7 best tips to make your Minecraft base look better

One of the most important aspects of Minecraft is building. In creative mode, players have unlimited resources to create whatever they can fathom, while survival sees players building bases to carve safe areas out of otherwise hostile worlds. Players will spend most of their time in or around their main base, so making one that looks good is a surprisingly important part of the game.

Detailed below are seven amazing tips for players wanting to spice up their base designs, along with what makes these elements so important to building.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and rely solely on the writer's opinion

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7 of the best tips for making a Minecraft base look better

1) Avoid flat surfaces

I covered my village in a DOME byu/hi-im-z inMinecraft

One of the biggest mistakes a new builder can potentially make is leaving huge flat areas within large-scale builds. Having large areas of the same block, especially if that area also doesn't have any variation in depth, will quickly start to look bland and uninteresting. Adding slopes, curves, Minecraft archways, or domes to walls can help break up this monotony.

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2) Avoid building boxy bases

While easy to build, squared-off bases look very bland (Image via Mojang)

The game's entire aesthetic is based on squares and cubes. The world is made up of blocks, with even the textures being made of perfectly square pixels. That's what makes a basic cube base so conceptually boring. They're inarguably effective, especially early on in the game, but there's only so much players can do to personalize and enhance such a base.

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3) Add detailing and depth

I’ve been trying super hard to get better at building! What do you think? byu/General______Kenobi inMinecraft

Unfortunately, the previously mentioned flat surfaces are impossible to avoid entirely in Minecraft. Thankfully, the game has many smaller decorative blocks and items that can be used to make these otherwise uninteresting stretches visually appealing. Some of these include buttons, fences, and trapdoors, which can add a nice rustic touch to wooden builds.

These details and decorations also introduce a bit of depth, which further helps break up these flat areas. This can be accentuated even more with items like fences, glass, or end rods that don't take up full blocks, which add even more depth.

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4) Build with what looks good instead of what's common

A great way to make builds look better is to use rare, and aesthetically interesting blocks (Image via Mojang)

When looking through a Minecraft storage system for materials to start a new project, it can be tempting to use the most abundant blocks. However, these materials tend to be the same across worlds, which can lead to boring and repetitive building.

A better method to discovering materials is to load up a Minecraft creative mode world and look through the inventory to find blocks. This should help players expand their block palettes since more rare and interesting-looking items can be used. The adventures to collect these materials should also lead to quite a fun time.

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5) Terraform the surrounding area

Just started terraforming my survival world in preparation of building a mountain town byu/silkydangler inMinecraft

One of the most important aspects of a survival base is the area that immediately surrounds it. It doesn't matter how good a build is if it looks out of place when compared to its environment. Having too detailed a build next to the terrain generated by a vanilla Minecraft seed can end up making the creation look worse due to the clashing design philosophies.

This can be avoided by terraforming the area around the base. Replacing Minecraft's bland vanilla trees with ones of a custom design while also rounding out and enhancing the visuals of the terrain itself will go a long way in making a build look like it belongs in the world.

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6) Add gradients

Even simple gradients can bring a lot to builds (Image via Mojang)

Sometimes a wall just needs to be flat to fit in a certain spot or to allow for a certain functionality. However, there are ways to make even mostly flat portions of a wall look better. This can be done by adding gradients.

These areas take advantage of blocks of very similar colors to create a sort of shading. This gives builds the illusion of depth, and the mixed textures do wonders for adding elements of visual interest.

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7) Hide light sources

Moss carpets are an amazing way to hide torches just under the surface (Image via Mojang)

Light is one of the most important aspects of any Minecraft survival base. On the obvious side, you will need torches to see while doing day-to-day tasks, but they also stop hostile mobs from being able to spawn. That said, torches in the game are not very pretty.

Thankfully, Mojang has introduced a few different ways to get around just how ugly torches are. The first, and easier option, is to replace these items with other light sources. For example, lanterns look much better in medieval Minecraft builds than torches do. Alternatively, players can hide torches underneath partial blocks, like moss carpet to disguise them within the terrain.