no idea how my diamond sword disappeared. I did get hit by a trident I think while I was lost. Does that unequip weapons? Its the only thing I could figure. Was it a mistake to set up so far from a village? Why did that villager run away instead of going to a bed that was 10 feet away? How are you supposed to protect villagers? Should I have even bothered with them? I did try mining first, but that turned up empty as I said. I was struggling to find enough coal for torches I went through so many tunnels.

Yes, I know I threw a tantrum in the end, but who wouldn't be frustrated after all i went though? Struggling for hours and hours on end for utterly nothing. I don't get why i can't handle mobs even with full stinking iron. What am I doing wrong? I don't get it. I'm doing the same thing everyone on youtube does, but its still an epic struggle. People kill freaking endermen with iron, I obviously don't stand a snowball's chance in hell with the same setup. What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? Was the seed just bad? No villages for miles around spawn. Spawning on a tree in a jungle. Failing to find any diamonds anywhere. Getting hopelessly lost god knows how many times. Having items vanish from my inventory at random. Struggling to kill mobs that nobody else has even the slightest issue with. What else could I have done?

[InDarkestNight]

If it matters, I think this is the seed I had:

6519440901064800498

I got this by chosing 're-create world'. I have no way to know if its the same seed or not.

[InDarkestNight]

Okay, decided to look up guides rather than going in 'blindly'. Nothing suggests interacting with villagers through the entire playthrough, so maybe it was unneccessary. it certainly wasn't worth the hassle. Hours wasting sailing back and forth across the map and I never got anything out of it.

As for combat, I apparently wasn't doing 'critical hits' right. I found through experimentation, that jumping didn't make me kill mobs any faster. Apparently I had to be 'falling' for the extra damage to take effect.

As for the non-existant diamond issue, everyone else had a far better chance of finding them than me, even if they were 'unlucky'. I think I just had a bad seed. Perhaps villagers would've helped so I could at least buy a diamond sword from them. Of course, I may have just been better off going to the village to trade with them there rather than trying to set up a colony near my house. I also needed a way to get them close to their 'dorm', which I couldn't do because the entire shoreline as far as I could find was a slope. I couldn't figure out how to get them up to a higher elevation. I thought about digging a tunnel leading to a staircase that they could climb once freed, but I never did do that.

Also thinking I need to just start a new world, on easy difficulty this time, at least until I get used to the game. Besides, I had purged all the iron I could find in my vicinity, so I had screwed myself over in that world by throwing a tantrum. I just can't stand beating my head against the wall for no reward. Who enjoys that? Doesn't help that as I said in a previous post, I've rarely completed a game in my life. I used to never give up, but this just lead to me wasiting YEARS of my life trying to complete a game without ever succeeding. I'm just not as willing to keep trying now. If things get too hard, I give up and go do something actually useful. The only reason I stuck with this as long as I did was because I was hoping to make some extra cash on it.

And no, I didn't 'enjoy' the game. The scenery was nice, I admit, but that's all I got out of this. That entire world was just getting hopelessly lost, dying for stupid reasons that I couldn't do a damned thing about, running for my life from mobs I couldn't handle, rebuilding over and over as creepers kept blowing up all my stuff, sailing back and forth across the map (which took an entire day/night cycle, so yes it was over 10 minutes one way), and searching the map for hours on end for COMMON items that I needed to progress. What fun is that? Of course, many people don't enjoy offline mode apparently; most prefer to play online.

I've also been thinking about what difficulty various youtubers play on. I do know from my experiences with this unnamable game that there's a rampant problem with people playing the game on lower than default settings then claiming they're playing on a super hardcore world. The manhunt series is clearly on normal difficulty. Spiders can poison players, and undead wear armor. Don't know about the empires smp and its various off-shoots, or those hide or hunt videos though. Either way, someone like me clearly needs to stick to easy mode and creative mode (haven't learned yet how to activate that, but w/e). If nothing else, maybe I'll get a better map where diamonds exist outside of chests, and villagers aren't an entire day's boattrip away.

This game does need an actual tutorial btw. It doesn't tell you a damned thing. I had crafting tables where I couldn't figure out what items it wanted, or even what they did. The game explains nothing to you; you have to look online to figure out how to play.

[InDarkestNight]

And before anyone says it, yes I  know diamonds are supposed to be rare. What I saw though was ridiculous. Also, watching tutorials on youtube, I really think either my map was screwed up or those videos were outdated. They kept claiming that coal was 'rare', but it was the most common resource on my map! I seriously had more coal than wood. It was even more common than copper. I don't think that's normal. I was also running into coal all the time on the surface, even though that's also supposed to be rare. Also, the amount of time I spent looking, you would think I would at least run into redstone, but I never saw that either. Coal, copper, iron, stone, wood. That's all I had to work with the entire game. Maybe you can understand my desperation to get villagers.

Either way, I think I need to take a break from it for a bit after my first experience.