Terraforming is one of those things I believe every Minecrafter should learn how to do. When one starts a world, it will have been randomly generated by a random seed (unless a seed was specified) and this will determine how the world looks, what you will find (such as structures) and how the landscape is formed. However, you may not be happy with what landscape you get. Terraforming is the art of changing a landscape, temperature or atmospheric level to suit your needs. If any of you have come across games like Spore, then you will understand this. However, terraforming in Minecraft can be quite a process that might put some people off. This will look at how to terraform so that you too can shape your landscape.



---Terraforming with WorldEdit---

This is my preferred way of terraforming. It is quite a simple and for me, a fun process. So how do you do it? Read on my good friends!

1. For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to create a simple hill or mountain. So to start, we're going to need to create the outline. To do this, press 'T' to open up the prompt and type /brush sphere 1 3 while holding an item. This will turn your item into a block brush. The command we inputted means that we are going to be painting with stone. Every right click will create a sphere of stone with a radius of 3. If you want a different material to stone (although I don't recommend it) change the '1' in the command to another block ID. If you want to change the radius, change the '3', however at this stage I'd say to use 2 or 3, but you can use any value you want from 0-5. Now that you have your brush, you can right click all over the place to make your spheres, but make sure that they form a mountain shape.



2. Once you've got a shape, you'll notice it looks very unnatural. What you'll have to do now is open up the prompt and type /brush smooth while holding an item. Then right click along your blob and it will smoothen it out and make it look a bit more natural.



3. This part is a little more fun. we need to put grass on our mountain/hill, otherwise it's going to look a little odd, being just a stone case. So, open the prompt and while holding an item, type /brush cyl 3 3 3. This will set it to a cylindrical brush (as stated by 'cyl') that spawns grass (as stated by the first '3') with a radius of 3 (as stated by the second '3') and a height of 3 (as stated by the final '3'). Now you just right click and make it so that when you look from above you can't see any stone.



4. Now you'll probably be thinking, "Huh? This looks weirder than before!" BUT you haven't done this step yet. While holding an item open your prompt and do /brush gravity. Then right click all over and it will make any floating blocks fall t the ground, thus covering your mountain. After you've done that, use the smooth brush finish it off.



5. And finally, while holding an item, do /brush cyl 2 3 1 and right click everywhere to cover it with grass, then use your gravity brush to stick it to the hill, and then the smooth brush if need be.



---Extension---

If you really want to, you can add trees to your hill/mountain. Simply hold an item and do /tree [treetype] with the tree type being optional (the available types of tree are big, redwood, jungle, birch). Then right click to spawn your trees!



And that's how you terraform using WorldEdit. Stay tuned for my next terraforming tutorial, covering how to terraform using MCedit!