ailiujiarui/mineai/building-design

Building design

What separates a build that reads as designed from a box of blocks. The style files under references/ describe one architectural style each; references/decoration.md collects finishing touches.

Size reference (width x depth x height)

• hut / shed: 7 x 7 x 6 - house / shop: 12 x 10 x 8
• mansion / temple: 18 x 15 x 12 - castle / cathedral: 30 x 25 x 20

Interior walls at least 3 tall so rooms don't feel cramped. Ground is rarely flat: a building on a slope either gets a foundation built up from the lowest ground to the floor level, or stands on stilts on purpose; otherwise one side hangs in the air or sinks into the hill.

Floors and doorways

A building has exactly one floor slab, with the walls standing on it. A second solid course under the walls or over the floor half-buries the doorway, and the door jams against the raised interior.

• A doorway is two air cells tall, cut through the wall.
• The lower door cell sits at the level of a body standing on the interior floor — directly above the floor slab.
• The interior walking level should equal the outside ground; if the floor slab raises it by one, a step block goes

outside the door.

• Walk the doorway in your head: outside ground → (step?) → lower door cell → interior floor. Any solid block on that

line jams the door.

• Windows sit 1-2 blocks above the floor, filled with glass or panes.

Which way a block faces

These are the game's own rules (north is -z, south +z, east +x).

• stairs — facing is the side the tall back is on, the way you walk UP

them. A roof slope rises toward the ridge, so its stairs face the ridge: on a south slope (the side that drops away to the south) they face north, on a north slope south. half=top turns them upside down.

• door — the closed panel lies against the edge of its cell opposite

facing: in a south wall, facing=north sets it flush with the outside, facing=south with the inside.

• trapdoor — open, it stands as a full-height panel against the edge of its

cell opposite facing (facing=south stands on the north edge, against a north wall); shut, half=top is a slab at the top of the cell and half=bottom one at the bottom.

• ladder — hangs on the block on the side opposite facing:

ladder[facing=north] needs a solid block just south of it.

• bed — facing points from the foot to the head; the head goes one cell

that way.

• lantern — hanging=true hangs from the block above it and needs one

there; hanging=false stands on the block below.

• log / pillar — axis is the way it runs: y upright, x east–west,

z north–south.

The parts of a building

1. Foundation / floor — one solid course, one block thick; it is the interior floor.
2. Walls — from floor + 1 up to at least floor + 3.
3. Roof — see below; a dome is the top half of a hollow sphere.
4. Openings — doorways two cells tall, windows 1-2 above the floor.
5. Interior fittings — on an inhabited floor 35-50% of the cells (see Interiors).
6. Exterior details — stairs and slabs as trim, glass panes, lanterns, paths, and flowers and grass around the yard.

Torches, signs, ladders, carpets, flowers, rails, buttons, pressure plates and hanging lanterns need a block to hold onto, so they go up after the blocks around them. Ponds, moats, canals and fountains are dug and lined first; one water source poured in spreads through a whole shallow basin.

Roofs (the part most builds get wrong)

There is no roof block: a roof is built course by course, one level at a time, which is why any footprint — L-shaped, cross-shaped — can carry a fitting roof.

The one rule that keeps a roof watertight

A cell can hold a slab in three states, and that is how a roof climbs:

• oak_slab — the lower half of the cell
• oak_slab[type=top] — the upper half
• oak_slab[type=double] — the whole cell

Neighbouring courses must touch. A course may climb at most half a block over the course beside it; climb a whole block between two bottom slabs and the two never meet — you get a visible slit and a row of slabs hanging in the air. Two ways to climb that always meet:

• Slabs, half a block per cell: alternate [type=double] and a plain bottom

slab as you go up. This is what a tiled roof is actually made of, it is the shallowest pitch, and it is what East Asian roofs need.

• Stairs, one block per cell: one course of stairs per level, facing the

way the roof RISES, toward the ridge (a south slope's stairs face north). Steeper, western, and the cheapest roof to write. Under a deep overhang put the lowest course as [half=top] stairs so the eave reads thin.

Never mix the two on one plane — the join is exactly where the gap appears.

Pitch and height

Roof height ≈ 0.5-0.75 × half-span. Below that it reads as a lid, above it as a tower. With stairs (one block per cell) you get 1.0 automatically, which is why a stair roof suits a narrow building and looks absurd on a wide hall.

East Asian roofs are concave: shallow at the eave, steeper near the ridge. Measured off hand-built halls, the surface rises one half-block per cell for the first two thirds and two half-blocks per cell near the ridge, averaging 1.2 — i.e. a 13-cell half-span ends about 8 blocks up. Write that as slab courses that start double/bottom alternating and switch to one course per level near the top.

The shapes, as grids

A 12-wide, 10-deep building, ridge along x, eave level y. Course k sits at y+k and is drawn twice — one row from the north edge, one from the south:

k=0   ############        <- both eave rows
      ............
      ............
      ############
k=1   ............
      ############
      ############
      ............

• Gable (two slopes) — as above: two rows per course marching inward,

the gable ends filled in as a triangle with the wall material.

• Hip (four slopes) — each course is a RING inset by k on all four sides.

The four diagonals fall out of the ring corners; a line of the ridge material runs along each of them.

• Pyramid — a hip roof on a square footprint; the rings shrink to a point.
• Half-hip — rings for the lower third, then switch to two rows and finish

as a gable, with a decorated panel filling the small end wall.

• Shed — one row per course, marching from the low edge to the high one.
• Dome — the top half of a hollow sphere, not a roof at all.

For a cross-shaped or L-shaped building, draw the courses of both wings in the same grid and keep the inner corner filled — the valley is a diagonal of cells that belong to both slopes. One grid per level; the wings cannot fight each other because they are the same drawing.

The four bands (this is what makes a style)

The structure above is the same everywhere. What makes one roof Chinese, another Gothic and another Mediterranean is which block goes in which band:

• Ridge — stands PROUD of the tiles: a line of a contrasting solid block

along the crest, one cell higher than the top course, plus the four diagonals of a hip roof and the bargeboards of a gable. This single line is most of what makes a roof read as designed rather than extruded, and every shape wants it.

• Eave — the outermost course only: [type=top] slabs, or inverted stairs,

in a contrasting material. One cell of width, enormous effect.

• Gable ends — the triangle under a gable slope. Fill it with the wall

material or a contrasting panel; leave it out and you can see into the attic.

• Soffit — a second skin one cell under the tiles, following the same slope.

This is what the roof looks like from below and through an open gable. It roughly doubles the cell count: spend it on a porch, a temple, a deep-eaved hall; skip it on a shed nobody looks up at.

Eaves and corners

Extend the roof grid 1-4 cells beyond the walls. 0 reads as unfinished almost everywhere; 1-2 suits most western work; East Asian roofs live on their overhang and want 2-4. A deep eave buys more character than a taller wall.

Lift the four eave corners 1-3 cells with the ridge material for an East Asian roof — the upturned corner is the most recognisable feature of the style, and one cell per corner buys it. Leave it flat for western buildings.

Under the eave

A deep overhang leaves a visible underside, and leaving it blank wastes the most characterful part of an East Asian building. Two cheap details:

• Rafter ends — a full block poking out under the eave every two cells along

the eave line. Two is the spacing the slope itself uses, so they line up.

• Bracket clusters — a band of [half=top] stairs flanking a full block,

repeated along the eave, facing ALONG the wall rather than outward. This is the detail people recognise the style by.

What roofs are made of

Roof planes want a weathered, textured material. The most common mistake is reaching for something bright and metallic — gold and polished blocks read as treasure, not as tile, and a large flat plane of them looks worse the bigger it gets. Verdigris copper, dark prismarine, deepslate tile, grey concrete and dark wood all read as roofing; save any gold for a finial the size of one block.

Mix the roof palette like any other large surface. The roof is usually the biggest single plane on the building, which makes it the last place to accept one flat colour.

Choosing, rather than copying

The style reference tells you what the roof should feel like — "low and wide", "steep, for snow", "four-sided", "corners lifted", "the roof is the building". Turning that into courses is your call, and two buildings in one style should not land on the same numbers.

Decision rules that hold across styles:

• Long thin building → a gable (the ridge wants a direction). Squat or square →

hip or pyramid read better than a gable on a near-square plan.

• Something added onto something else → a shed roof. It is worth reaching for far

more often than it gets used; one main roof plus a lean-to instantly looks lived-in rather than designed.

• Rank matters in Chinese work: hip > half-hip > gable. The roof announces the

status of what stands under it, so do not put the grandest roof on an outhouse and a plain gable on the temple beside it.

• Anything Chinese, Japanese or Korean → slabs, a concave pitch, lifted corners,

and a deep overhang. Without those it will read as a western house wearing Asian materials.

• Steeper suits snow, thatch and Gothic; shallower suits sun, tile and anything

meant to look calm. Let the climate and the material argue for the pitch.

A pagoda is not one roof — it is a pyramid roof repeated once per storey, each a little smaller. Multi-winged buildings likewise get one roof per wing at different heights, not a single roof stretched over everything.

Interiors (this is where builds are actually lost)

On an inhabited level, 35-50% of the blocks you place are furnishing. That is measured off a hand-built compound: on its living floors, four in ten placed cells are a trapdoor, a barrel, a shelf, a carpet or a lantern; across the whole build, furnishing is 16% of 5859 cells. If your interior is a bed, a crafting table and two torches, you are not slightly under-furnished — you are two orders of magnitude short, and the room will read as a storage shed with a bed in it.

Budget for it: a house whose shell is 3000 cells wants roughly 800-1200 more for the inside.

What furniture is actually made of

There is no furniture block in Minecraft, so furniture is ordinary blocks used for their shape. Measured frequencies from the same building, in order: