So, you are new to Minecraft or perhaps just never mastered the art of building between those pvp matches or whatever non-builders do in Minecraft. Regardless, you don’t want your first house to look like shit. Well, good news! It doesn’t have to! Below I’ll walk you through how not to make a shit first house.
A shit first house. For reference.
The first thing to understand when trying to build anything that looks good is to not just have solid walls of nothing but one block. Big flat cobblestone walls and wood plank squares look like utter shit. You need to mix it up by adding texture and depth. The way you add some texture is to break up the bland single block walls with blocks of a different but complimentary type. The simplest way to do this with a basic wood house is to add in log supports for the corners. That simple change improves the look of your house vastly.
It’s still pretty shit though.
While it’s better it has no depth to make it feel like anything more than a thin one block wall. This is were stairs come in. Stairs are pretty much your best friend when building. They enable you to build not totally shit roofs , arches, support beams, thick looking foundations, furniture, and even sometimes staircases. Their most important use is definitely for roofing though. Making a decent roof is probably the biggest step to making a nice looking house. The simplest stair roof is the old standby peaked roof. You just build up and inward one block at a time from from the log corners till you meet in the middle making a triangle shape. It looks best when you do the peak on the shorter side of your rectangle. Do this on both ends of your rectangle. Then you just build stairs on top of that adding a one block over hang out from the blocks underneath to give it that depth I mentioned earlier. This is the point where you start to move in decent looking territory.
Case in point.
Now that you have a basic roof, you can get down to the business of adding some more texture and depth to your house with a little detail. The best blocks to play around with when doing this are half slabs, fences, stairs, trap doors, and decorative stuff like flowers. Here are some examples:
Add some depth to your entry way with some half slabs and fences.
Add some window shutters using trapdoors.
Or perhaps a flower box.
Up until now we’ve been strictly building even sided rectangles for our houses. However, there are better looking dimensions for building houses. The simplest and the one I usually use in most builds is to have an odd sided rectangle. It’s a simple change but it allows you have a single block center and it lets you balance your buildings easier.
Simple, efficient, and balanced. J’adore.
Now there is another, slightly less simple, way to build structures and many Minecraft builders swear by it. Those of you who have ever taken an algebra class will know it as the Golden Ratio. It is the ratio that is most pleasing to the eye.
And mathematically speaking, it looks like this.
However, for our purposes all you need to know is that means having either a 3 by 5 rectangle or more likely a 5 by 8 rectangle. Of course if you want to scale up your build you’re gonna have to dive in the Fibonacci Sequence….
I’m starting to understand why I don’t use this method much.
Or you could just remember that the next number in the sequence is simply the last two added together. So a 13 by 8 rectangle or a 21 by 13 rectangle and so on. Yeah, that’s probably easier than algebra. This method has a lot of positives in terms of what you can do with it and is definitely the most professional looking.
But math, so fuck it.
Now you’ve got all the basics. If you combine all this and experiment a bit you can make a nice quaint little house. Good luck fellas.
A nice quaint little house.
FLG 