by 8ofHearts and KillerJen
The New Player Guide: How to Survive and Thrive
Hey everyone. Starting out on a massive server like this can be a lot to take in, so I put together this guide to help you get your bearings, find your footing, and understand how the world works. Read through this to save yourself a ton of time and avoidable mistakes.
- Contents
verison: 1.1 (05/21/2026)
Your Identity & The Spawn Area
Picking Your Look
One of the very first things you want to do is decide what you are going to look like. Open up your inventory and click the face icon on the upper bar to open the skin menu. There are hundreds of skins to choose from here. Take your time clicking through them until you find the one that catches your eye.
Understanding Spawn
You start the game at Spawn, which is the central hub for the entire server. This area is completely safe. PvP is disabled here, and if you happen to die while inside spawn, you keep all of your items. You will find various /shops around here where you can spend your server currency to buy gear and food.
Leaving and Returning
When you are ready to venture out into the world, just head out through any of the four main gates. It is that easy. If you ever need to get back, simply type /spawn in the chat or press the Go Spawn button located right in your inventory.
Setting Up Your First Base & Farm
Finding a Location
This server is absolutely massive, stretching about 30k blocks in all directions from spawn. Your coordinates are displayed as (x,y,z).
- The X coord tracks East (+x) to West (-x).
- The Z coord tracks North (+z) to South (-z).
- The Y coord is your depth, telling you how high or deep you are.
If you want to play solo or start your own faction base, you need to travel out and locate an area that is at least 1,000 blocks away from any other player.
The Rules of Farming
You start with 99 apples, which seems like a lot, but you will need a self-sufficient farm before that supply runs out. To place water for crops, you must fulfill two strict conditions: you have to be below y+10 in depth, and you must own the plot of land using a protection block.
Crafting Protection & Mining Depth Guide
To get a protection block, you need to smelt cobblestone into 8 regular stone and place them in a crafting grid with a gold ingot right in the center. This means your early game goal is to dig a mineshaft, secure your materials, and come back up to lock down your land.
Use this depth guide for your shaft:
- Coal: Located almost everywhere at any depth.
- Quartz: Found fairly shallow, right around -10 below ground.
- Iron Ore: Dig down to roughly -50 to find this.
- Gold Ore: Essential for your protection block, located around -200.
- Mese Crystal: Rare and located deep down at -600.
Surviving Without a Farm (Early Food Sources)
Automated Income
If you run out of apples before you find gold to start a farm, do not panic. The server automatically deposits money into your account every half hour just for playing.
Buying Food at Spawn
Take your server money to Spawn and head toward the South Gate. Look for MacDonna’s, a shop that sells basic food items. Just click on the signs to interact with the shop and buy what you need.
Free Honey
If you head North of Spawn, you can find beehives that give out free honey. Just make sure you do not punch the hive, or you will regret it.
The Home Teleport System
Managing Your Teleports
Even as a brand new player, you have access to multiple personal teleports to make traveling easier.
- Home 1: Stand where you want your main base to be and type /sethome. You can teleport back here anytime using /home or by clicking the Go Home 1 button at the bottom of your inventory screen. Use this for your permanent house, chests, and farm.
- Home 2: Use /sethome2 to set a second location, accessed via /home2 or the Go Home 2 button. This is best used as a temporary marker that you change constantly, like a deep mining spot or an area you are currently exploring.
- Undo: If you mess up a home location, typing /sethomeundo will restore the previous location of your last set home or home2.
Faction Home
If you are part of a faction, you can teleport to the shared base using /fhome or the Go Faction Home button. If you are the faction owner, you can set this spawn point for your team by standing at the base and typing /fsethome.
Faction Basics & Customization
The Faction Menu
Joining or creating a faction is highly encouraged on SquareOne. To access your faction settings, open your crafting menu and click the Inventory Settings button in the bottom left corner. From there, click the Faction Menu button. Here you can view members and look at the command list. Clicking the + next to any command will give you a simple explanation of what it does.
Picking Your Faction Color
You can customize your faction's name color using the RGB slider below the command list. Be careful: changing this color also changes your menu theme and your skybox color, so pick something you can live with.
- Drag the slider left or right to change the value by 1.
- Click any empty space on the slider bar to jump directly to that value.
- Use the << and >> buttons to shift all three color channels together to change the overall brightness.
- Make sure to click Save when you are finished.
Other Teleport Commands & Public Warps
Teleporting to Players
If you want someone to teleport directly to you, use the command /tphr [username]. If you want to request to teleport to another player's location, use /tpr [username]. The other player has 60 seconds to accept by typing /tpy or deny the request by typing /tpn. You can type /help to see other commands starting with /tp*.
Public Warps & Portals
The server has several public shortcuts you can type into chat:
- /shop takes you instantly to the main server shops.
- /bank teleports you directly to the bank.
- /18k-east warps you to an area exactly 18,000 blocks east of spawn.
There are also physical teleportals located underneath the spawn area that you can walk into.
Server Lore & Dangerous Monsters
The History of SquareOne
The world was formed from primordial chaos, and after thousands of eons, the Host, monk, came into existence. Blessed with great powers, monk drew other sentient life across the cosmos, creating the powerful beings known as Players. We are currently living in the age of moe 3.0. monk deputized the Police to keep order, and the Police oversee the Guardians to prevent war and famine from destroying the land.
Animals and Environment
Ancient wars caused the world's oceans and lakes to drop drastically. Friendly animals will randomly spawn around players, but if they are left unclaimed, they will vanish just as fast. You can feed grass directly to sheep and cows to tame them, but the only permanent way to keep them from despawning is to use a nametag on them.
The Land Guard (AFK Warning)
If you stand idle and go AFK (Away From Keyboard) for too long, a creature called the [Land Guard] will spawn near you, usually at night. Nobody knows exactly what it looks like; rumors say it can be tiny like a mouse or massive like a golem. Sometimes it just kicks you off the server. However, the server police warn that it has a darker side: it can kill even the most geared-out player in just two hits, letting out a creepy laugh right before it strikes. Do not stay AFK for long, and if you see it, run.
Underworld Monsters
The surface is relatively peaceful because monsters mostly roam below a depth of -1000. However, pools of lava found above that depth can spawn dangerous fire elementals (like lava blobs or lava snowmen) that appear in the light near the magma. To survive an early encounter with these fire elementals, you absolutely need a full set of Steel armor, which is made by smelting iron ore. Aside from these lava elementals, no other hostile mobs spawn above -1000 depth.