Minecraft wiki entry for Survival_in_an_infinite_desert, associated text: Your combat style needs to be cautious, defensive, and based on misleading your opponents. The most lethal attack you possess is to maneuver a mob into a fatal fall. The next strongest attack is to smother opponents in the sand - but this requires excellent timing, or you can breach your own defensive barriers. Walls of cacti are less lethal but can be used to channel mobs to a point where you can slowly kill them, doing additional damage as they touch the cacti. Cacti are especially useful against spiders, which are otherwise difficult to keep at bay. A dense roof of cacti (on sand 'pots') is one of the few ways of killing phantoms.