How to Start a Minecraft City, from a Self-Declared Pro

This is the city of india i helped to plan and build this city with a bunch of friends but when we started it it was more of a learning experience we had built cities together before but when starting this city we were just building on what we had learned when creating the

Previous city i also made this video explaining the main components of a city but it was more of a list of things to have and it didn’t really show the very beginning and of course i got a lot of questions asking how do you start but i couldn’t remember the answer because i

Hadn’t started a new city in years so today i will answer that question today i will walk you step by step through the little details that you might be stuck on when trying to start a brand new minecraft city welcome to the island of monstera this won’t be your typical minecraft youtube

Video either because i create my best work when nobody is watching obviously this is a huge problem as someone who needs to make videos to get enough ad revenue to pay my rent so if you’d like to help me pay my rent if you click like the youtube algorithm will boost this

Video and help me reach more people who may also enjoy this content also give me your money whoa buddy don’t scare the audience away please i don’t care give me your money i’m sorry don’t mind him what he means to say is that we have a patreon that gives you early access to

Videos and credit at the end of each video so if you’re interested in supporting the channel then check out the link below every dollar will get me closer to being able to do this full time i’ve been building in minecraft for about 10 years i’ve noticed that i’ve

Developed a bit of my own style while building so i want to have a city theme that i’m relatively comfortable with but i still need to have the flexibility to explore new ideas most of my inspiration comes from north america that’s where i live that’s where i grew

Up and there’s a lot of influence from vancouver in my style but i grew up on the east coast so i’m pretty familiar with eastern canada and sections of the eastern u.s for the theme of the city it’ll follow mostly canadian architectural styles the island that we

Will be building on is an island created in world painter by my good friend who also developed the textures that we will be using but before we talk about the terrain let’s talk about what we actually want our city to be vision statements are the glue that

Holds the city together here is the vision statement for the city of monstera monstera is a walkable realistic sustainable city that was once car dependent but has taken major steps to become a model city there is a focus on people rather than vehicles and a respect for the natural environment a

Key point when making a new city do not bind yourself to a specific style if you find that you get new ideas frequently this is why we have neighborhoods or districts if you have a new york style neighborhood but feel like making a mountain cabin do not build the mountain

Cabin in the new york style neighborhood this is like trying to build a dunkin donuts in canada the second you bring out the idea you will be pelted with timbits and yes i will be part of that crowd every time you want to build in a

New style that does not fit your current area start a new neighborhood elsewhere on the map and you can deal with the road and rail connections later i live in canada so i’m basing the island’s climate on a more mild version of canada’s spring and summer on our map

We have mountains on the west coast with steep hills that loop around to the south i was chatting with a friend of mine who also happens to be a civil engineer and makes youtube videos but we were talking about how the west coast of the island is more likely to have

Greenery and rain because of the mountains in terms of the amount of greenery it’s going to make it pretty different from the east coast the reason for this is that if you have humid air that is pushed by the wind into a mountain that air can’t go anywhere else

So it goes up it cools it turns into a cloud and then it rains that’s a big reason why it rains so much in vancouver but anyway all that to say that it rains more on the west coast compared to the east with this type of climate there

Will be a lot of trees around the islands and the greenery will make the city look and feel like a part of nature walkability will be one of the key components of this city combined with a great public transit network it will be just as fast if not faster to take

Public transit compared to driving the back story behind the roads is that monstera was developed similar to any other canadian city being relatively car dependent but is making major strides away from personal vehicles terrain is a pretty important element of your city there are a lot of people out

There that are a lot better at creating terrain than i am so i can’t show you how to make your terrain but i can give you nine general guidelines if you’re on java use world painter it is a free software and it’s relatively easy to use

Keep your slope to less than 15 degrees for major city blocks and high rises the higher the slope of your terrain the more challenging it is to build if you’re having a hard time coming up with ideas check out google maps or the wikipedia page of a real-life city and

Read up on the topography of the area make sure to leave room for your ideas if you know that you want to build an airport leave a large space open that you know will not interfere with the rest of your city you can import your minecraft world back into world painter

After you’ve already built your buildings but it’ll be in your best interest to get it right the first time before building be mindful of the scale of your terrain if you’re building a city on your own by hand you probably won’t want anything bigger than one

Thousand by one thousand but as you add building tools like world edits or even have some other people helping you build your city you might consider going with a larger map size i consider myself a relatively experienced builder plus i have world at it so this island that i’m

Working with is around four thousand by four thousand blocks i’m not planning on having the entire island covered with buildings i want to have a lot of open green space as well so if you wanted to this is something that you could also do make your terrain interesting include

Mountains rivers beaches cliffs and floodplains always remember use your terrain to your advantage don’t worry that it out an entire mountain range just to put a downtown core approach difficult terrain as a challenge and an opportunity to improve your building skills it will absolutely be more work

Than working with flat terrain but even just slight inclines can make your city feel so much more real if you’re using world painter you can add custom trees and make large green spaces i would highly recommend putting less greenery than you think you’ll want because if

You end up wanting to build in a place where you already put a forest removing trees cleanly becomes very difficult iterate through the terrain creation process export it explore it in game and then go back into world patre to adjust your terrain so on our island we have these giant

Mountains on the west coast and then it slowly flattens out going towards the east but when you look at this map from the top down it looks like everything is flat except for the mountains so now i’m going to show you a trick in world painter to create two extra maps to help

You plan your city if you don’t have access to world painter or you just don’t care then skip to this time stamp we are going to create an elevation map and a slope map in world painter let’s jump into world painter and i’ll give you a step-by-step tutorial

So go ahead and open your world painter file open your map and then save it as a world painter file now go ahead and close it go to your file explorer where you saved that file and create two backup copies of that file so let’s take our first copy and rename it to

Elevation and let’s rename the second one to slope once you’ve done that you’re going to want to go ahead and open the elevation file basically what we’re going to do is we’re going to cover your terrain at each elevation segment with different colors of wool the size of these segments for your

Elevation will depend on how tall or flat your terrain is if you just have a really flat island then you can probably do like four or five but for this map we’re gonna do something a little bit different so by doing this this is going

To allow us to see our similar areas and help us visualize our terrain it’s also really going to help us plan our port so that ships don’t get stuck in the shallow areas i’ll be referencing this map and the next one quite frequently while planning okay so let’s go over

Here and grab our sponge tool change it to a thick square and put the intensity up to 100. this next part is going to be pretty computer intensive but you’re going to go ahead and you’re just going to drain all of the water out of the world after you’ve finished doing that

Go to your terrain tab click the plus create custom material and you can name it whatever you want but i’m going to name mine 53-62 the reason i do this is because this is the interval that this is going to be at for this world and most minecraft worlds

The water is set at y62 so 62 is the upper range for the water so i’m going to set the block id to 35 which is wall and a data value of 3 which is going to give us light blue wool i’m going to go ahead and copy the new material name to

Make our life easier for the next steps and then i’m going to click ok click the plus and we’re going to follow the same process paste the old name and then decrease each value by 10. next i’m going to go for 35 which is wool once

Again and i’m going to change the data value to 9. this is going to give us cyan wool and i’m going to click ok click the plus create custom material but i’m going to name this one less than or equal to 42. this means that our

Water from this point below is going to be at least 20 blocks deep i’m not super familiar with big cargo ships but i feel like 20 meters is pretty reasonable and for this we’re going to do 35 and then set the data value to 11 so we get the

Navy blue wool then once you’re done just click ok so that’s for the water now we’re going to go ahead and do the terrain so let’s click the plus and then we’re just going to repeat this process we’re going to use lime green wool yellow orange and red and then i’m just

Going to increase it by increments of 29. once you get to the very last layer i’m going to use red wool to signify anything that is greater than or equal to 152. keep in mind that for any java version before 1.18 it only goes up to 255. after you have your increments all

Ready to go click the globe click fill with terrain type go to the drop down menu and then scroll down to find your lowest value go over to the right and check at or above check at or below and change at or below to 42. then from

Here just click go once that’s all done click the globe again fill with terrain type click your drop down menu find the next one up and in our case that’s going to be the cyan 43-52 so we’re doing the same thing as before just check both of those boxes but make

Sure it’s above 43 and below 52. so once you’re all done click go and then just repeat this process for all of your layers just don’t forget to input the right numbers once you have all of your layers in place go to file export export as image file name it whatever you want

Preferably something with the word elevation in it and then save it in a central place that you’re gonna remember okay so let’s go ahead and open that second map called slope so we’re gonna do basically the same thing but we’re gonna use slopes and degrees instead of

Elevations this is going to allow us to see where we can and cannot make buildings so go back to your terrain tab click plus create custom material and then name it 0-15 i’m going to set mine to 35 with a data value of 7 which gives us gray wool

And click ok click plus and repeat the same process i’m going to use green roll as 16 to 25 lime green is 26 to 35 yellow is 36 to 45 orange as 46 to 59 and red as 60 plus once you’ve created your custom terrain layers click on the

Globe fill with terrain type scroll down to your 0 to 15 check above 0 degrees and click go now repeat this process for each new layer adjusting the above number of degrees for each one now if we go to view show 3d view we can see that

It matches with the slopes just be careful if you’re using snow layers because it might falsely show up as a steep slope like this beach down here go to file export export as image file name it something with the word slope in it and save it beside your elevation map

The building blocks of cities are made of neighborhoods by having multiple neighborhoods that you’re working on at the same time you can use them as spaces to test similar ideas in the same space so i did a bit of building off camera just kidding i’ve been testing out new

Ideas for about six months in these couple of blocks here but let’s rewind to the start and follow the process so i saw this relatively flat area and figured it would be a good spot to add some skyscrapers so from there that’s what i did center town is a neighborhood

In the central plains of the island of monstera more towards the eastern coast it uses a grid pattern of roads it has the use of one-way streets protected bike lanes overhead greenery for shade and people are able to walk around quite easily but transit has not been implemented yet it’s a pretty dense

Neighborhood with a lot of offices and retail there’s also a handful of residential condos similar to vancouver or parts of new york to keep the density relatively high we’re not going to have very many gaps between buildings a lot of the alleyways have been repurposed for pedestrians and

Additional crosswalks have been added in place crossing the main blocks in terms of the color theme there is a lot of red and brown brick black gray white and blue glass small urban parks and pockets of space along with a lot of first floor shops make the area very nice to walk around

If you are on a creative server and have world edits use an extra flat world to build some templates templates are the only way to finish an entire city project the issue is that we don’t want it to get super repetitive so we need to be smart about how we design our

Templates the two big type of templates are roads and filler buildings let’s start with roads roads can be tricky but here’s the process that i follow for maximum efficiency create the road templates create an intersection template attached to the road template paste in the road template above your

Terrain use world edit to move the road templates into place and follow the shape of the terrain and paste in trees and decorations in center town i’m following a new york style city block with my own twist i referenced google maps and google street view to create

These templates city blocks are 87 by 160 including a seven wide walkway down the middle of each block for this template we have a wide two-way road with a divider in the middle and one-way streets on the longer side on all sides there are bike lanes protected by cobblestone walls spaced two blocks

Apart notice that we add grass strips on either side of the road templates and the green and lime wool represents where you can paste trees in afterwards i’m using cube pack so there’s a lot of biome dependent textures but since biomes are coded to be in one by one

Vertical columns you can only have one biome per vertical segment this means that if you have the plane’s biome over your road your tree might have the wrong textures what i do to prevent this is i change the biome of my road template to forest aside from the spots where you

Need to have another biome for the markings on the road after you have your two road templates create an intersection between the two i started by sketching bike and vehicle movements and worked from there so now let’s put our roads into the world and we can paste the city block in

The air above where we want it fly around to make sure it’s in the right place and then move it down so that the highest elevation matches the ground level from here use world edit and move segments down section by section your terrain doesn’t have to look super

Natural you’re gonna be building on top of it anyway so it doesn’t really matter keep your sidewalk level with the ground around it and indent your roads into the ground by one block let’s go ahead and add our trees although we shouldn’t add all of the trees yet because we may need

To remove some to access behind buildings from the road once you’ve added your handful of trees add other decorations like street lights benches and garbage cans there you go we have the basic building blocks of a neighborhood and now we can start to build the second major template

That we will be using to develop this city is filler building templates have you ever seen a completed minecraft city because i haven’t here’s how to potentially come close to doing so filler building templates will be your savior and make it so your city isn’t made of buildings that are all meant to

Stand out this filler building is actually five and one if we look at the one furthest left we can see that it has four floors the first has a commercial shop and a doorway the doorway leads to a staircase going up and down both staircases lead to residential units on

Every floor all the way up to the top each floor has cyan wool marking potential layouts but by not adding the walls it allows you to customize floor plans if you want to the second floor has a ceiling height of four and the third floor has a ceiling height of five

The top floor has a dormer sticking out of the side and with each variation of this build there are different styles and two flat roofs the reason the template is designed this way is so that we can expand and stack the second floor as many times as we want or remove it

Entirely the staircases line up too so that you don’t really have to do any editing before you make it taller this is exactly how i made these buildings once you have one template like this copy and paste it and change the next one slightly so that you can mix and

Match as you paste them into your city now that you’ve designed one template you can design a completely different facade and all you have to do is just copy and paste it onto the old one this way just by creating one extra facade you’ve created an entirely new build and

Just like that you went from one building to 100 and no one will have any idea in the next episode i’ll be bringing you to the other side of the continent to explore and design the next step of monstera if that’s something you’re interested in seeing feel free to

Subscribe and click the notification bell if you’d like to visit monstera you’ll need the java edition of minecraft with optifine version 1.14.4 from there you’ll need to download cubepack and join the server ip on the screen once on the server type forward slash warp monster up you