Minecraft Building Has Actually Taught Me Things

     Hey there! This week I was pretty busy with school and other stuff, so I ended up leaving writing a blog post for the last second. But then a dilemma struck me: I had no idea what to write about! Usually I have some sort of life story to talk about, or a new piece of media I want to share with my readers, but this week has been pretty quiet, and I haven't really watched anything this week besides JJK with Wade, and I already talked about that earlier this week. So I opted to do what I usually do when I need to clear my mind and think: fly around my Minecraft build world!

    I've had this Minecraft world for over half a decade now, and it's been populated with a field of builds and ideas I've had throughout the years as far as the eye can see (or at least, as far as the game can render). However, about three years ago, I started working on one mega project, aiming to create an immersive world out of nothing with my bare hands, instead of individual projects like I used to. As a result of this project, not only have my building skills drastically improved, but I've found myself learning a lot about art, history, and architecture as a result of my desire to improve my buildings in Minecraft. As I flew around, trying to think of something to write about, I ended up remembering a couple random things I looked into thanks to this project, so I'm going to ramble a little about them now!

Da Vinci's sketch of a tree

                                        Da Vinci's Rule of Trees

    Something I've always struggled with building in Minecraft were custom trees. Sure, I could always just plant one of the many types of naturally occurring tree types coded into the game, but those always tend to look a little out of place next to nicer buildings. So what many people do is build their own custom trees, with more detail and variation than normal Minecraft trees. The issue is, it's very hard to make a good looking tree, especially with no knowledge about trees or how they grow.

    For this, I tapped into the ancient theories of Leonardo Da Vinci, who had written a "rule for trees" that determined how trees should look when drawing them. According to Da Vinci's observations, “All the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk.” So, applying this rule into Minecraft logic, if the base of the trunk starts at two blocks wide, the splitting branches should be one block each. From each split from there, you should utilize slabs, and from there, fence posts and trapdoors, in order to capture the thinning effect of younger branches. To the right of this paragraph I built an example of this theory in practice, resulting in a much more realistic branch framework than I was previously making.

                Somerset Medieval Church

The Somerset Medieval Church

    Another type of building I was trying to improve at was some sort of chapel/church building. But instead of building a megachurch or a cathedral, I wanted to emulate the look of a more local place for worship, scaling down the building to fit in better with the other smaller villages houses. In my search for reference material, I came across the Somerset Medieval Church, which caught my attention because of its western tower that juts out from the rest of the chapel, which is built in a more traditional chapel scale and style. This style of church differs from the traditional cruciform floor plan of medieval churches, where the building would be laid out in (you guessed it) the shape of a cross, with a central tower in the middle. The style I opted for took inspiration from the western tower plan, which offsets the balance of the build and draws the eye in an L-shaped pattern.

Left: Church of the Holy Cross, Middlezoy
Right: my recreation of window depth

    When designing the details for my church, I realized that I didn't particularly like the look of the Minecraft stained windows, since they lacked the texture and pattern that real-life church windows have. Additionally, I've always felt like church stained windows should be essentially opaque, rather than the clear transparent that the Minecraft windows offered. In an attempt to remedy this, I chose to play around with the depth of the windows in order to give the illusion of it being a window, when in reality it was a solid block of glazed terracotta. The terracotta offered the bright colors and complex patterns that best emulated the look of real-life church windows, and by playing with depth perception in the building's façade, an illusion is created where it looks less like a solid block and more like a window with not enough light shined on it to see through it. Maybe it doesn't work completely, but I thought it was cool!

    I only had enough time to write about two of these examples today, but I had a lot of fun connecting my in-game building projects to real-life concepts, so be on the lookout for more of these types of the blogs in the future!