Find Your Way to Your House when Lost in Minecraft

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Almost every Minecraft player knows what it's like to get lost on an expedition. If you're not ready to give up on your old house and start a new civilization in the wilderness, there are many tricks you can use for getting back home. Even better, for future expeditions, use your coordinates, a map, or a series of landmarks to prevent yourself losing track of home another time.

Steps

Preventing Yourself from Getting Lost

  1. Use maps. The most surefire way of keeping track of your surroundings is to use a map, but this can be resource-intensive. Craft a map by placing a compass in the center of a crafting table, with paper surrounding it. Use the map while you are at your house, and it will begin to fill out the surrounding area with your house at the exact center.
    • On console versions of Minecraft, one map may be able to cover the entire world. On PC versions, the world is infinite, and long expeditions may require keeping many maps in your inventory and keeping track of which one is which.
  2. Expand your map with more paper. To create a larger scale map, place your map at the center of a crafting table and surround it with paper. This will result in a larger-scale map centered on your current location.[1]
  3. Use the breadcrumb method. On short expeditions to gather materials, carry around a stack of dirt or other mostly useless material. Every few steps, drop a block of dirt. On your way back, follow the line of objects back to your base.
    • You can also mark your tracks with torches so when you go back you can follow the torches with ease.
  4. Build your own landmarks. On longer expeditions, build high towers that are easily visible from each other. One of the fastest ways to do this is to look straight down at the ground beneath you, jump, and place a block under your feet. Repeat quickly until you are at the top of a tall tower. Use torches, glowstones, or beacons to make your landmarks visible at night.
    • Make sure that each tower is visible from the last one.
    • Be careful coming down from your tower. If you do not want to build a large number of ladders, you may need to step off the tower and stop your fall several times with blocks of dirt on the way down. This can be dangerous if you "misclick".
  5. Keep track of your landmarks. On your way back, you might want to destroy your landmarks so you don't get confused on a later expedition. Alternatively, make an arrow shape with any material next to your landmarks, pointing in the direction of your house.
  6. Track the position of the sun. The sun always rises in the same direction and sets in the opposite direction. When setting out on an above-ground expedition, note which way you are walking in relation to sunrise or sunset.
    • If you can't see the sun, plant sunflowers, which always face the sun's current position.
  7. Keep track of your route while mining. While you're underground, put torches on one side of the wall only. For instance, if the torches are all on the right side going in, you'll know you're returning home when the torches are on your left side.
    • You can also use wooden signposts with more detailed information, or use dyed wool as a code. For example, red wool could mean "lava this way" and blue wool could mean "toward the exit."
    • If you are completely lost, you can dig straight up to the surface and look for landmarks. This is risky, since gravel or lava above you could kill your character.
  8. Build paths along common routes. If you often journey between two locations, build a path to follow out of torches, walkways, fences, or another obvious marker. As you develop your world more, you might want to build powered railways with mine carts for traveling long distances, or create a series of outposts along the road to rest in at night.
    • For quick travel between extremely long distances, you can build a road through the Nether. If you built a Nether portal near your house, build a portal where you are, then search for your old portal in the Nether.

Using Coordinates and/or Suiciding

  1. Press the F3 key to view your coordinates. Press F3 at the top of your keyboard while you are in your Minecraft game. Text should appear displaying your coordinates. The X and Y coordinates describe your North-South and East-West location, and the Z coordinate describes your depth or height above sea level. Notice how your coordinates change as you walk around.
    • On an Apple computer, you may need to press fn and F3 at the same time. The fn key is on the lower left of most Apple keyboards.
  2. Write down your current coordinates. Write down your X and Y coordinates, or take a screenshot while they are displayed. If you are at your house, keep track of these so you can always use the coordinate display to find your way back. If you are already lost, write down your current coordinates anyway, and use the following method to suicide your way back home without losing your items.
    • This method does not work in Hardcore mode, which deletes your world when your character dies.
  3. Place your items in a chest. If you have any items you don't want to lose when you die, build a chest and place them inside it. In a single-player world, it's a good idea to keep your chest in a visible location, such as at the top of a tower. If you are playing with monsters on, you might want to protect your chest from exploding Creepers by building a protective shell around it.
    • If you have an "ender chest," you can access your belongings inside it from any other ender chest in the world, without having to travel to the other chest's location.
    • Alternatively, if cheats are enabled, press T to open the chat window, and type /gamerule keepInventory true into the cheat box. This should keep your items in your inventory after you die, which saves you the trouble of having to track down your items again.
  4. Kill your character. Jump from a tall location, let a monster kill you, or use any other method to kill your character. When your character dies, he will respawn at the last bed you rested in, but without any items. If you do not have a bed, or if all your beds have been moved, destroyed, or covered by another object, you will appear in the world spawn location instead, where you first appeared when you entered this world.
  5. If necessary, destroy your beds and kill your character again. If you do not recognize your respawn point, destroy the bed you appeared next to and kill your character a second time. If there is still a bed in your house, you will eventually appear next to it.
    • If you appear next to the world spawn point instead of a bed, and your house is not nearby, you may need to use a map or cheats to find your house again, or build a new house.
  6. Use coordinates to track down your items. Press F3 again to display your coordinates, and write these down as your house coordinates. Watch the x and y coordinates change as you walk around, and walk in a direction that causes them to approach the coordinates of the chest that contains your items.
    • Here's a simplified example. Say the coordinates of your house are x-50 y-100 and the coordinates of your chest are x-50 y-300. Walk around until you find the direction that keeps the x coordinate unchanged (near x-50), and causes the y-coordinate to increase, towards 300.
    • Finding your way back should be much easier now that you know the coordinates of your house.

Using a Compass

  1. Use this method to find your original spawn point. Each Minecraft world has a world spawn point, where new players appear. Compasses only point to this location, which may be helpful if you built your base near where you first appeared. They will not point to your individual spawn point, which is the last bed you rested in.
    • See the other methods if you are trying to find a house far away from the world spawn point.
  2. Acquire iron and redstone. To make a compass, you'll need four iron ingots and one redstone. Using an Make-a-Pickaxe-on-Minecraft for iron, or a Make-a-Pickaxe-on-Minecraft or better for redstone, you can obtain the raw ingredients. Redstone ore looks like a stone block with red flecks, and is found deep underground, less than 16 blocks above the bedrock.[2] Iron ore has beige flecks instead, and is usually fairly easy to find.
    • You can also find redstone by killing witches, trading with villagers, or looting jungle temples.
  3. Smelt four iron ingots. Make-a-Furnace-in-Minecraft and click on it to begin smelting. Add any type of fuel, such as coal or wood, to the lower box, and put the iron ore in the top box. This will smelt the iron ore into iron ingots.
  4. Craft a compass. Click on a crafting table and place a piece of redstone into the center box. Place the four iron ingots above, below, to the left, and to the right of the redstone. A compass should appear in the results box. Drag it to your inventory.
    • If you want to save materials, you can look at the compass needle, then take the ingredients back into your inventory instead of the compass. The compass needle in the icon will point toward the spawn point, just as it does when equipped. It can be tedious trying to use a compass this way on a long trip, however.
  5. Equip the compass and follow the needle. Hold the compass, and you should see a larger image of the compass appear in your character's hand. The compass needle will point toward the world spawn point, and will change direction as you do. Walk in the direction the compass is pointing until you find an area you recognize.

Using Cheats

  1. Check whether cheats are enabled. On a multiplayer server, the server administrators decide whether cheats are enabled. On a single-player world, the player chooses whether cheats are allowed when the world is created. However, you can enable cheats just for this game session by going to the menu and clicking Open to LAN, selecting the "Enable Cheats" option, and clicking Start LAN World.[3]
  2. Teleport to another player or coordinates. Press T on your keyboard to open the chat window. Type /tp (your username) (another player's name), without the parentheses, to teleport next to that player. This will instantly transport you with all your items. If you are in a single-player game, or do not know any players near your house or a recognizable landmark, you can only teleport to other coordinates instead, using /tp (your username) (x) (y) (z).
    • See the section on using coordinates for more information.
  3. Enable creative mode. In creative mode, your character cannot die (unless you fall into the Void or use the /kill command) and will be able to fly through the air, making it much easier to search for your house. Open the chat window and type /gamemode creative (your username), without the parentheses. Once you've found your house, fly down to the ground and type /gamemode survival (your username) or /gamemode adventure (your username) to return to your previous mode.
    • If you are still lost, go to the menu and select the highest render distance. This may cause your game to lag, but will let you see a great distance away.

Tips

  • Make sure you have a decent amount of resources in your inventory. Bring a bed so you can sleep and materials to build a hut. That way it is going to be easy because any monsters that burn up in sun will burn as soon as you step out of the hut you made.
  • Most Minecraft players lose at least one house, and give up on finding it. If you went on a long expedition, you might have new and exciting materials to build a better house, or you might have found a more attractive location.
  • If you are in Minecraft PE, dig down as far as you can until you take damage and die. You should spawn at your village/house.
  • If your game is 1.9 or later and you're going on a long trip above ground, bring several shovels and tap or right click grass blocks with them. This will cause the grass to turn yellow, creating a pathway look.
  • If you are playing multiplayer mode, stay together. You're going to want a partner to help fight/mine.
  • Build a tower of dirt blocks in front of your house. Place a torch on top and you have a beacon! This will help you find your way home. Glowstone makes for a better light if you have it.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Map
  2. ↑ http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Redstone_Ore
  3. ↑ http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Cheats
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