MattCraft – TERRAFORMING TUTORIAL – How to Build Cliffs and Mountains in Minecraft

Hello hello hello everyone my name is matt and welcome to this tutorial on how to do tarot forming in minecraft this has been a long requested video for me to do particularly among those of you who have been following along with the greens mansion tutorial series that i recently finished

So now that i finished that i finally have time to do this video so let’s jump right on in and start this tutorial the first step in any large scale terraforming project is setting your high points now i say large scale because what i’m talking about there is like if you’re

Building a mountain or some sort of large cliff then you want to begin by figuring out where the high points are the peak of the mountain or the top edge of that cliff is going to be now this is a smaller scale project like just throwing in a bunch of dirt around

Your base and just trying to make like the land around your base look a little bit more natural then you can skip this step you don’t need to build pillars like this to set your high points you can go straight on to the next step which is going to be

Building a bit of an outline of the land you want to create but for any large scale project so i’m talking mountains here i’m talking cliffs here you need to set your high points so the mountain that’s probably going to be in the form of a single pillar like this going up to

Where the top there is that is going to be the peak of our mountain if i turn around here if you’re building some sort of cliff it’s going to look a little bit more like this you’re going to have multiple high points along the cliff and

You can see that the central one is the highest it’s also the closest to me if i come in closer here you can see how going out from the central part of this cliff it’s not only going slightly down and getting a little bit shorter as we get towards the sides

It’s also generally going slightly back so this tallest point is also the most protruding out point of that clip once you have decided where the high points of your terraforming build are going to be or if you’re doing a small scale one that does not require that

Then your next step is to create a bit of an outline which is going to eventually take the form of kind of like a wireframe general shape to your belt so i have begun that here on this mountain that we’re going to have and as

You can see i’ve just done one line here and it’s going up fairly gentle so this is going to probably kind of be like a ridge starting from over there and coming up to here now the step that goes along with this which is also kind of deciding on your

Block palette you need to do this at this early stage at the same time as you’re building this outline so for the purposes of this tutorial i am just pretty much going to be using stone for all of it but if i was doing a more serious terraforming project in one

Of my actual worlds i would probably want to add in a bit more variety this so probably add in some andesite and cobblestone in a gray block palette for some terraforming of a mountain like this i might also think about some deep slate if i wanted to get some slightly

Darker patches in there and also diorite and granite can work really really nicely if they’re done well adding a little bit more variety to that palette it’s very important when you’re building this outline to try and avoid any straight lines as you can see from this

Bit that i started off with here i haven’t started on like a block say here which is in a straight line with the peak of that mountain i’ve come off to the side and i’m going not just at a diagonal but not even a straight diagonal it kind of curves around as

I’ve done it it’s also important as you do this you don’t want to do big sections at a time and then check it and find you’ve done it completely wrong place only a few blocks at a time and check it very very frequently as you’re going so to show

You what i mean by this i’m going to start off with another corner of the mountain here and i think i want this corner to be a bit steeper than that ridge i’ve started off with over there so i’m going to come in a lot closer still not in a straight line on

My diagonal here not in one of the four cardinal directions from this tower so i’m going to come in reasonably close there i’m going to build in a couple of blocks up and i’m going to have a look at where i am so i think i need to come

In a little bit closer to it now build a few more blocks up check again where i’m at in relation to the peak there so i think i’m going to come this way now a couple of blocks come that way again a couple of blocks

Up and i’m going to keep doing this now i’m actually starting to look maybe a little bit closer so i’m going to go slightly less steep for these next few okay how am i looking there still good not looking too straight and man-made but i can see here

That if i go from there i’m definitely gonna need to come in a little bit less steep than what i’ve done here because if i follow that line up i’m ending up way above my peak so i’m definitely going to need to continue a little bit more slightly less steep

There and let’s check again okay we’re getting that it’s looking pretty good just a few more here now and there we go that is now touching so we have our next corner built and i’m going to keep on with that kind of process around until i’ve got a few more of these lines

And now if i jump to a little bit later in this process this is the kind of wireframe outline that we are looking for so you can see on this mountain i’ve kind of got this big long ridge that comes up there not super steep this side here also

Not quite as long as this one but also not super super steep but then over this side this is kind of like the really steep face out it’s going to be more of a cliff and it’s going to be like almost like a little steep bridge coming down

There so these are actually going to be two ridges with this little bit coming in between them like that same sort of story over this side and then spinning around this is what the outline of a cliff will look like i’ve basically got these lines going up to those points

Marked earlier and then similarly to the way i’ve done the outline at the bottom of this mountain we have the outline of where the bottom and then also the top of that cliff goes now the next stage from here is to take this outline and at the

Moment you can see it’s very basic like the mountain here we just have these four corners coming up we need to make this a little bit more detailed so i’m gonna do the same sort of process that i just showed you for these ones just building up a

Little bit of a time checking myself build up a little bit more check myself again but i’m gonna now do it in between where i’ve done this so i’ll probably take that point just there and bring it up i’ll take some point along here maybe

Even a couple of points of this one so like maybe there and maybe can there ish bring those up a little bit same on this side and i’ll do a similar sort of thing over here basically just to make more lines so that my outline is more

Detailed while you are doing this stage of making the outline a bit more detailed you can see i’ve made a start on that here adding in these lines in between where those first ones we did were you don’t just want to add lines like this that go from the base to the

Peak you also want to add some lines that will run like between say this one across to this one so i might add one say that like starts from that corner and where am i going i’m going to go over there so i want to go in this sort of direction so like

That maybe yeah i might move that in a little bit but that’s the kind of general thing you’re looking for i probably will move that but that is what you’re doing you’re going from one line over here and joining up to the one next to it and i’ll keep doing that

Around so that is going to add in a lot more detail and the same rules apply to these ones you want to avoid your straight lines and you want to make sure that you are checking where you’re going every few blocks so you basically don’t end up doing exactly what i’ve just done

There and making something which doesn’t really look like it’s going to fit with the rest of the shape of this mountain and here we go with adding in all of those little bits we are aiming for something that looks a little bit like this so you can see very much still a

Wire frame outline of the mountain but with all these bits going across and between those initial bits that we did there’s quite a bit more detail here and you can start to see a bit more of a detailed pattern and shape to the mountain here and if you look across at the cliff

We’ve got over here as well i’ve also started putting some things in between those initial straight up bits that we put in and again like the mountain you can see the a little bit more shape that you can see starting to emerge here so this is the kind of level we are aiming

For at this particular stage and with that all done we are now at the next stage which is filling in these gaps so we start to produce an actual solid shape for ourselves now when you’ve done this you will have kind of naturally ended up segmenting it off

Into different sections so you can look at that’s a little section just there and then this bit here would be another section that’s the section and so on so within each section i’ll be starting down here i’m basically going to go backwards and forwards kind of like a printer almost

So it’s almost like i’m 3d printing this mountain at this stage filling in those blocks as you can see from my hotbar here i’ve also put in a few different ones so i’m going to quickly start randomizing those with an auto scroller i have here so that as i start to fill

This in like so you can see it’s going to place a bit of a random texture so when i have filled in all of this i’m actually going to have a bit of a texture to my belt now you can see here as i’m placing this i’m not being super super

Precise there is a little bit of haphazardness to the way i’m placing these so that that is going to create something that looks fairly natural like you can see here there’s not really too many big straight lines or big flat faces so it doesn’t look super man-made there

As you watch this time-lapse of filling in all those gaps notice how i don’t always get it perfectly right the first time i also make little tweaks such as breaking a corner which looks a bit too unnatural and smoothing it out to keep terraforming looking how i want now it’s

Important that you guys regularly step back to check how it looks while you’re doing this is the more you build without checking the harder it is going to be to correct it if you end up messing up So all the gaps in both these two terrain features have now been filled in you can see the clip there and the mountain over here and i would say i’m happy-ish with how they look like in a sense they could be both complete i could leave it just here because they

Are both full solid completed terrain features neither of them looks particularly man-made there’s not really any pattern to them they both look relatively natural but they can be better so the last stage i’m going to talk about here is adding some detail and making the structure

Blend in a little bit more with the terrain that is around it i’m actually going to start over here with the cliff for this one the first thing i’m going to do is sort out some stuff at the top because in real life what you tend not

To have with glyphs is ones that just go straight up the rock they rock the rock and then they just stop still rock at the top what cliffs tend to have at the top is they tend to have dirt and grass on the very top of them

Like this so that is one of the things we’re gonna do on this cliff and we don’t want this dirt and grass to be fully flushed like this we actually want it to overhang slightly and kind of wrap down around the cliff like so and now that i have built out a little

Bit more of that grass at the top you can see a few features of how i’ve done this there’s obviously the overhang that i just mentioned there adds a little bit of depth to that build also if you look at the bottom of where i’ve done this

Dirt it’s not just level it kind of hangs down almost in like stalactites made out of dirt there a little bit haphazardly and then the other thing if you look at the top here you can see the way it doesn’t just go flat back from

The edge of the cliff there is a very gentle rise it slopes slightly up away from the edge of that cliff which is how you tend to have the tops of cliff in real life the other thing i’m going to do to this cliff face here to add a bit more detail

Onto the actual face of it not just the top is take some moss blocks and where i have ledges i’m going to take a moss block pop the moss block there and then bone meal it so that i turn these ledges into little green bits because again in real life

Any time you have a ledge on a cliff that tends to settle there and then plants grow in that dirt so ledges on cliffs not always but often tend to have a little bit of greenery on them so that is what we are trying to emulate here by doing this

And that is pretty much it as far as the cliffs go you can see by adding all those moss blocks across the face of it adds a bit of color and variety into the otherwise very blank gray looking place of the cliff the other thing i’ve done

Here as you can see i’ve added a few trees around the bottom and what those trees do is they block a bit of the view of the bottom of that cliff which helps disguise the point where the ground becomes the cliff so that even in this super flat world where it’s very very

Pronounced that it’s just flat flat flat flat and then up even in this kind of extreme version of the world those trees do actually help to hide and blend it in with this flat terrain around it the mountain i think is going to be a bit easier than all of this because

Mountains as a general rule are more extreme environments than these cliffs which means they do not have as much life going on in them which means they don’t have all of this greenery that we need to worry about the main aspect of detail you’re going

To want to focus on on your mountain is of course all the snow that goes on top now there’s two ways you can place it you can either just simply add snow blocks and snow layers on top of the stone work that you have already done alternatively you can do it the way

That i have done this which was by replacing a lot of that stone with stone blocks and then placing a few snow layers on top of some other blocks as well now i think that this is the best way to do it because by replacing those blocks you keep the shape of the

Mountain that you’ve built and you don’t end up placing a bunch of stone on top and then completely changing the shape of your mountain by doing that snow layers in particular are really great to use for this section because as you can see you can place several on top of one

Another which allows you to have a lot of scope for getting a lot of variety in there in terms of the depth of that snow which means it’s great for getting a bit of texture onto your build and not everything is just either one block or

It’s just not there at all you can kind of kind of half a block or even i don’t know how many of these there are in the boxes of five but you see the point you can get a lot of variety and texture in to the build by doing this

When you’re placing all your snow it is worth thinking about the gradient of the slope that you are putting on if you think about a real mountain then you do not have snow settling on very steep faces you do have a lot of snow settling where it is

A bit flatter so when i have put all of this snow on top of my mountain you can see i’ve done a lot more around this ridge and around this side of the mountain where is nowhere near as steep and around this side over here where

It’s a lot steeper you can see there’s a lot less snow i have used far less snow blocks over here and i’ve got did more for the snow layers just on top of a few blocks at the bottom of those cliffs there but certainly no snow in these

Cliffs themselves because in real life snow simply would not settle on something that steep the other thing you’re going to want to do with your mountain is make sure that it blends nicely into the terrain around it it is quite unusual for a mountain to suddenly

Rise out of a very flat landscape like this it would be more common mountains to have foothills so the ground gradually rises up into that mountainous area so you can see i’ve started to do it here basically what you are doing for these foothills is the exact same

Process that we used to build up this mountain except it is on a smaller scale and we’re going to be using dirt and grass as our main blocks instead of uh instead of the stone and then you’ll end up with something that looks like

This so you can see it kind of rises up in a bit of a hill there and then slopes up so it blends nicely into that mountain and there we go now that i’ve done that around the mountain a little bit you can see how even just on this

Small scale where i haven’t gone out very far or really put any detail into it like i’ve not put any plants or use bone meal to get grass plows and stuff in any of that on this grass it’ll literally just the grass blocks you can see that

This minimal amount that i’ve done here it really helps by having this mountain rise up out of the grassland that is also rising with it it helps the mountain feel a lot more grounded and like it’s actually part of the land as opposed to something that i’ve just

Plonked down on top of it well everyone that is all i have for you for today on terraforming hopefully i have given you at least one piece of advice in this video that is going to help you to improve your terraforming in the future we have looked at some ideas

Of how we can build better cliffs and of course some ideas of how we can build better mountains and if i’m going to leave you guys with one last piece of advice on terraforming it is that no matter how detailed or comprehensive of a tutoring you watch even if you go and

Find one that is much much more in depth than this one i have given you here that is only going to be a starting point for teaching you how to terraform and the single best way you guys can actually learn and improve your terraforming is simply by practice so get out there and

Build as many mountains and cliffs and whatever other terrain beach you can think of as you possibly can anyway i really hope you guys all enjoyed that video on terraforming if you did hit the like button leave me a comment let me know what you thought and subscribe if

You haven’t already so you don’t miss any future videos from me until next time i’ve been mad and i will see you all in the next video bye