Boxy drops you into a world with nothing in your hands. The first half hour is the same for everyone: turn a tree into tools, turn tools into stone, and put a roof and a light between you and the first night. This page walks that path once, in order, and points at the pages that go deeper on each part.
Accounts and characters
A Boxy account is created once on this website and works everywhere — the browser client, the desktop app, and the Android app all sign in against it. You can also play offline single-player in the native app without an account at all, which is a reasonable way to try the game before joining a public world.
An account is not the same thing as a character. Characters live inside a world, and each world you join gets its own: its own inventory, level, homes, quests, and guild membership. Deleting a character or leaving a world does not touch your account, and joining a second world does not carry your gear across.
When you create a character you choose a name, an appearance, and a gender, and none of the three is preselected — the create button stays disabled until you have made all the choices. Pick a name you are happy to be called in chat; renaming is not a self-service operation.
Choosing a world
Open Worlds to see what is running. Each entry shows whether the world is online, how many players are in it, and a short description written by whoever operates it. Worlds share the same core survival systems but differ in the parts operators control: terrain and biome mix, how dangerous the mobs are, whether flight is granted, how many homes you may set, whether guests can join, and whether the map is ever reset.
Those differences are the reason this guide hedges occasionally. A command listed here may be switched off in the world you picked; the authoritative list is always /help typed into that world's chat, which prints the commands you can use, filtered by your privileges.
Join, create your character, and then wait a few seconds before you sprint off. Terrain streams in around you, and moving fast through a world that has not finished loading is the most common cause of "I fell through the floor" reports.
Reading the spawn area
Most worlds put you down in or near a protected area — a spawn town, a road junction, a plaza with signs and NPCs. Protected areas exist so that new players do not arrive to a crater, and they are usually enforced: you will find that you cannot break or place blocks inside them.
Spend a minute reading the place before you leave it. Signs carry local rules. Questmasters standing around with a ? over their heads have work for you. Roads lead somewhere, and following one is a much safer way to find a building site than striking out into the trees at random.
Build away from other people's work. Do not wall in someone's door, quarry a road, or set up shop inside another player's base. It is the fastest way to collect a report, and most of it is covered by the Community Guidelines rather than merely being rude.
Your first tools
Everything starts with wood. Walk up to a tree and hold the mine button on its trunk until it breaks, then collect the drop. Two or three trunks is plenty to begin with.
Open the inventory with I. The crafting grid is in there, and the first two recipes are the only ones worth memorising: a trunk becomes planks, and planks become sticks. Planks and sticks together make a wooden pickaxe.
That pickaxe is the point of the whole exercise. Stone and ore do not drop for bare hands or for an axe — they need a pickaxe, and each tier of tool digs faster and reaches materials the previous tier could not. So: wooden pickaxe, then a stack of stone, then the same tools again in stone, and you are properly equipped. Crafting covers the grid, the recipe book, and the rest of the ladder.
Torches are worth crafting early — coal above a stick — because an unlit base is genuinely hard to find again in the dark, and unlit ground is where hostile mobs appear.
Shelter, storage, and light
A first base does not need to be impressive. Four walls, a roof, a door you can close, and a torch outside it will do. What matters is that it is enclosed, lit, and somewhere you can find again.
Two blocks make it a home rather than a box. A chest (eight planks around an empty center) gets your spare stone and wood out of your inventory, which matters because a full inventory silently blocks quest rewards and dropped loot from reaching you. A furnace (eight stone around an empty center) cooks food and smelts ore, and it takes coal, planks, sticks, or trunks as fuel.
Keep cooked food on the hotbar before you go anywhere. Eating mid-fight rarely goes well; eating before one usually does.
Staying alive
Four bars on the HUD describe your condition, and each one drains differently:
- HP
- Health. Falls to hits, falls, fire, drowning, and lava. Reaching zero sends you back to spawn.
- EP
- Exertion. Spent by sprinting and by sustained effort; it recovers on its own when you ease off.
- MP
- Mana. Spent casting spells from a wand. Irrelevant until you have one.
- BP
- Breath. Only appears when it matters — underwater, mostly. Surface before it empties.
Damage you take is echoed in chat, and when you die the death notice names what killed you. Read it rather than dismissing it; "killed by a level 14 wolf" and "fell 30 blocks" call for very different adjustments. You respawn at the world spawn point, and your dropped items stay where you died, so the recovery run is worth making promptly.
The one rule that surprises people: check the level next to a creature's name. The gap between its level and yours does more to decide a fight than your equipment does. World Guide covers combat, levels, and what is worth running away from.
Quests
Questmasters are NPCs standing in towns and along roads. A ? above one means work is on offer; talk to them to see the objectives and the reward before you accept. An ! means one of the quests you already accepted involves that NPC — usually your cue to come back and collect.
Once a quest is accepted you generally do not have to do anything special: mining, crafting, harvesting, and hunting all count toward objectives as you play. The character menu (C) holds the full log with active objectives, timers, and rewards. Leave a couple of inventory slots free before you turn one in, because the reward has to land somewhere.
Setting a home
When you have a base worth returning to, type /sethome in chat while standing in it. After that /home teleports you back and /homes lists what you have saved. Worlds set their own limit on how many homes you may keep, and a world may disable homes entirely — if the commands are missing from /help, that is the reason.
With a home set, a stocked chest, and a stone pickaxe, the opening is over. Mining down for ore, taking quests seriously, joining a guild, and claiming land are all reasonable next moves.