Minecraft Forums

Let's face it. A huge element of Minecraft's appeal is building your dream structure, be it a massive castle that would make Neuschwanstein look like a lean-to, or the biggest fortress this side of Bara-Dur.

Sometimes, however, I feel like building big isn't always better. It's pretty cool to have a grand hall and a workshop, a bedroom floor, and an armory.... but the fact of the matter is, all you really need is a handful of furniture and a couple of chests.

And you can have that in a dinky little 10x10 one story house.

In my last game, I built a mighty castle on top of a mountain, with 9 floors and it literally scraped the sky limit of the world. It looked awesome, and I had a fully functional workshop (with crafting chests and so forth), a secured armory, and a floor of bedchambers, etc.

Cool, yes. But the fact of the matter is, after a while, it got tedious to have to go to different floors to do what could have been contained in the first floor. Furthermore, heading up those mountain stairs got monotonous. While I had a massive, impressive fantasy castle, the fact was it was getting to be a hassle to go about the buisness of playing the game due to its size.

Plus, I found that large, open chambers (like a grand hall or ballroom) are hard to adequately light... nothing like a Creeper popping up in the very heart of the structure you should feel safe in.

What do you think? Are large structures worth it, or do they impede the gameplay?

At first, I was building huge buildings, like the one you mentioned, but they just got kinda boring. Also, I always seem to struggle with roofs, and just kinda made the top of everything flat.

Now, I'm working more on villages. I've currently got a 20x10 (ish) house, that has 2 floors, and a slightly smaller basement. All my chests are in the basement, in neat cut outs in the walls. The ground floor has a table and chairs, and a back door leading to my back yard farm, and the top floor has my bed (and TV, which currently has a documentary about ravenous 2 metre wide spiders on, the narrator has a scary voice which makes it worse. I lost the TV remote too, which makes it hard to change the channel over. I thought I found the right button on the TV, but it just kinda paused it. So now I'm stuck with this until I find the remote ). About 30 metres away is the church, which has 3 rows of pews all pointing towards the nether portal. Not got any other buildings, yet.

(sorry for the description, haven't got facebook)

So yeah, small villages/houses over bug builds now. Maybe something big in the future.

I like to use a middle ground between the two. On a friends world I have a 30x30 circular base, in total 4 floors, each 30x30 and 4 high. I like my space to do a bunch of random stuff. One floor is for farms, another floor for some generators and redstone stuff, etc ...

On my own survival world I am going for a smaller approach but located in a nice extreme hills biome. I do not know about you all but I get some of my ideas from that Find your Creativity thread, it has helped me design a few worlds with set themes. Kudos to JDawgMillenium for doing that thread as well, gotta give them credit.

Big and compact. I plan on creating a large underground base with everything from auto melon farms to obsidian generaters. Here's the catch: Everything will be compact and easily accessable. You see, sometimes you do need to have a large amount of space to fit everything, but that doesn't mean it can't be efficient and compact.

For game play, I lean towards making everything I use as compact as I can and usually my base is partially underground since I usually start out the first night by digging into the side of some cliff or digging straight down before nightfall. I tend to expand only as additional chest space is needed. With some reliable food source now required, these bases may tend to get a little larger to incorporate a wheat or melon farm or chicken coop.

I tend to separate my "playing the game" worlds from my build worlds; and since I tend to delete my game worlds upon death or 3 deaths, the home bases in those never amount to much. Before creative came along, my build worlds were made mostly in Peaceful without hostile mobs interrupting the building process. My current 1.7.3 build world has a walled base that is somewhere around 60 x 60 with 2-storey house inside it that is probably about 15 x 15 on each floor and also has a basement for chest storage. I also have a country house is about about 20 x 20 on one floor built around the base of a mob drop trap. I've been considering turning this into some sort of highrise to enclose and disguise the mob drop trap; but I'm waiting to see if they fix the dark chests glitch and the signs issue before booting up that world to finish it. I've started a creative mode build world in a new 1.8.2 seed. However, my home is just a slightly expanded village house; and I've mostly been working on just adding some features to the village itself. I'm just not inspired and may ultimately delete it too. There is a nice deep lake nearby that is connected to a massive cave system... so I may eventually move my home base underwater.

Currently I have a 5x5x3 house on the surface. Holds the bed, crafting table, furnace and a staircase to the underground. Buried is a storage room, wheat field, branch mine, and chicken coop. I tend to enjoy hollowing out mountains and making buried compounds, almost dungeon like.

I typically have a large castle surrounded by redoubts and linked with tunnels allowing Minecarts with people and supplies to pass through. Big and efficient. I can do both.

I like to build 7x7 towers. 1st floor has furnace, crafting, and chest. 2nd floor bed and windows. 3rd floor archer's nest. I'll also digout a mine under the tower if I don't have a bed on the first night.

I like my outpost tower cause I can build it in one day. I also build them next to key areas on the map so I don't have to sprint home when night comes.

I'm currently working on a world for my kids (8 and 5). In this one, I went around and smashed every skyblock I could find except one and turned that one into a miniature version of Howl's floating castle. It's got a two story-library tower than scrapes the height limit (gives you an idea of how high the skyblock is) but the living area is really no bigger than a 10X15 divided into a couple of rooms. Beyond that, the secure sleeping area (to avoid sleep-spawned aggro mobs) is nothing more than a 4X4 basement in the skyblock itself.

Since 1.8, I've taken to building modern style cities. My current world's main base is a twin 10x10 floor space tower connected by bridges every fourth floor, with a large room on top for my personal space. And I build them in Taiga biomes; its beautiful at a distance seeing the city lights in a snowstorm.

I mainly build for neccessity, I build things that serve a purpose and some decorational items, I just don't see a lot of point in making things big for the sake of it.

my island ranch has a house that is 17x7 (counting walls). 3 rooms. One for sleeping, one secure entryway, one storage/craft/furnace room.

outside, is a 5x5 wheat farm, completely fenced in, and then the rest of the island is fenced off to keep the animals in and the hostiles out.

It is lit up every 6 blocks with a torch on a fence post in a grid fashion.

I still get hostile mobs spawning occasionally. It's less likely to happen now, and mostly prevented if I sleep at night. The lighting system used to prevent hostiles in pre 1.8. I used to be able to use 1 torch every 12 blocks. Something has changed in the game.

I like smaller buildings or small towns with small buidings al doing their own thing. When I make big constructions I tend to leave a dark spot somewhere which leads to mobs spawning in my home which leads to creepers which leads to my brain exploding.

I like my house nice and spacious. You know...me and Stanley gotta have our space if you know what I'm sayin', right?

I tend to build towns with small buildings, where each building has a purpose. For example, I have a building with a chest and crafting table (for small craftables such as tools), a building with multiple furnaces, etc. If I am playing mods such as industrialcraft with buildcraft, eventually I start on a large factory structure, with automated lines crafting multiple things. The structures are huge, but everything is very compact on the inside, meaning I can get 5 production lines producing mining drills (industrialcraft) in a single building.

Quote from AlternateLives

I tend to build towns with small buildings, where each building has a purpose. For example, I have a building with a chest and crafting table (for small craftables such as tools), a building with multiple furnaces, etc. If I am playing mods such as industrialcraft with buildcraft, eventually I start on a large factory structure, with automated lines crafting multiple things. The structures are huge, but everything is very compact on the inside, meaning I can get 5 production lines producing mining drills (industrialcraft) in a single building.

I totally agree.

compact. i usually go underground, split it into small rooms.

For me it depends on my mood and the terrain around me. If the terrain looks right to build big, then I build big. If it calls for a little of both i do both and so on... I generally just work with the terrain as I see it, terraforming when needed for adjustments for the build while still keeping the main look of the land.