Welcome to Cencraft Survival! Whether you’re joining Cencraft for the first time or returning after some time away, Survival gives you a traditional Minecraft experience with additional multiplayer features for protecting your builds, earning money, trading with other players, and progressing over time.
This guide covers the essentials you’ll want to know during your first few hours on the server, including finding a place to build, setting a home, protecting your land, joining Jobs, participating in the economy, and getting established.
Getting Started on Survival
After connecting to the Cencraft Network, head to the Survival server to begin your adventure.
Before you start building, take a little time to familiarize yourself with spawn and the basic commands available to you. You don’t need to learn everything immediately. A few commands are enough to get your first base established.
Finding Somewhere to Build
When you’re ready to leave spawn, you can use:
/wild
or:
/rtp
These commands teleport you to a random location in the Survival world, making it easier to find somewhere away from spawn to begin building.
Don’t feel like you need to build wherever you first arrive. Look around before committing to a location. Consider access to wood, food, caves, nearby biomes, and enough open space for anything you may want to build later.
It’s also a good idea to leave some distance between yourself and existing player bases.
Once you’ve found somewhere you like, set a home:
/sethome
You can then return to your home using:
/home
Setting your home early is important. If you die, travel somewhere far away, or return to spawn, you’ll have an easy way to get back to your base.
Protecting Your Land
Finding the perfect location doesn’t help much if you don’t protect it.
Cencraft Survival uses a land-claiming system that allows players to protect their bases, storage areas, farms, and other builds.
Claims prevent other players from modifying protected areas unless you’ve specifically given them permission.
Creating Your First Claim
The primary tool used for creating claims is a Golden Shovel.
With the Golden Shovel equipped, select opposite corners of the area you want to protect. Your claim defines the protected area between those points.
When deciding how large to make your first claim, focus on protecting the important parts of your base first. You can expand your protected area as you gain additional claim blocks.
Your first priorities should generally include your:
- Chests and storage
- Main house
- Furnaces and crafting area
- Farms
- Valuable blocks
- Important redstone or machinery
As your base grows, remember to expand your claim with it.
Giving Friends Access to Your Claim
Claims don’t mean you have to play alone.
If you’re building with friends, you can give individual players permission to interact with your protected area.
For full building access, use:
/trust PlayerName
A trusted player can make changes inside your claim, so only give this permission to players you actually trust.
For more limited permissions, Survival also provides commands such as:
/containertrust PlayerName
and:
/accesstrust PlayerName
These are useful when you want someone to interact with parts of your claim without necessarily giving them unrestricted building access.
If you ever need to remove someone’s permissions, use:
/untrust PlayerName
It’s worth checking your trust permissions occasionally, especially if you previously shared a base with someone who no longer plays with you.
Your Starter Kit
New players can use the Survival starter kit to help get through the earliest stage of the game.
Use:
/kit starter
Your starter equipment gives you a head start, but you should still begin gathering your own resources fairly quickly.
Some good early priorities are:
- Establish a protected base.
- Gather a reliable food supply.
- Start mining for iron, coal, and other resources.
- Create organized storage.
- Set your home.
- Begin participating in the server economy.
Once those basics are handled, you’ll have a much easier time deciding what you want to focus on next.
The Cencraft Survival Economy
Survival isn’t limited to collecting resources for yourself. Cencraft also has an economy that lets players earn, spend, sell, and trade.
You can check your current balance with:
/balance
Building up your balance gives you another form of progression alongside normal Minecraft resources.
There isn’t one required way to participate in the economy. Some players enjoy mining, others farm, some sell valuable items, and others focus heavily on trading.
Finding something you enjoy doing is usually better than trying to maximize every activity from your first day.
Earning Money With Jobs
One of the easiest ways to begin earning money is through the Jobs system.
Use:
/jobs
Jobs reward you for performing different activities while you play.
This means you can earn money while doing things you would probably already be doing in Survival, such as gathering resources or working on your base.
Choose Jobs that fit how you normally play.
If you enjoy spending hours underground, a mining-oriented Job makes more sense than choosing something you rarely do. If you spend most of your time gathering wood, farming, or fighting mobs, choose accordingly.
Jobs become especially useful because earning money doesn’t have to become a completely separate activity from playing Minecraft.
Trading With Other Players
As you accumulate resources, you’ll eventually have items you don’t need and other items you’d rather buy than collect yourself.
That’s where Cencraft’s player economy becomes useful.
Auction House
The Auction House allows items to be offered to players across the server.
Use:
/ah
Check the Auction House periodically even when you aren’t selling anything. It can give you an idea of what other players are selling and what kinds of resources are currently in demand.
When selling items, think about what would actually be useful to another player. Rare resources, equipment, building materials, and other desirable items may be more valuable than filling the market with things everyone already has.
Player Shops
Player shops provide another way to buy and sell items.
Unlike simply throwing unwanted resources away, selling excess materials lets another player use them while giving you additional money for your own progression.
As you become established, running your own shop can become a project of its own.
Vote for Cencraft
Voting is another useful part of playing on the network.
Use:
/vote
Voting helps Cencraft appear on Minecraft server lists while providing players with rewards for supporting the network.
If you’re playing regularly, it’s worth checking the available voting sites and making voting part of your normal routine.
You can also visit the Vote page on the Cencraft website for voting information.
A Good First-Hours Progression Plan
There’s no single correct way to play Survival, but if you’re unsure what to do after joining, this is a solid starting path.
1. Leave Spawn
Use /wild or /rtp and explore until you find somewhere you’d like to settle.
2. Set Your Home
Use /sethome so you don’t lose your new location.
3. Protect Your Base
Create a claim with your Golden Shovel before storing valuable items or investing significant time into your build.
4. Claim Your Starter Kit
Use /kit starter and put the available equipment to use.
5. Gather the Essentials
Secure food, wood, coal, iron, and enough building materials for your first proper base.
6. Join Jobs
Open /jobs and choose Jobs that complement the activities you already enjoy.
7. Start Building Your Balance
Continue gathering resources while earning money through Jobs and participating in the player economy.
8. Explore the Market
Check /ah and player shops to become familiar with what other Cencraft players are buying and selling.
9. Expand
Once your basic needs are covered, start working toward larger goals: a bigger base, farms, better equipment, more land, community projects, or whatever else you want your Survival experience to become.
Playing With Other People
Cencraft is a multiplayer network, and Survival becomes much more interesting when players interact with one another.
You can trade resources, build with friends, participate in the economy, help newer players, or simply chat while working on your own projects.
If you decide to share your claim, remember that commands such as /trust grant another player permissions within your protected land. Use them intentionally.
You remain responsible for deciding who you allow into your builds and storage areas.
Protect Your Progress
As your base becomes larger and more valuable, take a few minutes occasionally to make sure everything important is actually protected.
A small starter claim may have been enough on your first day but may no longer cover a newly expanded storage room, farm, or building.
It’s much easier to expand your protection while you’re building than to discover later that an important section was outside your claim.
The same principle applies to homes and permissions. Keep useful homes set, and remove trust permissions that you no longer need.
What Should You Work Toward?
Once you’re established, Survival becomes much more open-ended.
You might decide to:
- Build a large permanent base
- Create farms and resource-production systems
- Become active in the player economy
- Operate a player shop
- Collect valuable or difficult-to-obtain items
- Build alongside friends
- Explore the world
- Accumulate wealth
- Work on ambitious building projects
There isn’t a finish line you have to reach. The goal is to establish yourself and then decide what kind of Survival player you want to be.
Need Help?
Don’t worry if you don’t understand every system immediately.
Other players and Cencraft staff can help if you’re unsure how something works. You can also join the Cencraft Discord or TeamSpeak community to talk with other members of the network.
As more Cencraft Guides are published, we’ll also be expanding this section with detailed guides covering individual Survival systems such as claims, Jobs, the economy, shops, and other gameplay features.
Start Your Survival Adventure
Getting established on Cencraft Survival comes down to a few fundamentals: find somewhere you want to live, set your home, protect your land, gather resources, and start participating in the economy.
From there, what you build is entirely up to you.
If you’re brand new, don’t worry about becoming wealthy or building something enormous immediately. Get your first base protected, learn how the server works, meet some other players, and expand from there.
Welcome to Cencraft Survival.
Continue Exploring Cencraft
New to the network? Read the Getting Started on Cencraft guide for an introduction to connecting, choosing a server, and finding your way around the network.
Looking for a different progression experience? Try the Cencraft Skyblock Starter Guide or learn how mining and ranking work in the Cencraft Prison Progression Guide.