Tutorial: Tips For Landscaping and Terraforming

Tutorial Difficulty: 3/10

You might be here on the Minecraft website, thinking to yourself, "Wow. These writers must be the best in the world at Minecraft. They must know everything there is to know!" Well, you're totally right, my friend. We are so good at Minecraft that we're actually not allowed to play with other people, because we'd make them look bad. But you know what? Even the best in the world at Minecraft can still learn new things, and this tutorial is full of things to learn.

You see, building houses can be tricky, but it's easy to learn: it's just four walls and a roof. Sure, you can add more walls, or even more floors, but the basics of houses are pretty simple. It's the terraforming that's hard, which is why many of our houses can be found inside mountains, where we don't have to think about what the garden looks like. But BlueNerd's tutorial has made us feel far more confident at creating sweeping hillsides, curvy paths, and lovely gardens.

In the tutorial video, you'll learn how to make wide, beautiful paths that look natural and work with the terrain, and how to make walls to accent those paths. But it's actually kind of hard to make things look natural in a world that's made of cubes — the secret, as it turns out, is never placing more than seven blocks in a straight line when you're building something organic. Anything more than seven blocks will look weird, like... well, like you built it in a straight line. Of course, this doesn't apply to houses, just hillsides, paths, gardens, trees, that sort of thing.

But that's not the only tip BlueNerd has for us. If you're the kind of perfectionist who loathes weeds in the flowerbeds and wearing mismatched socks (not us, we love a good mismatched sock) then you'll probably also be the kind of person who thinks that naturally-generated Minecraft rivers look untidy. All that clay, gravel, sand, and dirt just clashes terribly, don't you think? Well, did you know you can just... replace it all? Take out all that nasty grey stuff and replace it with lovely brown dirt, and texture it up with granite and seagrass.

But it doesn't stop there — real-life rivers have erosion all around the banks, as well as plants — so swap out some of that pristine grass for coarse dirt and paths to make it look realistic, and pop in some foliage to make it look lush and green.

Finally, there's one last tip that, to be honest, we never thought of ourselves: make sure to double-layer your terrain. It only takes one light-fingered Enderman to create a hole in a single layer of grass, and you just know the hollow below will be filled with Creepers and regret.