Hello everyone! Welcome to my first in-depth tutorial! Let's get started:
Spiral staircases are cool. They look cool. They're fun to traverse.
Minecraft is square. And blocky. It would seem that constructing circles and circular structures would be difficult, but it's not!
This link has diagrams for circles of different diameters, up to 45.
But how does that help with staircases?
The first step to making a spiral staircase is to make a circle. I'll start with a simple design and construct a circle of diameter 1, then make a staircase around it.
This staircase is just a pillar with stairs on the sides and slabs on the corners. It is trivial to make, but it is ugly and functions poorly. It is very thin, so it is easy to fall off.
Intuitively, one might want to extend the staircase out by one block. This would make the staircase wider, but the border would likely be rectangular – we wouldn't end up with a spiral.
To fix this, make another circle with a larger diameter than that of the first circle. Make the circles concentric.
The area inside the ring is the outline for our staircase. We will build the staircase by filling in this area and elevating the blocks around the circle.
DON'T. Remember that we are building the staircase in a circle, not a line. Instead, do this:
The block that was a stair is now a slab. Observe that by replacing the stair with a slab, we have made a 1/4th turn in our stair. Next, we just repeat that pattern as far up as we want. We'll end up with stairs like these:
Of course, the inner circle does not have to have a diameter of one. The circles can have any diameters you want, depending on the desired dimensions of the stair. Here are the same step-by-step pictures for a staircase using circles of diameter 17 and 25: http://imgur.com/a/pTOzl (in this one I built the stairs out of wool first and then replaced them with wood. That is not necessary, it was done because wool stands out more).
That concludes my tutorial. Comments and questions are welcome.
I've got my own pattern I use for spiral staircases, it's flawlessly elegant without a single awkward join buuut it does have a downside too, since it's all slabs you have to make more circuits to reach the same height!
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"Sometimes, I just wanna give up, say 'I'm done with this mess' and go to bed. But you know what; you can't shrug off your responsibilities. You got to pull yourself up and meet the challenges head on. That's the only way you're gonna get ahead in life."
Nice tutorial.Surely useful for me.I will immediately grab my supplies and replace my old stairs to the new fashioned spiral staircase.Thanks for the help.
Wow, good tutorial! But personally, I think that spiral staircases are hard to go up. But if I must make one, I will make one with an at least 2-times-2 square, with a little tub of water at the bottom, so I could jump down and not waste time(also really fun too)!
What if your trying to make a spiral staircase around a tree thats from a mod? And just letting you know thats what im doing and im having trouble figuring out part of it. Also the mod is called ExtraBiomesXL. The tree im trying to build around is a redwood tree.
i personally tend to avoid staircases as they break sprinting, i lean towards using slabs on a much larger radius, along the outside of a wall, that is just my personal preferance
Depending on the radii, you can use stair blocks on the inner portion of the stairs, and half slabs along the outer edge as there are more blocks available, if that makes sense. I'm also a fan of an open center with water at the bottom for fast decents. 8)
I've got my own pattern I use for spiral staircases, it's flawlessly elegant without a single awkward join buuut it does have a downside too, since it's all slabs you have to make more circuits to reach the same height!
Spiral staircases are cool. They look cool. They're fun to traverse.
Minecraft is square. And blocky. It would seem that constructing circles and circular structures would be difficult, but it's not!
This link has diagrams for circles of different diameters, up to 45.
But how does that help with staircases?
The first step to making a spiral staircase is to make a circle. I'll start with a simple design and construct a circle of diameter 1, then make a staircase around it.
This staircase is just a pillar with stairs on the sides and slabs on the corners. It is trivial to make, but it is ugly and functions poorly. It is very thin, so it is easy to fall off.
Intuitively, one might want to extend the staircase out by one block. This would make the staircase wider, but the border would likely be rectangular – we wouldn't end up with a spiral.
To fix this, make another circle with a larger diameter than that of the first circle. Make the circles concentric.
The area inside the ring is the outline for our staircase. We will build the staircase by filling in this area and elevating the blocks around the circle.
The first step is just to lay down some stairs.
Next, we continue upwards, using the inner and outer circles as our borders.
In the next step, you may accidentally do this:
DON'T. Remember that we are building the staircase in a circle, not a line. Instead, do this:
The block that was a stair is now a slab. Observe that by replacing the stair with a slab, we have made a 1/4th turn in our stair. Next, we just repeat that pattern as far up as we want. We'll end up with stairs like these:
Of course, the inner circle does not have to have a diameter of one. The circles can have any diameters you want, depending on the desired dimensions of the stair. Here are the same step-by-step pictures for a staircase using circles of diameter 17 and 25: http://imgur.com/a/pTOzl (in this one I built the stairs out of wool first and then replaced them with wood. That is not necessary, it was done because wool stands out more).
That concludes my tutorial. Comments and questions are welcome.