How to Make a House in Minecraft

Step-by-Step Guide

1. 1

   Step 1: Make your crafting table.

   Before you start, the most important thing is to make a crafting table.
   
   It’s the single most important amenity in the game because it lets you create most of the items you’ll be needing throughout your gameplay! , The first thing you need to do is to find a tree.
   
   When you find one, press and hold the left mouse button (PC), press the left bumper button (Xbox) while facing the trunk, or simply tap the trunk with your finger (PE).
   
   You’ll see your character’s hand punching at the wood and leaving cracks on it.
   
   Continue punching until one block of wood pops off, and it automatically goes to your hotbar.
   
   You can keep punching trees until you feel like you have enough wood for later, but for now, this single block of wood is all you need to make your crafting table.
   
   Make it big enough to put enough rooms. , Press the “E” button (PC), the X button (Xbox), or the icon (PE) to view your inventory, and you’ll see, aside from several boxes where your items are stored in, there is also a set of four empty boxes arranged into a box formation, with an arrow pointing towards a single empty box.
   
   That is your initial crafting grid, where you can make various things.
   
   But seeing as it only has 4 slots in the grid, you can’t make anything complicated with it, which is why you need a crafting table., Place your wood on one of the slots by selecting it (clicking on it for the PC versions, scrolling to it with the RB and LB buttons on the Xbox, and tapping it in PE), and you’ll see that an item appears on the single box.
   
   It’s a plank, and one block of wood is worth 4 planks right off the bat.
   
   If you’ve got more wood, feel free to convert it all to planks, but for now, all you’ll be needing are 4 wood planks, Place one wood plank on each box of the four boxes in the crafting grid, and you’ll see another item on the rightmost box again.
   
   Take that item, and you now have a crafting table!, To use the crafting table, simply drag it to your hotbar, “hold” it by using your mouse’s scroll button or by pressing the corresponding number on its hotbar placement, place it on the ground by right-clicking while holding it, and then right-click it again.
   
   It will bring you to a window that has a 3x3 version of the crafting window in your inventory.,, Feel free to punch some more trees and turn some of those wood into planks! Around 3–5 pieces of wood would suffice, depending on how many of these you’ll be making., On the PC, all you need to do is right-click it.
   
   On the Xbox, press X.
   
   On PE, just tap it., Now, you’ll be needing some sticks, which you can make by crafting two planks placed vertically on the crafting window, and it will reward you with 4 sticks.
   
   You’ll be needing this to make the torches, pickaxes, and axes, which you will need to gather materials.
   
   At least 3 blocks worth of planks would suffice for the creation of many basic tools for your venture., Fill up the first row of the crafting table’s grid with planks—or cobblestone, if you managed to get those and want a better pickaxe—then put two sticks on the middle column.
   
   It should look like this in the grid:
   X = empty space m = material s = stick m m m X s X X s X The resulting item will appear in the single box at the side of the grid.
   
   Take that, and congratulations! Your first tool! , Making an axe is similar, but the third plank from the left is moved to the first block second row.
   
   It should look like this in the grid:
   X = empty space m = material s = stick m m X m s X X s X , To use your tools, simply place them on your hotbar, which can hold up to 9 items at a time.
   
   Hold the item you want to use the tool on by scrolling to it with the mouse scroll button or pressing the number corresponding to it in your keyboard (PC), using the left and/or right bumper buttons on your controller (Xbox), or tapping it with your finger (PE).
   
   Then use your tool by holding the left mouse (PC), holding down the left trigger button of your controller (Xbox), or tapping and holding it (PE)! You can use the axe to chop trees down faster and pickaxes to gather cobblestone by going to a gray block and hitting it with your pickaxe!, Now, in Minecraft, practically everything around you could be used to build a house! Most blocks can be stacked together and on top of each other to make your house, though some exceptions include sand, gravel, cacti, and regular ice blocks.
   
   If you’re aiming for the simplest house you can build, dirt blocks are efficient enough until you can gather more materials, like stone and wood, but a better (and nicer-looking) house normally has different materials., Having at least a full stack (64 is the maximum amount per stack) of each material you want to use is always a good idea, though more complex structures need more materials, depending on what kind of house you want.
   
   Blocks like wood, sand, dirt, gravel (a darker gray block with a rougher texture than stone) and clay (grayish blocks with a texture like sand sometimes found in bodies of water) can be gathered without tools, while harder materials like stone (pure gray “streaked” material) and ores (stone with colored speckles) need a pickaxe to gather, since just punching them or using other tools would just “break” the block and not give you any material.
   
   Gravel can be acquired underground or poking from hills and mountains.
   
   Dirt can be found everywhere in the world except the surface of the desert.
   
   Sand is dominantly found on deserts as a surface material.
   
   Clay can be found underwater.
   
   Wood can be found almost everywhere in the surface world.
   
   Stone-based and other “hard” material have to be mined with a pickaxe.
   
   They’re normally available underground or poking out of hills and mountains.
   
   Sometimes, they have different-colored materials dotting the surface.
   
   Those are ores, and when mined, they break up into smaller items you can’t place.
   
   Ores are essential for long-term survival.
   
   Coal (distinguishable by black speckling in stone) is the most common encounter when mining, but you’ll occasionally find Iron (pinkish orange) or rarer ores like Gold (bright yellow) and Diamond (bright cyan) if you’re extremely lucky or have dug deep enough.
   
   Most of the time, you’ll be spawning in places with trees nearby, and stone and dirt are always abundant if you dig down.
   
   Sometimes, though, you’ll be stuck in a desert with nothing but sand as your building material, which isn’t ideal because you can’t make a roof with sand since it’s affected by gravity (falls down when placed above ground).
   
   An easy way to remedy this problem is to go to your inventory, then place sand in all four boxes of the crafting grid to make sandstone! You can also encounter sandstone if you dig downwards, but you won’t be able to gather it without pickaxes.
   
   Clay is a bit of a troublesome material as well since it breaks up into items instead of blocks, but you can make clay blocks the same way you make sandstone blocks, and then smelt them in a furnace to make hardened clay blocks! Or you could smelt the clay items into bricks, and then create brick blocks the same way you make sandstone and clay blocks.
   
   You can tell if it’s a hard material if punching it doesn't immediately show “cracks” in the surface. , Certain blocks have to be made, however.
   
   Blocks like glass, bricks, and hardened clay need a furnace, and you can make one by using the crafting table and filling up all the squares in the grid but the centre square with cobblestone, and it requires wood or coal to use.
   
   To smelt things, you put the material you want converted, like sand or clay, on the top square, then put something flammable like wood or coal on the bottom square, and after a short wait, your item is converted to another! You can also smelt ore into other materials for later, too! , Now, one valuable material you can make whenever you want are torches, and for that you need coal and/or charcoal.
   
   Coal is somewhat easy to find, since it resembles stone with black spots on it, and when you gather it with a pickaxe, a piece of coal is dropped.
   
   Charcoal is also easy to make if you have a furnace and some wood.
   
   You simply smelt the wood, not planks but actual wood, and it turns into charcoal! Crafting torches is as simple as stacking a piece of coal over a stick on the crafting window, and you immediately get 4 torches.
   
   Which is good, since you’ll need as many of them as you can to light the way and ward off monsters! , At the absolute minimum, you’ll be needing about a 5x5 square of free space to build your house.
   
   This is to accommodate a bed, a chest, and a crafting table without running out of room to move, but you can build a bigger house if you feel like it or if you have enough resources.
   
   If you want to clear out an area, simply start punching the ground blocks in the nearby area until you have a flat space.
   
   You might need a pickaxe or axe if the area is rocky or full of trees.
   
   At the very beginning, it’s best to build your house near the spawn point, which is where you first appear once you make your world, and where you end up in whenever you die.
   
   This would provide you a steady shelter from whatever monsters lurk in the night, and a place to keep all your stuff. , Line out your house’s shape by laying down blocks, which can be done by selecting your desired material and pressing the right mouse button (PC), RT (Xbox), or tapping it, on where you think the house corners would be.
   
   It should preferably be different from the main material you plan on using.
   
   This is both to keep track of the size and shape of your building and to keep it looking nice.
   
   Lay out the outline of your house with your prefered main building material, but remember to keep one space open to serve as your door so you can go in and out.
   
   Build up the corner blocks by placing more blocks on top of the corner blocks until it’s at least 4 blocks tall.
   
   They’ll serve as the guide to how tall your house is, or even as a base for a second floor if you want. , A house needs walls, so slowly fill in the spaces between the pillars by building on the outline of the house, but take care to leave the door space at least two blocks high and to leave a small window now and then to let in light., A house also needs a roof, so fill in the top of the wall by placing blocks inwardly from the topmost blocks until the inside of your house is covered.
   
   Now if you don’t want a square-ish house, you can slope the roof a bit.
   
   The simplest way to do this, and the method that works best on a less-complicated house design is to line a row of blocks around the topmost block of the walls adjacent to your door, then stacking the blocks on both sides diagonally until they meet.
   
   Another way to create a nice roof is by crafting stairs! To craft stairs, you need your trusty crafting table.
   
   Starting from the left, fill the entire leftmost column with stone, wood, or brick.
   
   Fill the bottom row with the same material, and then place a block of the material on the middle block so it resembles a stair.
   
   X X m m X X X m m or m m X m m m m m m You’ll be rewarded with 4 stairs.
   
   You can then repeat the same process of stacking them diagonally on your house like in the blocky roof method, but if there is a single block of free space between them, make some slabs by lining a row with the same materials you made stairs from and use those to join the stairs.
   
   Make sure to line the bottom of your “roof” with the same material as your pillar, and fill the rest of the gap with the main building material! Out of the two methods for creating a roof, the “stairs method” is the most convincing and visually pleasing, but costs more time, materials, and effort. , Making a door is both nice-looking and useful, since it prevents monsters and other creatures from invading your little hideout when you keep it closed.
   
   Take six wood planks, and access your crafting table.
   
   Fill two columns on the crafting space and you’ll get three doors.
   
   Go up to the house opening and install the door by placing it on the open space you left on the wall so you can protect your privacy! , Beds are wonderful, soft things.
   
   The best part is that if you die, you just wake up beside it, though you drop all your stuff where you died and you’ll have to get it back.
   
   To make one, like the bottom row of your crafting table’s grid with planks, then the middle with wool, and take out your resulting bed! Now place it inside your house, and then at night or during random thunderstorms you can right-click it to sleep the danger away! Wool can be acquired by killing or shaving sheep.
   
   To kill sheep, keep punching a sheep or hitting it with your tool until it falls down.
   
   Killing yields 1 Wool.
   
   Shaving requires Shears, which can be acquired by smelting iron ore into iron ingots, then laying them diagonally in your inventory crafting grid or crafting table.
   
   Now select the Shears and go up to your sheep.
   
   In the PC version, you right-click it; on Xbox, you press LT; and on PE, you tap and hold.
   
   Shearing a sheep would leave you a bald-but-alive-sheep and 1–3 Wool. , Grass is nice, but not for indoors, so scoop out the first layer of dirt blocks on the inside of your house and replace them with any material you want.
   
   Remember, choosing a different material from your main building material, or choosing a different kind of wood if you’re using a certain kind of wood as your main building material, would add a dash of color and make your house look inviting., While you may have some holes punched on the walls for your windows, they’d look lovelier (and be safer) if you put some glass on them.
   
   Simply smelt some sand, which you can usually find near water or a desert, and place it on the holes.
   
   Be careful when placing them inside the window gaps, though, they break too easily, and you can’t gather the glass back if you place the block wrong!, Now, when it gets dark, you’d prefer some light, so putting some torches along the walls would definitely brighten up the space! The windows do a fair enough job during the daytime, but when night comes, the light keeps the monsters from appearing in your house, so better invest on torches!, A picket fence is also nice to look at, and adds a layer of protection from the monsters.
   
   Line two stacks of planks on the left and the right columns of your crafting table, and line two stacks of sticks on the middle column, take your fence, then place it around your house, but be sure to leave a gap you can go through! The recipe for PE and Xbox uses sticks and only sticks lining two rows of the crafting grid.
   
   Adding a fence gate makes it more secure, and the recipe is just the reverse of the fence itself: line the left and right column with two stacks of sticks each, then grab your brand-new fence gate and place it on the gap on your fence! Ta-da! A nice little picket fence with a sturdy gate! Now all you need to do is fill the house with goodies, furniture, and such.
   
   Experimenting with slabs, stairs, blocks, and fences are the way to go with this one, so run wild and feel free to create whatever you want!
2. 2

   Step 2: Get at least 4-5 stacks of wood.

3. 3

   Step 3: Open your inventory/crafting menu.

4. 4

   Step 4: Make planks.

5. 5

   Step 5: Use the planks to make a crafting table.

6. 6

   Step 6: Learn to use the crafting table.

7. 7

   Step 7: Make sure you have at least three wools in your inventory.

8. 8

   Step 8: Get more wood.

9. 9

   Step 9: Open the crafting table.

10. 10

    Step 10: Create sticks.

11. 11

    Step 11: Make a pickaxe.

12. 12

    Step 12: Create an axe.

13. 13

    Step 13: Learn to use your tools.

14. 14

    Step 14: Consider your house material.

15. 15

    Step 15: Gather the necessities.

16. 16

    Step 16: Make a furnace.

17. 17

    Step 17: Make your torches.

18. 18

    Step 18: Find a free space.

19. 19

    Step 19: Create an outline.

20. 20

    Step 20: Build up the walls.

21. 21

    Step 21: Add a roof.

22. 22

    Step 22: Make a door.

23. 23

    Step 23: Make a bed.

24. 24

    Step 24: Put in flooring.

25. 25

    Step 25: Put panes on your windows.

26. 26

    Step 26: Place torches for lighting.

27. 27

    Step 27: Surround the house with a picket fence.

Detailed Guide

About the Author