Minecraft is Building

Not to be confused with crafting, building in Minecraft is the act of placing blocks to create structures both common and impressive. This could take the form of a simple home in survival, a huge castle, or perhaps the Enterprise as some have chosen to do (seriously, look it up on Youtube, it’s quite impressive).

Game Modes

Building is going to be a little different depending on your game mode. In creative mode you have unlimited resources and can just build to your heart’s content. This is a great game mode for testing out ideas before implementing them in your survival worlds. Survival on the other hand is much harder as you only have access to the resources you can gather and you don’t have the benefits of flight or infinite damage protection. Still, more often than not the reason you’re building something in creative is so you can make sure it works for your survival game as many such projects are designed to make the survival character’s life easier.

What can be Built

There really isn’t a limit to the kinds of things that can be built in Minecraft. These can be simple buildings for basic storage or far more complex things using redstone circuitry to do all manner of incredible things. For the sake of categorization however, I’ll list some of the broad areas for you.

Buildings – This is your most basic type of building in Minecraft which involves placing blocks to make some sort of structure to store items, live in, or for any other purpose you can imagine. Testing these types of structures beforehand serves only to get the structure to look exactly how you want it to before copying the design into a survival world.

Spawners – A spawner is a specially designed building intended to serve as a place for the spawning of specific types of mobs which are then fed into a trap of some sort. These are used to feed into item and experience traps to help a survival player gather the resources to better survive in their world.

Traps – Traps are designed to either hurt or kill mobs and players being fed in from a spawner or foolish enough to try and invade your base. These can use water, lava, cactus, or simple gravity to injure or kill any creature that falls into the trap.

Redstone – Redstone devices are basically any structure that uses mostly redstone to accomplish its purpose. These can include automatic or semi-automatic farms, vertical item transporters, piston elevators, automatic item sorters, and minecart systems just to name a few. The things you can create using redstone are seemingly limitless and testing these designs in creative is highly recommended before implementing them in survival.

Pixel Art – This is a special category for those with an artistic flair. Say you want to create a rainbow as an addition to the view from your penthouse apartment; you could do this by creating a pixel art rainbow way out in the distance. These designs are usually accomplished by harvesting and building with colored wool to create all the colors you could ever need.

Conclusion

Building is almost certainly the primary focus of Minecraft and very much an essential element of the game. If you’re a fan of building, be sure to do a bit of it over in your N3rd C0rn3r.