Planning

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This is just a quick guide to the bare minimum a build should be planned. If you do not plan a build, you will often end up with an uninspiring rectangular building, walls that have very little detail and you will run into problems that are a lot harder to fix the later you encounter them. Planning may seem boring but it will pay off!

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Installing world edit (can be obtained on single player commands but is easier to do on servers):

This does not make you a bad builder. It can save you a lot of mind-numbingly copy and paste work and is a must for terraforming. It is impractical to build large builds without this.


Voxel Sniper also helps with terraforming. I will not be going into detail on how to install this (unless you guys request it) because there are a lot of fine tutorials already out there! Do not let this make you lazy. You should still include detail by hand. This is only meant as an aid to save time. Without these mods/plugins you will end up cutting corners.

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Research

This is the first Step. It is important to research what you are going to build. If you are building a replica of a well-known building from a movie or in real life then it is incredibly important to google good pictures from every angle. This may seem obvious but a lot of people forget! Don't limit yourself to just photos as other people may have made 3D sketchup models or taken a youtube video of the place.

If it is your own build, sketch out a rough draft. If you jump straight in, you will end up with a square cobblestone castle.

A good build takes time. Do not rush it. This is the single biggest mistake that people often trip up on. It is better to make a really good build in 2 weeks than it is to do one in an afternoon and nobody liking it.


For example:



How much time do you think was spent on this, compared to:



Furthermore, it is clear that the second picture was not researched correctly. There are no supports in it and there is a lack of terraforming as it is not even completly over a river. Do not get me wrong, it is a good build for the time that it probably took to make it, but you can clearly see the differences.

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The next step:

Think about the terrain. This is often overlooked, and while it does not have to be finished straight away because you may change your mind on design aspects, it is important to do this first so that you don’t have to shift your entire build after its been made (another reason to install world edit if you find yourself in this scenario).

This means that it is often nicer to build on a large biome/normal map instead of a super flat one; otherwise you leave a lot of unauthentic land all for the sake of it being slightly easier.

Lastly, think about the oddness/evenness of your build. A lot of the time you may want to build odd/even, but you realize you want to have single/double doors. What do you do then? If you have an odd design for a wall for example, you may need to repeat it an even number of times to have an even pattern on top of it. This can be an issue when considering window designs!







Building odd is useful as it draws the eye to the center of the design.

That concludes this part of this series. Please rate comment and subscribe to see more of these.

Please comment if you would like anything explained better, have any questions or anything you believe should be improved.

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-wms98