Designing a Stylish Mine! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide [Part 221]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft survival guide and it really does feel like a welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide today because we are back in the Java Edition world oh gosh I’ve missed this place it’s it’s been a fun little holiday through bedrock Edition

Getting all of those achievements last week it’s been a little bit of a wild ride but now I’m back in my familiar Java Edition world and everything feels weirdly different at the same time like once you get used to playing one version for an entire week and then you go back

To Java Edition it just feels like such a weird change there’s just something a little bit more responsive about the world to me I don’t quite know anyway I’ll probably make a video in future kind of formulating my thoughts about what is different about bedrock and Java

Edition and maybe how the two can be brought closer together but for now I want to almost like get familiar with this world again just have a look around and remind myself of what is here because it feels like I’ve been away forever you know that feeling you get

When you’ve been on holiday somewhere and you’ve been away for about a week and you’ve started to get familiar with the surroundings like you’ve started to think of like the the hotel or you know whatever kind of place that you’re spending your holiday like if you’ve gotten like an Airbnb or something you

Start to think of that as your home in a weird sort of way like your brain just has this shift and then when you come home it sort of feels a little bit weird but it takes you much less time to get familiar with the surroundings again you

Know so it’s it’s like that feeling right now I feel like I’ve been away from my Java world on a holiday and I’ve come back and I just need to kind of blow the cobwebs out and run around the world and remind myself of what’s here

Of course we’ve got our Lovely Pets here we’ve got the villagers I need to see Mendelson again I haven’t seen Mendelson for a while hello hey hello buddy how are you been visiting your your uh villager friends over in in Bedrock Edition they’re a little bit different a

Little bit weird gotta remember that there’s certain things I can do in Java Edition that I couldn’t do in Bedrock and vice versa oh it’s so good just having all of my stuff back look at all the enchantments I have on my gear oh and this is pretty incredible all right

All right uh let’s get focused let’s figure out what we’re going to do today because I have a plan I’ve actually wanted to do this for a little while and I want to kind of renovate some of the mining spaces around the town here and

Go into a little bit of like what makes a mine aesthetically pleasing and how we can kind of transform the stuff that you’ve used in your early game to dig out an area into more of like a feature of the world you know if you if you

Don’t want to just use it as a kind of early game mine if you want it to be like a feature especially with the surrounding landscape that we have here and all of the Town developing over there it sort of feels like these mine shaft entrances don’t really turn into

All that much they don’t look particularly organized so what I want to do today is work on making an aesthetic mine and we’re actually going to do more or less a week of stuff related to mines and Minecarts because I really like minecart in this game I think they are

Quite a neat thing and you can take advantage of them in a bunch of different ways but I feel like sometimes they get overlooked as a useful resource aside from Hopper Minecarts which we use all the time in resource Gathering mechanisms in farms and stuff like that

There are so many other ways Minecarts can be used for exciting stuff and infrastructure and and just neat features of the world that I think people maybe forget especially now I’m so used to traveling around with elytra and Minecarts used to be kind of a useful form of transport and in a way

They still can be because they are transport that you can use hands off you don’t have to worry about flying reusing fireworks making sure you know which way you’re going and making sure that you’re pointed in the correct direction and that kind of stuff you can use minecart

In a more kind of hands-off way and I like that idea I would like to set up some sort of AFK transport Network around here where we can have a set of Minecart stations that will take us to different places and that’s always been my plan for some infrastructure in the

Nether but I think we might start doing stuff like that in the Overworld as well just for the sake of having it there and having places that you can go to travel from Zone to Zone from place to place but for today let’s take a look at mine

Shaft and what we can do to make them prettier I’m probably going to use some dark oak and Spruce Wood for these projects and there are a few things we can do let’s start with that mine over there by the wheat field though because

That mine is is kind of the first one I ever really went down into and it’s kind of the place that I found a lot of stuff like we dug down there to find diamonds we’ve got a spider spawner down there that is probably in need of renovating

One of these days if we want an easy string Farm but as far as mine shafts go there are some aesthetic guidelines I guess you could say provided by the game itself and it’s something I’ve adapted a little bit here for this mine entrance that I made ages ago this is talking

Like in the early teens of this series we ended up making this little entrance here and you can take your cues from abandoned mine shaft if you have a certain aesthetic going on for example you’ll find abandoned mine shaft in regular biomes I’m saying regular biomes here because there are different

Variants of them in in Mesa Biomes but you’ll find them having the same kind of structure where there are three by three tunnels the kind of tunnel that you would dig out like say here here’s a good example for for example sake we can have a couple of fences on either side

Like that and a kind of prop on the top like so and that is what you’ll find in normal abandoned mine shaft often you’ll find a torch planted on one side of it to light the area up which makes them really nice to explore because you don’t

Get as many mobs spawning down there as you might do in a completely darkened Cave System but this can be the template we can use to expand upon the mine shaft design a little bit but I find this a little plain I also really like the use

Of stuff like wood logs which look a little bit more like load-bearing beams in mine shafts than say this arrangement of planks and fences does so I wonder if we can do some more with the logs themselves obviously this is going to be more expensive and for those of you who

Want to have economy of material factor into the kind of shelf designs you’re going to be building you might want to break stuff down into planks and and do some stuff like that but I think we can probably afford to Splash out especially considering our mine looks like this we

Can also take advantage of the huge array of new slabs and stairs that have been brought in for Minecraft 1.14 so where previously you could only really make slabs and stairs out of cobblestone and stone bricks now we have the option to make natural stone slabs and stairs

So the walls of a cave can be manipulated to feel a little bit more cave-like there can be some natural rock formations that you can work in there that are actually not natural at all to Minecraft but might look a little bit more natural for real world purposes

Likewise we now have slabs of raw diorite granite and andersite stairs of those as well even walls if you wanted to do that although the walls have a tendency to look a little bit more player crafted and artificial because they don’t naturally occur anywhere in Minecraft’s natural world so I’m going

To break open some of these and see where I have some resource is made up already we clearly haven’t done a great deal with the diorite and granite and stuff we’ve only done a minimal amount with the andesite but of course we have plenty of this from strip mining

Projects elsewhere in the world so we could take a few stacks of each of these and start to incorporate them into caves not only that but Cobblestone will actually play quite a vital role for aesthetic mine shaft building because Cobblestone you could expect to be around the place if rocks have been

Broken up with pickaxes and stuff like that you’ll find that that broken gritty Cobblestone texture that kind of cracked texture will work its way into mine shafts very well and you’re going to want to avoid using stuff that looks a little bit more processed like stone brick and andesite because those

Materials will have been taken out of the mine and then refined elsewhere in the world or by the stone masons or whoever is going to be working them into things that people would use to build with so I think that will be a good set of materials to start off with let’s

Head down this mine shaft and let’s see what we can do to make it a little bit more pretty one of the first things I want to do is focus on the natural elements of the cave and how we can refine them into something more approaching features

Let’s take for example this vein of diorite that runs across the floor of the cave and you’ll find this happening throughout with patches of granite and andesite and that kind of stuff personally I don’t really like those all that much I kind of feel like those should occur more in veins and like

Geological strata of stone than they do in these kind of randomized patches it works for Minecraft’s natural terrain generation but I feel like if we’re trying to make this look a little bit more like the real world I would like these to be a bit more kind of sparse or

Maybe turn them into features let’s take a look at how we can do that right now so I’m going to replace the entire floor of this mine shaft with stone which is going to look a little bit you know plain for the time being but we’ll do

Something about that in a second and let’s take this corner here as an example right so let’s take some of the diorite this raw diorite that we’ve got here in the wall and in instead of having it occur as a large patch here maybe what we can do is bring some Stone

Around it like this and then have it running through the cave wall almost like a a vein of sorts floor to ceiling this is only four blocks high so there’s not really a huge amount we can do to make this look kind of proportional with the wall it’s always going to look like

A giant vein of diorite is running through here but we can potentially fix that with a few things made out of stone so let’s grab some natural stone here let’s turn that into slabs let’s Chuck out some of these extra blocks like the trap door which we won’t need for a

Minute or maybe we could put some stuff in the shulker box that I’ve got here still got a few supplies that left on me from that Arctic biome build uh right so let’s grab some stone slabs and we can maybe thin this vein of diorite out slightly with the use of Natural Stone

There so it looks like there is a smaller vein of diorite running through the cave wall and we could even bring a little bit of overhang into this like that with slabs just kind of working the terrain a little bit bit here and already this is starting to feel a

Little bit more like a natural cave formation and you also have this beautiful line of diorite and yes I did just describe diorite as beautiful guys don’t worry I am I think I think it can actually be used in ways like this that make it more an aesthetic part of the

World without it having to be a building block for houses and stuff like that these things are intended to look like Natural Stone formations let’s work with that and enhance that and we could even do the same on the opposite wall here and follow the same sort of vein because

If you imagine this is a path that we have carved down into the Rock we’ve probably carved through a vein of diorite in order to do that so once again let’s tidy up the floor here because this is definitely going to be a layer of stone and let’s try and copy the same

Geological Style on the opposite side but maybe with a little bit of variation allowed because naturally like the the vein would grow organically for one of a better word because this is Stone it doesn’t necessarily feel particularly organic but in the real world it would grow in a similar pattern and if you

Just kind of copy it over diagonally with a little bit of variation I feel like this can look quite natural there you go if you look at that from side to side you can kind of imagine that this has been a path we have cut through the

Diorite here so now we can start to naturalize this a little bit just by bringing the ceiling in slightly uh maybe we’ll build up around here like this and then this can come down like so and we can use slabs like that just kind of filling these in those could be full

Blocks but we can probably just work with that there we go and just like that we have a much more natural looking entrance to this if we imagine it’s just a cape you could also work in slabs of diorite as well as the slabs of stone what we’ve done is use full diorite

Blocks and kind of work around them with stone but you could equally do the same thing with a a single slab of diorite poking out here and there if you wanted to I like this a lot and I think that could be the template for how we work

With the rest of the cave going down we can do the same kind of thing with veins of granite which are clearly in the walls and the ceiling here and there uh we’ll probably have to prop up some of that gravel as well and there’s a whole

Bunch of stuff we could do down here so let’s take a look at how we can make a few more realistic mine shaft beams and props because while obviously it helps to have these nice organized tunnels almost like you are Branch mining down here it’s also going to look a little

Bit better if you have something that works with the natural feeling of the cave and is a bit more organic in that way so let’s build a few logs up here and we’ll build some on the opposite side we can probably put this on a bit

Of a diagonal like so and this is the point at which instead of using log textures we could use wood textures with bark on all six sides so that we can have something like that something that feels a little bit more solid even though it’s going to be at a diagonal

Let’s break down a little bit of dark oak wood so that we can make some fences and some slabs and stairs and stuff like that and that will allow us to fill in these Corners here so it seems a little bit more solid like that yeah that’s

Looking quite nice I think we could probably add a little bit more detail to it but in the simplest terms it is something that feels a little bit more like it’s supporting this section of the mine shaft without it feeling too flimsy like the fences I feel like this could

Maybe hold up a three by three tunnel I feel like the same kind of thing would look very insubstantial when it’s trying to hold up the roof of this section of the cave and prevent it from caving in on the miners we could even add the fences around here as reinforcement as

Though they’ve kind of been drilled into the Rock slightly put those on all three sides like so yeah that definitely feels a little bit nicer there’s still plenty of room for us to walk through we could hang a lantern or two from these surroundings here and there if we wanted

To have it feel a little bit more like a mine in fact I feel like lanterns are some of the perfect things to have in aesthetic Minds like this they definitely have that kind of old world mining kind of feel so I think we can do

A lot with those and with the amount of iron I have we can make a whole bunch of lanterns so I’ve just made half a stack we’ll probably try not to spam them too much but I do like lanterns they look really nice in the context of the mine

They’re going to be great part of the problem I have with lanterns though is that you can’t attach them to the side of a block you can’t put them like on a block here it has to be hanging from the ceiling or sitting on the floor or on a

Block that will allow it to be placed there so I think we’re probably gonna have to get away with just using lanterns on top of these fence posts for now still provides a really nice glow to the area and I really wish that the light around them looked different to

The light around torches it’d be nice if they had like a warmer Rosier glow to them but that’s colored lighting that’s one of the things I’ve wanted in Minecraft for a while let’s not worry about that too much so if we want the walls here to feel like they have been

Mined or at least broken away then it’s important to add a few Cobblestone slabs around here for the debris of some of this stuff and while we don’t want it to obstruct our off too much if we still want to come down here and use this

Space as a mine it’s going to be really nice to have a little bit of this stuff around here to give some texture in fact we could maybe even create a pattern of it in the floor around here we could do something like that and while yeah maybe

It will feel a little bit awkward to run up and down this a whole bunch I think it could look nice if we maybe kind of fill it in here and there because the floor of a cave like this is never going to be completely even and if we’re

Creating cracks in the walls around us then we could potentially create some cracks in the floor as well if you wanted to you could always just kind of fill that up so that you don’t have to worry about the height variation being kind of jerky when you’re walking around

It as a player but I like that as a detail I think that’s kind of nice and it doesn’t distract Too Much from the fact that we’re using cobblestone as part of the detail of the surrounding scenery we can do the same thing to the

Ceiling here as well and I don’t know if I want to add too much to the ceiling in terms of additional texture but more just a slightly higher and and almost more rounded approach to it so maybe we’ll add some more stone slabs in there

So that we can create a bit of textural variation just using maybe we’ll add a few more slow maybe we add a few more stone slabs and stairs in there so instead of creating textural variation we kind of create a bit of variation in the um I guess the

Topography of the ceiling if that really makes sense you can use stairs to create a lot more fine detail and stuff like this as well so if you want a crack that is just like half a block wide you can do that with stairs and of course take

Advantage of the fact that you can put Corner stairs in here as well if you want to really adds a little bit of a dynamic feel to the whole thing and that might even be how we get around the fact that having slabs in the floor would create that kind of height variation

That registers with the player because putting stairs in having that half block space you can’t actually stand in that the player will not dip down if it’s just this half block that’s been exposed like that so we can potentially put cracks like that in the ground without

Having to worry about it being an uneven experience here I’m using andesite stairs here and andersight can actually be integrated quite nicely into smooth Natural Stone without it feeling too far out of place they do have quite a similar color palette to them compared to the contrast that you’re going to

Create by using diorite or Granite so I feel like maybe we can swap a few of those out we can maybe even mix it in with the Cobblestone texture here and there to make it look like a natural formation and that’s yeah that’s really not going to stand out too much in the

Walls of the cave my eye is not immediately drawn to the fact that that is andesite I really like this so far I think we can work with a lot of this as we go down further into the mines so we’re going to look at a couple of

Patterns that we can use when we’re working with these materials and kind of follow the same style as we go further down first of all we have stuff like the mine shaft beams and props where if we’ve got a smaller tunnel to work with we can use something a little bit more

Simple like this with fences and planks over the top but if we’ve got a larger area to prop then we want stuff that’s going to be a little bit more sturdy so we can create something like this where Everything feels a little bit more solid we’re using solid wood we’re using

Darker wood and maybe we can add Lantern to those as well because I think aesthetically they match quite well we can use diorite as these kind of veins of geological strata in the walls here and there and I think when we get around to using Granite we might try and make

It look a little bit more like a geode formation say for example over here in this wall if we kind of carve out an area inside and create this sort of pocket of granite in here almost like this spherical formation of it perhaps a little bit more like how Minecraft would

Generate it itself maybe around the outside of a patch of granite like this we create a kind of jagged formation probably taking the granite out of the ceiling here as well just to make it feel a little bit more like this is the only patch of granite we’ve found and we

Can work around that with the slabs once again kind of filling it in here and there to make it really look like this is popping out of the wall a bit more you can always round off the shape of the granite a little bit more by adding

Slabs to it but yeah there you go it’s got me a bit more of a geode effect like it’s kind of being broken out of the wall by the miners here and maybe we could add some different variation in texture for the stairs around here just for a little bit greater effect because

Right now it does blend with the cave wall a little bit too much perhaps and the sight stairs or even Cobblestone stairs would make that pop a little bit more there we go that’s really nice and I think and a site could even be an indicator of where some of these areas

Have been quite heavily trodden as though the stone has been eroded slightly by the miners hanging around here and chipping away at this geode of granite that we’ve got buried in the wall so that could be a good start for the theme for granite for the rest of

This cave so anytime there’s a patch of granite we can turn it into something more resembling this anytime there’s diorite we can include it as more like a vein in the wall and we can work with those patterns going down further into the mine shaft until we’ve got something

That feels a lot more natural the mine is progressing well I am a little short on time today and a lot of this detail work takes a lot of time so I’m not going to be able to do too much more today but this is a really rewarding Venture I think it’s it’s

Really nice to build some aesthetic stuff in Minds like this just to give it a bit more character and it’s probably better to do this after you are done using the majority of this to actually gather resources but I think it can look really nice it makes the world of

Difference having access to stone slabs and stone stairs to make detailed sections of caves like this just the ability to bring that cave roof in like a half block more creates so much more atmosphere allows you to create a darker Vibe for the ceiling which can actually

Help a lot when you have to light the floor up meticulously to make sure that mobs don’t spawn I’ve tried to keep some areas of the mine a little bit gloomier than others but I really don’t want to be faced with creepers and zombies every time I come down here but it’s really

Coming together quite well we’ve got this lovely little intersection here a lot of Crag kind of rocks and stuff all hanging down around the beams and props that we put here just to make sure that the mine feels a little bit more secure and then this can go down in a variety

Of directions this down here already leads to the area where I set up the spider farm but I think we could work in a few extra details here and there and maybe have like a larger mine shaft going down splitting out into a wider Cavern that has a bunch of small mine

Shafts running off of it perhaps as though they’ve set up a diamond mining operation down here I’m thinking about maybe bringing in some all blocks that I’ve gathered myself using silk touch and even stuff like iron and gold where you don’t need silk touch at all and

Just putting them at the end of some of these offshoots and corridors just to give it the feel that you know they are mining towards something that there is a goal in mind and maybe a piece of gold ore in the uh in the wall here and then

A barrel with gold nuggets or something in here would really add to the vibe of the place as though they’ve actually gathered some gold nuggets from the wall here um I’m put some buttons down as well Stone buttons work really nicely as little kind of Pebbles and rocks that

Have just been cast aside and just you know one or two of them kicked to the walls here seems like a a good thing to add into the whole vibe of the space but I hope this has given you a bit of inspiration for how to decorate a mine

In a kind of aesthetic way that’s going to look really neat especially if you’ve got some law to go with it in the world if you’ve got a a set of Mines that you want there to be some sort of story around then this feels like a good place

To start and that is going to be it for this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide thank you guys so much for watching don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now Thank you