Minecraft Build School: Landscaping!

Hello my name is green and welcome back to another episode of minecraft build school today i’m going to be teaching you the techniques in how to terrain minecraft areas so as you can see i’ve got a bit of a rough naturally generated area and i’m going to transform it into

What you see here some nice trees rocks some hills and a bit of a cliffside so it should give you everything you need to know on how to transform your area around your house especially if it looks a little bit like this so let’s get a

Good aerial view at the area that i’m going to be working with today now i’ve chosen a particularly bad area just to try and get the point across i imagine your area may be more varied but hopefully the techniques that i’m going to show you will help you transform it

So the first thing to always do is just prep the area a little bit that’s always your first step try and get it looking a little bit more neat and tidy maybe even flatter so you know what to do the next step is to visualize you want to take a

Good look at the area and try and figure out in your head and plan ahead what you want to do so on my example i have a hill in the middle and i’ve got a steep slope on the right hand side so my immediate thought is we’re going to make

That hill a bit smoother introduce a cliff on the right hand side and because there’s a dip we might even add some water in so what i’m going to do first and you don’t have to do it this way but i recommend it is add in a skeleton

Framework of what you want to do first or part of your visualizing process so that you can get an idea of how it might look so what i’ve done is taken my dirt block and made sort of a bell shape or a cross section almost like a wire frame just trying to

Visualize the hill itself so as you can see none of the sides of my hill are the same i’m trying to make it as natural looking as possible however whatever you place by hand it won’t look like naturally generated structures it won’t look like traditional minecraft which

Isn’t necessarily a bad thing it’s just different the other thing of course is part of the cleaning and visualizing process is you might want to add yourself in a pond so i had this natural dip in mine so i’ve just edited it to make it a bit smoother and that’s where

The water’s probably going to go i’m not entirely sure yet that’s all part of the visualizing process so as i said i’ve got this steep slope on the right hand side here and what i thought i’d do is just make that even steeper by adding in

A cliff side and that pretty much it means ignoring exactly what’s there already just building over it so i’ve made a slope over and i’m going to create a cliff edge first i’m not going to start from the bottom and build in stone but i’m going to create an edge that works

It’s all the way around almost like a boomerang shape that’s going to work around what’s already there but obviously high enough that it’s going to be a little bit of cliff obviously the higher you go the more stone and stuff you’re going to need so please be aware of how much you

Might need in terms of resources so if we take a little step back we can see how this might look it’s obviously very bare bones but you can see there’s going to be a bit of water where i’m excavating there a cliff on the right hand side and a general hill and once

You’ve got the idea of where you’re going to put things it’s time to start making that happen so once you’re happy with how clean the area is and i’m only doing a little bit at the moment you’ll notice that the rest of it’s still very messy it’s time to actually start putting

These bits together so what we’re going to do is essentially connect up the framework the wire framework of the hill and the key part here i don’t really want to insult you about how to make a hill but the key part is having the bottom layer a bit

Bigger than every subsequent one now my hill is fairly steep the thing you want to avoid when making a hill is having a lot of straight diagonal lines you know block after block after block just straight diagonal you’ll see that i’m trying to remove any very straight lines in it and trying to

Make it as circular as possible and that might mean making the entire thing a different shape my making the bottom layer even bigger and subsequent layers after that so as you can see i’ve tried to avoid very direct diagonals on my hill and it’s kind of come together in a

Decent shape i’d say no more than three possibly four diagonals you always want to have the one or two after them and once you’ve connected them all up layer by layer it should equal roughly what your framework indicated for the cliff i’ve added in a plateau on the top just

Covering it with dirt and adding that couple of extra layers a big mistake people commonly make is just making one flat layer always remember to add a few more underneath adding some stone is a very simple thing to do but you need to make sure that it does overhang you want

It to go up straight and then even further over you could make a different cliff that goes backwards there is a different sort of design for all of these things my recommendation here would be look at cliffs that you want to make and try and mimic them my ones a

Very simple one it’s perhaps not the best in the world but you kind of get the idea there’s plenty of little nooks and crannies in there lots of little holes it doesn’t look like your normal minecraft cliff and i think that’s kind of key with this kind of terraining and

Of course it will be hollow on the inside so make sure there’s no little holes in there so the next thing is you’ve kind of got an idea and you can see how this area has already been smoothed out quite a lot and there’s always more smoothing to be done so

Don’t be scared to add in little blocks here or there you might want to consider mixing in some other gray blocks with your cliff particularly andersite as it does go very well with stone but i also added in some cobblestone along with some mossy because i decided to add in a

Actual water feature so it does kind of tie it all in together and if you do add ponds or lakes it’s a very easy thing to decorate later on so i would definitely recommend if you’re terraining add some water features in or maybe even add a

Waterfall from your cliff to a lake or a pond or whatever you decided to make but remember water sources are very easy to decorate and they add a lot to your landscape so you might have noticed that that side’s looking pretty intense with a steep hill and a cliff and i’ve left

This side very open and bare and that’s because we’re going to do something slightly different here so something very much less intense so we’re going to create a few smaller hills and we’re going to try and make a more gentle terrain on this side of the building and

That’s because you want a bit of variation in your terrain around it and like i said the smoothing process is never over and i don’t really want to insult you again by telling you how to make a hill but the slightly less intense hills tend to be maybe one to four

Blocks in height and they tend to span over a much wider area so there is a bit of an issue with training because you can’t hand terrain the entire minecraft world it would be physically impossible where do you stop well that’s up to you i like to sort of gradually make everything intertwine

With the natural minecraft generated terrain but you might want to have just a physical standpoint where you just have that no i’ve had enough that’s it that’s the end so it’s up to you but you want to try and integrate it as much as possible at the end so now we’re on to

Number four which is the decoration and one of the best things to start with is a pathway from your front door out through your terrain you want the path to kind of take a good route through the terrain that you’ve made because you’ve put hard work into making this look good

A good place to start is to take your shovel and just right click the grass until you’ve got path blocks themselves and you want to have a few speckled out of the normal line as well as a bit of detail don’t just make it a firm straight line and

Then add in some coarse dirt and maybe some spruce or maybe even some jungle wood and connect the slabs into the blocks themselves so it’s a very messy pathway the next thing of course another detail is to add in some rocks i’ve made mine out of cobblestone

Because you get some nice slabs and staircases to go with it to make it look really rough and then mix in some soul sand which is a very dark kind of dirt around them to try and integrate those rocks into their surroundings of course if your biome is different you might

Want to choose some different blocks i imagine that it would look incredibly different if you’re in a snowy biome if you’re making a rock on a hill you definitely want to make sure that you remove the hill underneath and make sure that the rock physically goes right down

Into the hollow space you don’t want it sitting idly on top of the hill because it looks kind of strange you can of course make the rocks out of normal stone or even stone brick if you’re feeling bold again there’s a lot of opportunity for different pallets the

Next thing of course is part of the detailing is to add in your own custom trees now this is a very staple product of having a hand-terrained area you could use normal minecraft trees but they’re instantly recognizable as normal minecraft trees if you put the effort in

To making a few custom trees like this it will make all the difference you start off with a fairly sizable trunk you don’t want to go too massive and you can use some fences especially spruce as it matches oak pretty closely you can create a lot of little branches made out

Of the slabs and sort of connect them up with fences if they don’t quite sit nicely sort of spread them out as much as possible and then fill in the surroundings with some oak leaves and maybe even mix in a different leaf type as well i’ve chosen spruce and make sure

That there’s some branches going upwards as well as to the sides trees tend to grow up and not just spread out widely so that’s kind of a key part so this is kind of like a mini oak tree custom made one you don’t have to have exactly the same tree type throughout your

Hand-terrained area so what i decided to do was to add in a couple of variations so the second one i decided to make was more of a pine tree so i still used oak wood and i decided to make just a very thin and tall tree now this again

They’re not that much bigger than your big minecraft trees but they look distinctly different so the key to making a custom pine tree is to cover in leaves but leave these very big sort of patches so you can see the wood behind it and then just top the tree off itself

So it goes ever so slightly thicker and deeper at the bottom and then it sort of thins out as it goes to the top again remember to mix in different leaf types now to save myself some time i copy and pasted the one pine tree that i made and

Just pasted it all over obviously if you’re doing this in survival it will take a significant amount of time to paste entries but the good thing is if you’re making lots of custom trees they will all look very very different and that’s very important when you’re hand

Terraining you can kind of tell that all my trees are the same but it’s not a big deal because this is just a sort of proof of concept and you’ll also notice that i put in some cobblestone slabs to kind of look like little rocks just dotted around you could even add buttons

Which i didn’t do but now it’s time to vegetate and that’s kind of part of the detailing process but i want to put it in its own category because placing flowers and stuff isn’t as easy as you might think you don’t want to just go nuts and place them absolutely

Everywhere you probably want a few patches here or there mixed in with some double length grass you may also want to consider adding in a custom sort of fence either side of your pathway i recommend sort of breaking it up now if you’ve got a more gray palette you might

Want to go for a basic cobblestone wall but basically what i’ve done is added in sort of logs with some fences on the top and some slabs either side of them they don’t really function as just a normal block block block wall it is very higgledy-piggledy it’s meant to look

Very sort of rough but it helps sort of hone you down that pathway and i also removed a lot of the long grass that was there from the sort of original terrain and then there you have it that is my hand terrain area now i could probably spend another

Couple of hours fine-tuning this as much as possible but i’m actually pretty happy with how this has come out you can sort of dabble around by adding different flowers in different colors maybe even a few different trees but on the whole you want to try and keep it as

Natural looking as possible just not minecraft natural if that makes sense i’ve added in lily pads flowers reeds custom cliffs custom trees and of course the all-important custom terrain all of these factors are really important in making your own little area and it takes

A long time this took me over an hour to make and i did this all by hand apart from pasting in the trees and the key thing is once you’re past my sort of handmade area you will go into the normal minecraft world but you can’t

Really tell where that point is too much so those are all things to consider and i hope that you’ve learned something thank you very much for watching and good luck with your own terraining good bye