Minecraft wiki entry for Survival_in_an_infinite_desert, associated text: No wooden weapons can be crafted without planks, apart from a bow (sticks from dead bushes and string from spider kills), but even a bow requires a crafting table, which requires planks. A village usually provides a crafting table, but not planks. With a crafting table, however, you can bypass wooden tools and weapons and go directly to stone tools and weapons, if you can get cobblestone by other means, such as a creeper (without a wooden pick which is the normal way). Alternatively, you can craft an iron pickaxe if you obtain 3 iron ingots from zombie drops. Statistically, this would require killing about 120 zombies.