Minecraft wiki entry for Beginner%27s_guide, associated text: Once you have sticks, the Recipe Book for the crafting table includes recipes for the wooden tools. The wooden pickaxe lets you harvest cobblestone, and once you have that, you get the recipes for stone tools. Later, iron or gold ingots, and diamonds, likewise appear in the recipes for those tiers. That said, all the recipes for each tool follow similar patterns, making a little picture of the tool in the crafting grid, and different tiers vary only in the material used. For wooden tools, any combination of planks can be used. If you can't immediately find stone, you might want to make other tools out of wood; once you upgrade to stone or iron, you can always use the wooden tools for furnace fuel.