Stone, from one bucket of lava.

01 The premise

Why stone comes first

You arrive on nine blocks: eight dirt around one grass centre, over a single layer of deepslate. That is the whole floor, and there is nothing under the deepslate at all. A bridge is cobblestone, a furnace is cobblestone, a stone pickaxe is cobblestone, and the twelve deposit islands — the only ore in the world — sit 96 to 180 blocks out in open air. The road to them is a bridge, and the bridge is stone.

The kit has no tools. Wood comes first: plant one of the three saplings on the grass centre, grow it, chop it, and turn the logs into a crafting table and a wooden pickaxe. A wooden pickaxe takes deepslate, stone and cobblestone. It will not take anything that matters out of a deposit.

02 The stakes

The bucket you cannot spill

The kit is one lava bucket and two water buckets. The water can be made again: two sources in a line fill the cell between them forever, and that is what the second bucket is for. The lava cannot. There is no lava in the void, none in the hub, and nothing in the alpha that produces more — one source per player, once, and it is the only lava in the world.

Everything the lava is for runs through a single block, so the whole build is arranged around one rule. The rule is not “be careful”; it is a specific thing that must not happen:

Which makes the most repeated sentence in every cobblestone guide — “pour the lava, then pour the water on it” — the one sentence you must not follow.

03 The mistake this page made

Why a gap is not enough

The first version of this guide said: dig three cells in a row, put water in one end and lava in the other, and the middle cell — where the block appears — is what keeps the two fluids apart. It was built from that page, and the lava source did not survive it.

What the working build does differently is not one thing, it is three, and it is worth being plain that we do not know which of them carries the safety: the water is fed from further away, so it arrives at the lava as a thin flow rather than a body; it is draining the whole time, so it never accumulates into a pool; and the cell that feeds the lava is the pad's own centre, with solid ground on both sides. The trench had none of those. It had a gap, and a gap turned out to be the weakest of the three.

04 The build

The build, cell by cell

One line through the pad's middle, and the order is the whole trick: water → hole → cobble → lava. The cobble sits between the drain and the lava, so the water has to cross the drain to reach it — and everything past the pad is a floor you built, with walls around the water, running on one source. The pad supplies three of the cells (lava, cobble, hole); the plug on the lava's outside, the water source beyond the hole and the plug that closes the far end are yours to build.

1. Pick the row

   The pad's middle row, the one through the grass centre, read in one direction: lava at one edge, cobble on the centre, drain at the other edge. The cobble always sits between the hole and the lava — that is the arrangement the whole machine depends on. Everything else on the pad stays as it is; those dirt cells are your walls and your standing room.

2. Dig the lava's cell, then plug it

   Dig the pad's edge cell one block deep and put the lava in the hole, so it is below the surface and enclosed. The dirt you dug has a job: place it against the open side, the one facing the void, so the lava has a wall on every side except the face toward the centre. One block is enough — the pad walls the rest — but it has to be dirt or stone, not planks. Wood against lava catches fire, and a burning machine is a worse afternoon than a lost bucket.

3. Break the drain

   The pad's other edge cell, in the same row: break the deepslate under it. That is one of your nine tiles gone for good, and it is the cell the water leaves through — the one between the water and the cobble, so the stream has to cross it to reach the block. Do it before any fluid exists, because after that the floor is a working surface, not a build site.

4. Build out the water end

   Past the drain you need a platform — planks, or whatever the first tree and the first cobblestone give you — and it is a floor before it is walls. The pad ends at column 3 and there is void under everything past it, so build the floor at the level below the water first, then wall the north side and the south side and put the plug in at the far end, so the water has one way to go: back toward the pad. That is the "build out" in the plan, and it is why this machine is six long and not four.

5. Water first, at the far end

   One bucket, one source, in the cell just inside the far plug — the second water bucket is for the pool, not for this. The source is the whole water run: it sits against the drain, so its water arrives at the hole, drops through it, and the thin lip that crosses the gap wets the cobble cell. Watch it do that before the lava exists: if it is not reaching the centre, or it is pooling anywhere, you have lost nothing yet.

6. Lava last, into its hole

   Aim at the floor of the dug cell and empty the bucket. It fills the cell, the water runs past its one open face, and the pad's centre cell starts producing cobblestone.

7. Mine the centre

   Stand on the north or south pad cell and reach into the middle one. It refills for as long as the stream keeps running and the lava stays in its hole — and you are always standing on solid dirt, above the level of the drain.

05 The material

The floor you are spending

Three things get spent, and none of them is free on the first day. A dirt block — not gone, moved; it becomes the lava's back wall, and it has to be dirt rather than a plank because wood against lava burns. A deepslate tile under the pad's edge, broken through for the drain: one of nine, permanent. And planks for the built-out end — floor first, then walls — which means the first tree is a prerequisite, not a convenience. Water costs one bucket of the two; the other is the pool in the next section.

The pad itself is eight dirt and a grass centre over that single layer. Eight dirt is another eight blocks of bridge, and nine tiles under it is the whole supply of stone until the machine is running.

06 The water

The water pool

The machine takes one water source. The second bucket is not spare parts — it is the other half of an infinite pool, which is what every farm, the sugar cane and any later brewing assume. Build it somewhere the water cannot reach the drain, and build it before the machine if you only trust yourself with one bucket at a time.

Dig three blocks in a line, one deep, and put a source at each end. The middle becomes a source of its own — two sources beside a cell fill it — and stays one after you scoop it. That is the whole trick: scoop the middle, never an end, and the pool is endless. A bucket only picks up a source block, never flowing water, so an end you break is an end you cannot refill.

07 The neighbours

One machine, sixteen pads

The first generator anyone builds is the only one for a while, and it is the closest thing this alpha has to public infrastructure. It is also a cell of lava at a pad's edge and a stream running through somebody's floor, on a server with no claims and no locks, where etiquette is the protection.

• Mine the centre, not the ends. The block appears on the pad's centre cell every time. Taking a bucket to the ends because they looked like a puddle is how a source dies.
• Do not dam the stream. A block dropped in it to stand on is a pool next to the lava, and the machine's whole safety is that the water keeps leaving.
• Sign it and light it. A sign with your name and a torch beside the machine turns a hole in the dark into something people use on purpose.
• Ask before you build on top of one. A generator through the middle of a neighbour's pad is a favour; a wall through the drain is not.

The deposits are the same arrangement at a larger scale: they belong to everybody, they come back on a timer, and nobody's chest is protected by anything except the fact that we are sixteen people who agreed to be decent about it.

08 Fixes

When it goes wrong

None of this is a bug, which is why it is worth writing down. The alpha's rules are few and specific, and “is this a bug or is this the game” is the most useful question you can bring to the Discord.