If you are feeling a little daring, we have just a thing for you: adventures! When you are out and about in the real world, you may notice some particularly big tappables with glowing rays of light emitting from them. These are adventures!
Adventures are not tappables - they are actually preset buildplates that you can explore in play mode. The difference is that you can actually keep the stuff you find from the adventures in play mode, as opposed to play mode on your own buildplates.
Before you head off into an adventure, you will need the right tools for the job. We recommend a sword for fending off hostile mobs, a pickaxe for mining through the earth, an axe for cutting down trees, a shovel for digging through the softer minerals, and a bow for sniping mobs from afar (don't forget the arrows!).
Adventures almost always have hostile mobs hidden within them, so it is important you bring a sword and ideally a bow, but it is not required. Since most build plates are not too wide or long, you will have to start digging down. Peek your head around to find soft spots, and start going down!
Most of the time there are some caverns hidden below the surface where you can find rare items and mobs that want to eat you, so defend yourself and grab that sweet loot!
Free buildplates
To start you off, Minecraft Earth gives you a small but respectable buildplate right from the get-go. It is a humble 8x8 plate with some grass and a tree on it. It is not much, but it is a good starting point for creating your own little home! Of course, you are going to want to move up in the world and get yourself some more buildplates. You will receive five buildplates for free (including the starting one) as you level up and progress through the game. Here is a complete list.
Starting Buildplate
The starting buildplate is nothing more than a field and a small lake with a single tree. What you see pictured above is our version where we made things a little more lively with some animals!
Level 5 Buildplate
The level 5 buildplate is a simple little house nestled between a couple of trees. Many of your starting houses probably looked something like this!
Level 10 Buildplate
The level 10 buildplate is a small desert oasis with a waterfall in the center. There are some cacti making things a little more colorful, and this buildplate is perfect for your desert creations.
Level 15 Buildplate
The level 15 buildplate is a mossy tall tree covered in vines. If you want to make a tree house or something of the sort, this is a good starting point!
Level 20 Buildplate
Finally, the level 20 buildplate is an arctic igloo complete with a polar bear! If you prefer things a little chilly, this buildplate is for you. Remember that ultimately buildplates can turn into whatever you want them to so as long as you have the blocks ready to make your dream build come true, so do not feel like you are restricted to the default palette of the buildplate. Unfortunately, these all seem to be 8x8 but they should give you some ideas to spark your creativity. You gain these by simply leveling up, and what is the best way to level up? Finding tappables of course! But that's not all...
Tappables are the key to rubies and experience!
Every time you find a tappable, you will earn experience for collecting it. If you manage to find uncommon and rare items in the tappable, you will earn even more experience. The key to leveling up is to simply just get out there and explore your world while collecting everything in sight! Not only that, but every tappable you find has a small chance to grant you a ruby. The chance is slim, but eventually you should receive some rubies after a couple of tappables. If you are out of challenges to do, run out and collect everything you see to hopefully get some rubies. Speaking of which...
Complete challenges for more rubies!
Challenges are special objectives that reward you with lots of experience points and a decent amount of rubies once completed. There are four types of challenges: dailies, weeklies, career, and events.
Daily Challenges
Daily challenges, as the name suggests, cycle out every day. You get assigned two challenge groups: Let's Collect and Let's Build. Let's Collect will require you to collect certain items from specific tappables. You will need to run around a lot to get this one done! Let's Build requires you to place certain objects on a buildplate. This one is not too hard, you might need to craft the blocks you need beforehand though. Completing both the Let's Collect and Let's Build challenge groups rewards you with 5 rubies and a grand total of 500 experience points!
Weekly Challenges
The second type of challenges are the weekly challenges. You have the whole week to get these done, so naturally they are a bit harder to complete, but the rewards are even greater! There are a total of six weekly challenges that you must do. The first challenge is to complete the 5 days worth of daily challenges. This one is easy to miss if you start in the week too late, so be careful! The second challenge is to simply log into the game every day of the week. You do not need to collect a tappable or anything, you just need to open the game to receive credit. The third and fourth challenges require you to collect specific tappables or mobs, and the fifth challenge makes you smelt a bunch of items in your smelter. You need to visit adventures often to get the ore you can smelt, so this one requires a bit of effort. The final challenge asks you to put down a certain number of mobs on a buildplate. As long as you have been collecting every tappable you come across, you should have no problem with this one. Completing every single weekly challenge, including the daily ones, will reward you with a grand total of 20 rubies and 200 experience points.
Career Challenges
And finally, we have the Career challenges. The career is meant to be a guideline down the general progression path of Minecraft Earth. If you are ever unsure of what to work towards next, take a look at your next career challenge and you should get a good idea.You do not get any rubies with the career challenges, but you do get a lot of experience points, making them still very worth your time to do. There are also Event challenges, but they have not been implemented yet, so stay tuned for those. We can imagine there are going to be some nice events where special tappables appear!
Take a look in the store!
Once you have amassed a hefty sum of rubies, you can visit the store to see what kind of buildplates are on sale. Just like the ones you earn by leveling up, the ones in the store are all differently themed. The real treasure here are the 16x16 buildplates, which is currently the biggest buildplate you can get at the moment. The cheapest 16x16 buildplate costs a whopping 225 rubies, so you better start saving now if you want it!
I-Game Tappables
Tappables come in different forms, and here is a list of the kinds of tappables you can expect to come across. Every tappable you find is worth some experience points, so they a major contributor to your experience pool.
Trees will give you logs that you can process into wooden planks. The type of log you get depends on the tree: there are oak trees, spruce trees, and birch trees.
Animals will give you... well, animals! The animal you see on the map is the one you get when you tap on it. Be sure to collect all the pigs, sheep, chickens, and cows!
Rocks will give you various basic minerals, such as cobblestone, stone, sand, granite, and more. You will need lots of cobblestone for crafting basic tools.
Hills will give you lots of different fauna, including dirt, red mushrooms, and different kinds of flowers. You can use these to make your buildplates pretty.
Chests are the rarest kind of tappable, and they provide you with pre-crafted rare items, like redstone mechanisms, TNT, note blocks, and much more!
Tappables randomly spawn all over the world, and there is no data yet on whether or not certain tappables spawn in specific places. So, if you are looking to earn a lot of tappables, simply open the game while you are on your daily commute or walk and take a look around! You do not have to play for that long as there is a good chance you will see some immediate tappables spawn near you.
All of the goodies in your inventory can be used just like how they are used in Minecraft: for building and crafting! Let us explain "buildplates" and crafting to you.
Buildplates are little pieces of your own personal Minecraft world that you can build on and customize to your liking. If you tap on the button with the little castle on it, you can look at your buildplates. Your first one is given to you for free!
It is a small 8x8 buildplate, but you gotta start somewhere, right? You have two options: build and play.
In Build mode, you can use the blocks and items from your inventory to permanently make changes to the buildplate. You can use the tools to pick up items and mobs. When you are done, exit and your buildplate will save in its current state.
In Play mode, you will enter your buildplate with health. You can be hurt by hostile mobs in this mode, so be careful! Blocks now must be mined with the appropriate tools, and you can set up your own little adventures.
In Play mode, nothing is saved so do not worry about using too many items or blocks; when you leave Play mode you will revert back to the state you were before you started it.
Did you get all of that? Basically, think of Build mode as the "creative" mode and play mode as the "survival" mode, just like in the original Minecraft. Use build to set up interesting scenarios or battles, or just build a house if you want. Then use play to act it out and show it off!
Start working on your career challenges
Now that you have dabbles in tappables, buildplates, and crafting, you can start working on progression! Much like the original game, Minecraft Earth is ultimately a sandbox game so you can do whatever you want without feeling pressured.
However, if you want to level up faster and unlock the later buildplates, you will need to earn more experience. You get experience points whenever you complete an adventure, find tappables, or complete a career/daily/weekly challenges.
There are three types of challenges: daily, weekly, and career. Daily and weekly challenges are limited time as suggested by their name, but if you manage to complete all of them you can get some rubies for your hard work.
If you want to focus on leveling up, start working towards career challenges. They offer nothing but high amounts of experience points, so they are the perfect way of leveling up. They also offer you a bit of guidance on what to do next if you like to follow some sort of progression route.
With a combination of exploration, tappable collecting, and challenge completing, you should be able to level up relatively quickly!