Minecraft wiki entry for Survival_in_an_infinite_desert, associated text: If you challenge yourself by not allowing the generation of villages or temples etc. - or if you just can't find any - your situation becomes difficult indeed. You can obtain shelter, safety and food using the techniques described above, but you can't obtain any tools and your crafting is extremely limited. You have no easy way to access cobblestone items, and more importantly, no way at all to create a crafting table (no source of planks). With only a two by two crafting grid, even if you had cobblestone, or other tooling material (planks or ingots), you are unable to craft any type of weapons or tools. Not even stone or wooden tools. Without tools and with only limited crafting, progression beyond basic survival is not possible. You must disable villages and temples, but you must enable all other structures.