Building a Volcano with Nether Blocks! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play)[Part 326]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you guys are having a good day i’m up here on one of the rooftops here in my central town here in founders forge the center of the minecraft survival guide world and today

I want to take a look at some of the blocks that have been brought into the nether update and how we can adapt them to builds and how we can start building with some of these fancy new materials that we’ve got hold off and i really

Want founders forge to be at the center of this set of experiments that we’re going to do because i really like some of the new stuff that’s come into the nether there’s a lot of like dark material there’s a lot of stuff that is in this kind of color

Palette we’ve got a lot of darker gray and black kind of stuff added in the form of basalt and black stone we also have some very colorful materials like the warped and crimson wood and we have a few more building blocks that actually go with this stuff

Pretty well namely shroom light and so we’re going to do a couple of transformative things around the town today including a little bit of terraforming i really like this ravine in the center of town this is kind of the center of the lore that i sort of

Came up with when i wanted to start out this world the town was going to be centered around this ravine because the ravine is providing geothermal energy to the town and is to a certain extent what these machines are trying to mine out of here maybe they are looking for

Stuff like netherites you know they’re looking for ancient debris in the bowels of the earth and maybe this ravine in theory in the lore of the world would extend all the way down into the nether but since this is all kind of geothermal volcanic magmatic energy i thought it would be

Kind of cool to change one of the mountains in the surrounding area and i’m thinking i’m probably going to be focusing on this little mountain range here behind this blacksmith’s house we’re actually going to be transforming that into something that looks like a volcanic eruption has occurred here

And maybe that is the reason why there is a giant ravine under here is you know tectonic plate movement and earthquakes have caused the land to split apart and reveal this and part of it may also be linked to volcanic activity in the area that may even be the reason

That this section of the town here has fallen into the swamp but in minecraft terms this is all just an excuse for me to check out the blocks that have been added to the nether update and how they would look if we apply them in an overworld context because i’ve had

Some time to play around with these blocks and i’ve managed to form a few opinions about how i think they are best used now like many things about this game i would consider this an art and not a science and art is by its very nature kind of subjective meaning

Your mileage may vary on how you feel about all of these blocks how you feel about the designs i’m going to come up with today and how you would use them yourself and my overall feeling about a lot of these blocks is that i’m not going to be using them in every single

Build i do because sometimes they just don’t fit in the overworld let me give you a quick example about what i’m talking about here in the overworld i tend to use a lot of plain stone simply because it has such a neutral texture up close obviously it looks

Quite detailed but from a distance you don’t see as much of that texture especially if you work in additional highlights of stuff like stone brick and andesite it kind of follows this 70 30 rule when it comes to building stuff like this where you want

30 percent of it to be detailed and 70 of it to be more plain which gives the eye a little bit more time to rest and kind of implies that the rest of this structure is detailed without actually covering it in detail and making the entire thing look sort of

Messy i have done my fair share of messy building in this series and the blacksmith skill here at the center of the town is one of those things this building does look like a giant patchwork of stuff and in some cases that works because it might be all of the materials they had

On them at the time or the materials might have degraded which is the idea behind all of the different colors of wool in the walls it’s like it was originally white wool but then the ash coming out of the ravine in the center of town has made it a little bit

More gray and it started to you know cake the walls in soot and that kind of stuff but i do feel like occasionally stuff like this gets a little bit messy and unfortunately the same is true of the blackstone texture for me i find this texture

To be incredibly busy and so you really can’t use it in the same way that you use stone it does not provide a very good neutral because it is all about those cracks in fact it’s like building something entirely out of cobblestone if you end up using this texture all

Over the place and it tends to just look a little bit repetitive a little bit samey and a little bit busy surprisingly even though it doesn’t really look like that right now a lot of the textures in here are actually quite purple in color if you look up

Close at stuff like this that is definitely purple if you color pick that in photoshop or some kind of image editing program you would probably find something that was a little bit more on the purple side of the spectrum and that’s something we can use a little

Bit later to take advantage of that it may be some builds like this where we’re mixing it with purple concrete and terracotta maybe even purple blocks and using that to our advantage but as far as building a house wall out of blackstone i don’t think i would do it i probably wouldn’t

Even do it out of blackstone bricks because once again those do have that very rough and heavily textured look to them which really doesn’t blend in super well with some of the stuff that i have in mind and creates a very busy wall likewise if you

Put that next to the black stone if we were to mix the bricks in with the black stone the regular black stone almost looks more detailed in a way because there’s so much going on here by way of contrast within the texture of a single block where i start to like blackstone a

Little bit more is in polished blackstone which still has a lot of detail it’s got a lot more kind of granularity to the texture but does feel a little bit more neutral however it does have that beveled border around the outside in the same way that a regular quartz block or a

Polished andesital granite block might and that to me makes it kind of difficult to use in a different way because the texture is so obviously tiled you couldn’t make a big smooth wall out of it and pretend that it is one big hunk of rock because it is quite clearly

Sort of chiseled at those joints between the blocks so i might find that a little bit difficult to use as well but don’t worry even though i’m saying a lot of this is difficult texture to work with there are definitely some interesting applications of it that we can apply a little bit later

And we also have this kind of accent block in the chiseled polished black stone which has the piglen snout on it but that’s not necessarily going to signify piglens everywhere you can put that to interesting uses as an occasional accent lock in the same way that you would use chiseled

Basically anything else chisel quartz or sandstone or red sandstone all have different designs that can work pretty well there’s even now a chiseled nether brick which we’ve looked at in previous episodes so that’s kind of worth taking a look at as well the next one i

Want to look at today is basalt and basalt is an interesting one because for a start it is directional which blackstone is not i can’t place blackstone so that the top texture is facing outward but the top texture is actually different from the side texture so it’s not one of

Those things where it’s got the same texture on all six sides like stone it actually has a different top texture and that is where some of the differences between these blocks really start to become apparent and this is what i’m talking about here this is where you can start doing a really fun

Gradient between these four blocks we’ve got andersite cobblestone basalt and then blackstone and you’ll notice that the texture of these first three blocks is quite similar and this last block even though it’s not quite the broken down texture of cobblestone and not nearly as contrasty as basalt

It does have little veins and stuff running in there that do merge together pretty well so if you wanted to put together a path out of these blocks obviously the black stone being rotational we want to have that facing upwards because then that merges quite well with the

Cobblestone texture you’ll notice a lot of the lines the cracks implied in those textures kind of connect up very well we can end up mixing some of this stuff in and maybe using the black stone quite sparingly i brought some obsidian over as well so we can take a look at how those

Contrast in a moment but yeah throw some black stone in here surround it with some of the other blocks maybe use a little bit of that gradient pattern to it and you could actually come up with some really interesting designs and so where i’m going with this is that

I kind of like using blackstone as a floor material and possibly even as a ceiling material but i don’t really like using it as walls or at least not walls where you end up seeing it close up i think from further away when all of the detail of this texture can kind of

Fade into the background and what you end up with is like a general vibe of that block instead of looking at the texture really close up i think it can actually do a little bit better and if especially if you surround it with other things to kind of make it the

Background of something that is a little bit more detailed in the foreground if you ended up putting stairs and slabs around it and just having the blackstone act as a kind of backdrop i think it could work a little bit better and the problem with this of course is that blackstone is also

Available in slabs and walls and stairs and a bunch of different block variants so you can actually use it in quite a different way if you want to go detailed with blackstone however i feel like the texture itself is already so detailed that using the more detailed blocks on this it’s going

To be very kind of occasional when you’ll want to use this kind of stuff and frankly i think it looks a lot better in the nether than it does in the overworld simply because the overworld has this blue sky green grass and very clear daylight which doesn’t necessarily suit the darkness

Of these textures they look a lot better in the nether because they naturally have a little bit more color harmony there and i still think we can use blackstone in the overworld for the record i just think it’s gonna look better in natural formations and in areas where it’s not necessarily

A flat wall of the stuff i think it’s going to be an occasional detail block in structures and it’s going to be a lot better using it for more natural terraforming approaches but let’s take another look at basalt because i kind of got sidetracked there but salt is an interesting one because

If anything it acts more like a tree or a pillar than it does a flat wall once again this is one of those blocks where especially in the polished variant it’s got these kind of darker edges to it which kind of imply that the block is a bit

More rounded but what that does is create once again a tiling effect which means it’s really obvious that if you were to build a wall out of this stuff it has these very dark stripes in it and if that’s a desirable effect for you then great but if it isn’t

I think it’s going to work a lot better as something like a pillow where you have a variety of supporting pillars holding it up maybe even with black stone accents around the edges if we put some of those slabs around the outside there that could very easily be a pillar and the

Basalt texture here is noisy enough that you don’t necessarily see as much of that noise in the blackstone the blackstone looks a little bit more tame by contrast the problem with basalt being that it doesn’t really have slabs and stairs or anything like that it is directional but that is

About as versatile as it gets there are only two different types regular basalt and polished basalt and while that may change in future right now that leaves us with fairly limited options for using it it is full blocks only which means the amount of detail we can

Get out of it has to rely on the scale of the build being larger so that we can really work in that kind of detail the end of polish basalt also has this really interesting pillar texture which looks like it has been copied over from stuff like quartz or even

The rings of tree blocks let me go grab a couple of examples here so i think this is the most direct comparison we can draw between polished basalt and a quartz pillar block you’ll notice those kind of rings in the top of the texture much more emphatic in

The polished basalt of course like it’s really obviously been chiseled and you can tell those super dark lines exist there but then you put polished basalt and an acacia log next to each other and of course while the side textures actually look kind of similar the basalt

Could almost imitate the bark of a tree here you have a much different end texture at least you have different colors in the end texture you have the acacia wood color coming through next to the heavily gray polished basalt texture and so in polished basalt what you have

Is this really interesting middle ground between a more organized quartz pillar block and a more organic acacia tree block and in fact in terms of the gradient we could make here i think it’s actually wise to put the acacia in the middle and the basalt on the outside simply because it feels a

Little bit darker with those edges the center of the texture may not be as dark but the darker edges tend to take over a little bit when you’re looking at the amount of color this thing provides and i think that’s another really interesting group of textures that we could end up doing a

Lot with let’s go back to looking at blackstone in the context of purple for a second because the amount of purple that works its way into this palette of blocks in particular looking at obsidian black stone polished black stone here for the slabs and then a purple block

You could actually start to work purple back into the palette in quite an interesting way and the reason i feel like people haven’t really used purple all that much is because this light purple has never really had anything to pair with it very well i’ve used it a

Little bit over there in what i think of as the alchemists guild where my original concrete maker machine was and there are a couple of other purple blocks we’ve been able to use surrounding that but i think blackstone really takes that to the next level i really think that kind of adds

To the purple palette in a way that i didn’t expect it to being such a dark block to begin with so there’s a lot we can do with that next up though i want to take a look at one of my favorite combinations of blocks and that is

Magma blocks and shroom lights because when you put these together not only do the shroom lights provide a really nice light source but they actually tile together pretty well and right now i’m crouching to make sure i don’t end up taking too much damage on the

Magma blocks here but if you look at this this actually looks like a lighter in fact a more molten version of what’s going on with the magma blocks around here and the way i want to use this today is to create a lava flow that does not contain lava i

Actually want to have a large patch of magma coming down from one of these hills interspersed with shroom lights here and there to make it look as though there is like rock floating around on top of it that is being heated to that white hot level where it’s

Almost melting and turning into lava but obviously making that a lot less dangerous for the player also avoiding any kind of issues with fire spread if you have that switched on in your world which i don’t but it’s kind of nice to design something that takes that into account every now and again

Putting lava near any wooden builds is a recipe for disaster but if you want to use something like a combination of magma blocks and shroom lights you’re going to have something that looks quite similar from a distance and has the same light level but with none of the dangerous side effects

So for this terraforming project i want to try i’ve got three shulker boxes lined up ready to go i have the stuff that’s going to be in the magmatic river we have the magma blocks and shroom lights and this is about as many streamlights as i’ve been able to farm

Manually still working on an automatic farm design that will hopefully work out for those we have the blocks that are going to be around the outside which is going to be mainly blackstone and basalt and i’m probably going to have a couple of slabs of blackstone kind of floating in the magma river

As though they’re making their way downstream and potentially just kind of breaking up and melting into the lava as they go and then around the outside we want to have formations of stone specifically like some of the more textured stuff like cobblestone we want some natural stone

To work in there some andesite and weirdly enough some brain coral and i’ll i’ll explain because some of you may not be familiar with coral mechanics it’s been a while since we covered these because i don’t use the block very often coral while it looks very pink in its

Natural form because i’ve harvested these with a silk touch pickaxe when it is placed down if it does not have access to water it actually turns a gray dead color within a couple of seconds and that is what we’re going to use to kind of imply that the stone here has

Been melted away or eroded by the heat or something like that but some of it is still clinging to the idea of still being stone and so dead brain coral is potentially going to be a really interesting detail that we can work into the stone part of these designs

So i’m going to fly over to that mountain and we’ll get started figuring out where all of this stuff is going to go and it’s interesting actually because this is the area we’ve done a fair amount of terraforming in the city already and i’m kind of wondering if maybe some of the lush

Life that has sprung up around here on the way up to this blacksmith’s house is thanks to centuries of volcanic activity maybe enriching the soil i don’t quite know if that actually happens in real life but maybe we’ll call it that just for the fiction of this world i guess

First thing i’m going to do is swap out my netherright boots that i’ve got here with the sole speed on for my frost walker diamond boots just so i don’t end up having to worry about stepping on magma blocks all of the time and there aren’t really any water sources up here

For me to mess up with uh running around with frost walker boots on so that should be just fine and we’re going to start out with the shulker box here that has all of the magma and the shroom lights in it and we are going to have to take a little bit of

Artistic license with this at first because i want the magma stream to kind of run from there down this way and i didn’t see from ground level down there that there is actually a giant gap at the back here but we can probably fill in bits of this cliff later if it makes

The most sense and in the meantime i think we can start having the flow come down from the top of the mountain here which probably means a few of these sheep and llamas and cows are probably going to take a bit of damage in a minute and it makes sense to me

For the areas where it is flowing a little bit more freely or if it’s kind of affected by gravity to be these areas where the rocky texture of the magma is broken up by the shroom lights and so maybe we’ll have sections like that be more patterned with the shroom lights

And then mixing the stream lights in a little bit more subtle ways when we get a little further down and there is a kind of loose pattern that i’m trying to stick with here by keeping the shroom lights mainly towards the inside and the magma blocks towards the outside because the magma blocks

Look like they’re a little bit cooler while the shroom lights tend to look a little hotter and despite the fact that all of this is meant to be hot anyway and the magma blocks are the ones that burn you i think the stream lights look a little bit more

Molten and then therefore it makes more sense that they are towards the center of these flows i’m also having it branch off in multiple directions and right here these are going to converge in the middle and just flow around some you know stubborn rocks that have managed to hold out against the heat

Around here but then they’re all going to converge again and flow down towards that part of the town we’ve also got a couple of flows heading off in different directions and if we wanted to make this a little bit more like an active volcano looking thing it would probably end up

All flowing off in different directions from the peak here where we would make a few adjustments to make sure it looked volcanic enough like a decent crater up here and maybe some actual lava and i gotta say from a distance that’s looking not too bad i feel like i maybe

Overdid it with the shroom lights in the center here but i really wanted to give the impression that this was like liquid falling down the mountainside and it’s starting to pool around the bottom there i’ll probably finish that off but i want to get started on terraforming the outside of this with

The blackstone and basalt because i think once again the natural formation of these is really going to pay off here we want to have blackstone kind of on the inside and then as it cools around the outside this is the kind of like the stuff that’s covered in ash

Very much at the center of this whole thing and then around the outside of that we want to go with basalt now we’re going to have this come up in pillars it’s going to be kind of jagged and a little bit of elevation change here and there will definitely

Help this whole thing feel like it is hemmed in and you know give a reason for it not flowing down the rest of the mountain side but it’s also going to really frame this out in a nice way and give it some dynamism i think so outside of this we’re going

To add a layer of basalt and the layer of assault can be a little bit thicker in places the layer of black stone can be thicker here and there as well but i think having a little bit of assault around the outside once again coming up over the

The layer of black stone here try not to make it too staircasey here but i think it’s going to look very very cool once we get all of this situated of course we can make slabs out of the black stone which will allow us to add a little bit more

Variance in height here and make it look a little bit less squared off there we go just create little pockets of it here and there bring the basalt up around that once again the basalt does not have slabs so we’ll just have to kind of make it a little jaggedy here

And there we kind of recreating that basalt delta feel here in the overworld but it feels like it could still be a natural part of the way the overworld functions and here in the center of these sections where the lava streams diverge and then converge again afterwards we can have

Larger sections of basalt as though it’s kind of been thrown together in the center here and cooled maybe we can even start putting in some of the regular cobblestone and stone here but i think because it’s only too wide here i think it’s probably best to just keep

It with the basalt and the black stone for now and that’s what i’m talking about that looks really really nice now it’s starting to come together super well the blackstone and basalt really lend a very very kind of burnt and crispy feel to the surrounding terrain it does feel like the rock has

Melted and reformed around these black stone formations here which is super cool and i reckon we can continue this on further up and further down as the flow dictates but i think now we’ll probably put the blackstone and basalt away for a second and we’ll

Work on the outside details of this so i can show you what else i have in mind while we’re here i’m also going to grab a couple of these polished black stone slabs and have those kind of dotted around here like floating sections like chunks of rock that have been

Flowing down the streams here and maybe put one or two of them like they’re about to tip over the edge like that just kind of have everything shore up around the edges here like that this from below this stuff might catch on something at the edge of the cliff before

It gets carried away by the lava flow and tips over so i think it’d be kind of cool to throw in some details like that here and there like rocks floating down the river sounds really great and now let’s move on to working with the cobblestone

The stone and the dead coral around the outside because that’s really going to once again add a little bit of extra geology to this area taking the same approach as we are with the basalt and just kind of piling it up around the outside once again

Like the black stone we can make slabs out of this if we want to if we want to add a little bit of height variation maybe some walls some stairs that kind of stuff to make the terrain feel a little bit more jagged with the cobblestone than we can

And i think we’ll do that in spots like here where it kind of makes sense not to build it too high but still to give it a little bit of height variation and then once we get a couple of blocks back we’ll have it be a little bit more

Natural stone like that we can still make natural stone slabs as well so we get a little bit more detail the further out we go from the magma stream here and i really want to be sparing with the dead coral blocks but in sections where they might be exposed

To the heat i want to throw one of those in and once it turns back into a gray block yeah no that looks that looks really great i like having that texture up in here that really lends a lot to it and we need to be sparing with it both because of the

Material cost involved and the fact that that is still a very detailed block next to a bunch of other very detailed blocks we don’t want to go overboard with that stuff but i think it’s going to be nice to work some of it in there here and there where we could also have

Some cobblestone backing it and contrasting with everything else that’s going on here we’ve got a heck of a biome on our hands folks this volcanic biome that we’re working on is something i really really enjoy yes oh yes no i like this a whole lot i think this actually looks phenomenal now

I’m really really pleased with the way this came together and i’d sketched stuff like this out in a test world basically as soon as i realized that shroom lights and magma blocks worked well together but actually seeing it in the world is taking this to the next level for me so i think

We’re going to continue this whole design downwards like so it really gives it a better context when you frame it out with the surrounding blocks as well with the black stone and the basalt and everything really starting to love the black stone in combination with these other blocks

Like this and once again in a natural build not really taking it out of the natural context that you would even find it in the nether itself but from a distance especially at night this is starting to look very very special and it actually fits right in next door to the terraforming

We’ve already done in a way so if you just have this flowing down next to that and we can probably find ways to shelter this area from all of the volcanic activity that’s going on next door maybe i don’t know set a couple of fires around the leaves or something like that

But i think this is looking tremendous now and definitely looks a little bit better from the air because i’ve not done as much detail closer to ground level but that that right there is terrain i like that but i am running a little bit low on shroom lights at this point

We’re down to the last couple of stacks got plenty of magma blocks though so we can expand those here and there if we want to i reckon it’s time to do a little bit more terraforming and we’re going to do that in the form of a time lapse So So [Applause] Oh So Welcome back folks i hope you enjoyed the time lapse and look at this look at this i’m really really happy with the way this ended up looking and i could throw in some pockets of lava here and there but i think it’s just kind of nice to have

This stuff as is right now it might look a little bit blocky but from a distance especially surrounded by all of this basalt and blackstone it really has some character and that is really what i want from this region what we’re building here is bags of character even if it doesn’t make a

Whole lot of sense for this guy down here to have built well half a house really i never quite finished building this one if it doesn’t really make sense for them to build quite so close to this terrain at this kind of volcanic terrain or maybe even that all of this volcanic

Activity has only started in the last little while and the town is in immediate peril i don’t know that might be part of the story here but main thing we’ve got a massive volcanic lava flow coming out of the back of this and ultimately it is not covered in lava it’s covered

In magma blocks and shroom lights which i think do look super great together even now i’ve been building with them for a while and i might be tired of the texture i’m actually really really pleased with this part of the advantage as well of having the magma blocks and stuff

Instead of lava is just that you don’t have to worry about going back and tweaking details without the danger of falling in lava and as you can see the build process here has been put in the magma and shroom lights and stuff first and then create this kind of channel out of

Basalt and blackstone which i think looks superb now we’ve made a few more additions to it and it all runs down the side of the mountain and then pools at the base of the mountain here and that one there is actually spreading further down towards this section i

Wasn’t sure if i wanted them to connect up or if i wanted that to flow down into one of the neighboring caves i think we could redevelop this entire mountain in this style but for now i’m actually pretty happy with the way this turned out for this episode we got

A lot done here it feels like and if i stand around elsewhere in the town it is really really obvious now that there is this massive lava flow coming down from the mountain the cats oh no the cat’s in the cat cafe run guys be careful i think that the

Lava is coming for you at this point or the magma at least is is coming for you and it all flows pretty slowly in real life all of this sort of lava flow stuff does tend to move a little slowly because it’s molten rock it’s got a lot of

It’s it’s got a lot of heat behind it but it doesn’t exactly move very fast so i think it kind of makes sense that this stuff is easing its way down the mountain side and coming to rest over here we could also terraform up around the outside of

This if we wanted this to be something that’s been here for a while and the earth is just kind of absorbing it as it comes down but i think this actually looks fantastic now we’ve got this whole set up here and i think that’s where we’re going to leave this episode for

Today folks thank you so much for watching this episode of the minecraft survival guide i do hope you enjoyed this look at a little bit more build theory today so sorry if i waffled a lot at the beginning of the episode but hopefully that will be the kind of stuff that is

Useful to you if you’re considering building with materials like these for now that’s gonna be all uh thank you so much for watching the minecraft survival guide leave a like on the episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you guys soon take care bye

For now [Applause] [Applause] You