What a Swiss Village can teach us about Building in Minecraft
An analysis by LimeeFox
An analysis by LimeeFox
Greetings everyone! I’ve wanted to make a post like this for a while now, and this summer has given me the perfect chance to do so following my recent trip to Graubünden, which is one of the 26 cantons (“states”) of Switzerland.
Introduction
Let’s briefly talk about the canton itself first. Graubünden is the biggest region in Switzerland, and the entirety of it’s surface is consisted of pure mountains - the Alps. Yet, it is the canton with the smallest population in Switzlerand, housing approximately 200’000 people. It’s also the only canton where you can find the 4th (and most forgotten) national language - Romansh. Fewer than 30’000 people speak it, and even so, it has countless dialects which literally vary from valley to valley. One could almost safely say that practically every single village has their own version of that language.
The character preservation, strong architectural identity and historical integrity are part of the region’s most important values. This is precisely why we are going to explore this canton, in particular the village of Zuoz in Engadin, through pictures I took myself.
Analysis
Let’s start by looking at the bigger things, and work down to tiny details the further we go.
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The importance of scenery. In Switzerland, the laws that regard building new buildings are very strict. For example, you can’t build tall buildings to not obstruct the views. There are also very strict rules on how the building will look. It has to blend in with the rest of the houses. Often, villages are divided in multiple areas which have their own set of rules applying to them. Often, the “old town” is practically untouchable and the best thing that can be done is renovating a building. |
Every street, especially in the “old town” area, has a cobblestone floor. Sometimes, large bricks would be acceptable as-well. It is something that is very important for the identity of the village.
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Of course, nature has a very important role to play in a village’s atmosphere. Beside wild trees, bushes grasses and flowers (of various kinds, ages and sizes), it is also almost a MUST to have your own garden, especially in locations with lower population density. Gardens should mostly be used to grow food, but a little bit of beauty can also subscribe to them. |
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Building varieties
When I started the project of Bree together with @lew_yam11 over 4 years ago, we underestimated the impact of a larger variety of buildings, than just 1 or 2. You will see through my photos, that every building is very much unique and does not exactly repeat. Do not get me wrong, repetition is something that actually greatly facilitates building new houses - you wouldn’t want to reinvent the wheel every time you wanted to build a bicycle - but when your goal is to build a place with a fantastic atmosphere and deep character, filled with cultural background and especially history, you need to think about the evolution of the buildings through time.
For example, repurposed buildings, buildings for which you add extensions, expanded buildings, revamped buildings (which happens to literally every building at-least once in some point in time, unless its to be destroyed).
An even stronger argument for bringing variety into the architecture, is thinking about the functions of those buildings. A shop in the town center won’t have the same look as a shed on the border. Buildings with multiple families living inside of them will not look the same as some farmer’s house. Public buildings will also have their own look, often with ornaments or additional decoration or extensions if it’s a cultural building (town hall, hospital, market, etc…). Of course, those additional decorations would have meaning behind them, usually symbolism or representing history or cultural values. This could be a fresco, statue(s), paintings on the exterior, sculpted patterns, inscriptions, paint, etc…
Let’s explore the different house shapes that can help inspire you to build different kinds of facades.
This is the old prison. It’s standing right in the middle of the old town, and as you can see it has a big fresco. It contains three sigils and words in Latin, that read as “Be equal and therefore live in harmony, for beauty, song, love, and age have united you”. It looks grim and strong, and certainly of the mightier building types. It looks stark. The building has been repurposed now to serve as a bar, in the basement. Please, take your time to observe all of the additional extensions to the right side. It is important that you remember to decorate your own builds with such extensions. |
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Here’s a building containing two shops, on the main steet. As a shop, you most definitely want to display your goods to attract people. If you’re running a shop, your building better look inviting. Who would want to go shopping in an ugly, sketchy looking building? The wealthier the products, the more special it should look. Upstairs, it’s the living space for locals. Access to those can either exist from the shops or from a completely different entrance. |
Granaries, warehouses and storage
Let us now take a look at a set of buildings which together form, in my opinion, the highlight of the town. Barns, granaries and storage houses. You will most definitely agree that they look entirely differently. They are made with wood, a much cheaper material than stone. And they are also not as ornamented or as well decorated. After all, you don’t live in a shed, do you. Barns need to be functional. You will notice on a couple of them that there are massive doors that can open there, and something that isn’t really visible in my photos are the tools used to get stuff inside. Cranes. There are all sorts of different cranes that can be used. The most common ones here would be simple ropes attached to a pulley on a stick fixed to the ceiling and a hook at the bottom, lifting up nets filled with goods.
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Please do take a good moment and spend some time on each of these pictures. Try to understand how it’s built, what it had gone through and try to feel the different scales and sizes. The one on the right, for example, is absolutely massive. The door at the bottom is 2 meters high, so picture how enormous the massive wooden panel is. The best part? It’s actually openable. Perhaps not this exact one, but further in this town I saw an identical building, with identical sizes, and that one did have the massive doors opened.
The one on the left, has a particularly interesting architecture. Oftentimes, many of the advanced Minecraft builders think that a beautiful and realistic building is a flawless one; a building where everything is well calculated, one that has no mistakes nor imperfections. But it is far from always being the case in real life. This building is a perfect example of something unique that would make @the_pharaohs_cat eat his cat from rage! Open the picture and zoom in on the left wall. Can you see it? Unfortunately I didn’t take a second picture, but those of you who have good eyes will see how weird the stone base looks, almost imitating the shape of an upside-down letter T (or teewee as we say in Tetris). Even so, the wall is not straight at all and changes direction three times. The wood, old and weighted, is all over the place on that one.
We will come back later to “weird-shaped” buildings and we will see in detail how those very shapes are actually the core of what provides charm in such unique locations and how it adds character. For now, let’s return to sheds, granaries, barns and warehouses.
In the middle, we have a really big warehouse. The wooden doors do open. You can also see that there’s a basement, thanks to the windows on the floor. Another thing worth noticing is the different materials used for the walls (you can see a clear separation/different colours going all the way across the building right in the middle) and the roof. You can tell it went through renovations, but maybe not uniformly everywhere. Something else I’d like to point out is, again, the not-so-straight walls, which is most outstanding on the left side of the building. Can you see it? If you can’t try to analyse what’s happening below the roof.
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In this photo, we can see how the warehouse on the right side is perfectly married to the living house on its left (and right above it too!), As before, the massive doors do open. In the photo, you might see hints that this storage room had been repurposed into living quarters, which is now the case for many buildings of this village. That’s mostly the contemporary solution to the housing demands, though. In Switzerland it is extremely difficult to build new houses, both due to very strict laws but also due to cosmic prices and expenses. |
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On the left, you can see how storage buildings are sometimes connected with residential buildings. Notice how the entrance includes a roofed promenade.
In the middle, I apologize for the angle of the photo as it effectively misguides us regarding the intuition for its scale. It’s in reality a really large warehouse/granary that we’re seeing. Don’t forget to include trees and vegetation into your own builds 
On the leftmost picture, you can see how a half residential half storage building has been repurposed into a restaurant. This could happen even in the days of old. You should not limit yourself to thinking that repurposing buildings is a contemporary idea, because it is not. Pay attention to the irregularity of the building. Can you see how the portion with windows suddenly stands out? The walls are not straight, yet again.
Let’s take a look at another building. On the left, you can see a huge entryway to another storage. It is far smaller than in the huge granaries and warehouses we’ve seen earlier, but it’s still something. We will come back later to this picture to analyse its character and the different elements that allow it to stand out as a unique cute little house. |
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The importance of Oddities
This is the most important part of this article. As I said earlier, in Minecraft, most people do their best to avoid those mistakes, but oftentimes it takes away a bit of character from their buildings. Sometimes they’re not intentional, for example a crooked roof or a wavy wall. Sometimes it’s because of ‘no care’, when windows don’t align for example. Other times, it’s intentional. For example in the picture above, you can spot a window carved right inside of the corner of the building. It was probably made out of necessity. Or who knows, perhaps it was due to a miscalculation when they were building the storage building, and the wall happened to be built in the wrong place? It is up to you to make irregularities explainable.
Let’s take a moment to analyse one particular residential building, from two angles. It is perhaps one of my favourites.
This building houses multiple families. Allow me to show you around. First, starting from the right, You can see that this part of the building has three floors, with one window on each and a particularly large window on the third floor. It is off-center. It is actually quite useful for interior design, as it serves no purpose to end up with little space on either side of a large window had it been placed in the middle. Think of it as a train wagon - there’s a reason why the corridor is on the side and not in the middle. You need to give some space to the rooms.
Notice as-well how on the left surface of house, the wall has transitioned to wooden planks (right where the balcony is). The balcony too, has a unique shape, since it continues by turning 90 degrees right into the left side building. At that point of the balcony, we’ve merged the building extension that we began with into the larger building, and the wall turned back to stone/plaster there. That building also gained an additional storey. Right below, you can see a different kind of extension. A two-floor section made out of stone on the first floor and wood on the second one.
The time has come to move on to the most interesting part of this building: the left wing. There is a lot to be said about, I think you could already tell that right off the start.
Begin by trying to picture this part of the building without any wood. The shape is already odd. The wall is completely crooked and there is a weird ‘overhang’ on two sides of this buidling extension. Even vertically, the walls are not straight. The windows are all over the place. Now, in your little imagination bubble that I made you create, put all of the wooden parts back (just simply look at the picture). Can you see how peculiar the roof is? It stands not at the edge of the walls on their top, but it is more retracted - it’s base starts on the inner part of the building. There is some sort of a platform all the way across the top tip of the walls. But at the same time, the roof itself extends light years away from the walls. It’s very extensive. You could be standing five miles beside the building and still be covered from rain.
Obviously, I’m just kidding, but it still stands out a lot. Another funny detail to notice is how the roof and the walls are not aligned at all. You can tell this by taking a closer look at the left side of the building.
Let’s view it from a different angle.
This is the same building, just further up the street on the left. First of al, you can see that it was built on and angled slope, so the first floor that we’ve seen earlier vanishes into the ground, and the second floor becomes the first one. We can see that the staircase leading up to the doorway also blends into the slope on the left side.
Repeating what we’ve already noticed, windows all over the place with different shapes and sizes, different sections of the same building, curvy walls, a particular extension overhang on the right, and so on… Something that we haven’t seen in the previous picture as well as in this one, is the roof of the extension on the left. Notice how it’s only 1 slope, and not something symmetrical.
But going back to the crooked walls, I think here we can see that even better, with the roof clearly not aligning with the rest of the house. It’s on its own. Can you explain why? Was it by design? was it because the roof got renovated later on, in more modern and more calculated times?
Try to ask yourself the questions of why some of the building decisions that were made here, were made. Why are the walls all curvy? why are the windows like that? Why is the roof so irregular? When was each extension added to the main building? Why were they added? How did they blend them in and how did they make it all work together (surely, you need to demolish or restructure a portion of the building if you want to extend it?).
Clearly, this building has a lot of history to it, and that’s exactly how you give character to a building. When you’re building in Minecraft, you need to stimulate, imitate what your building would have gone through, throughout the years of its existence. Try to think about problems that could arise with the building at some point in time after it’s first construction, and try to think how the people living there would attempt to solve these problems. For example, you could assume that your building had a leaky roof by design, you you go through certain roof renovations. Or imagine the fictional designers of your building didn’t account for moisture, so some of the structure beams of your building begin to rot, especially inside of the ground (more so than on the outside), so the building begins to fall into the ground. It wouldn’t do that uniformly, because of a million factors such as weight distribution or different soils around the building, etc… so in some places it would fall in more than in other places. A result of such problems could be that the walls begin to hang over and obtain a curvy shape, the roof subsequently would be all crooked as well.
What if your building had a tree fall on it a long time ago, and after cleanup the family doesn’t necessarily have the means to repair it? You would have a damaged building with temporary fixes (or no fixes at all). This could have been going on for generations! With time, the damaged parts would deteriorate and your buildings could become worse.
What if your family, on the contrary, became a bit wealthier or more populous? They could now be thinking about improving their house, decorating it or adding extensions. Adding extensions could also be a result of a housing matter in the town, if for example the space was becoming sparse. In that case, perhaps the way the extension is built would be different. If it’s a different family, you wouldn’t necessarily want to join the houses in their interior, but the outside space available obliges you to build it adjacent/against another house.
Behold, another irregular house. One could almost think that everything is going alright until we see the left side corner. The roof is completely straight, but the wall is not. Why did they build it like this? Was it always like that? Either way, I think it is very cute. See also how the entryway works with the slope. |
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Look closely at this one. It doesn’t immediately jump straight to the eyes, but even though the front seems mostly neat, open this picture and zoom in on the alleyway. Can you see what’s going on? I recommend having a few of your Minecraft builds integrating this idea. |
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Above, you can see three pictures of the same building (the every time more and more zoomed out). In our Build Team on EpicQuestz, we usually make Builders redo their work if we see something like this: the ‘sinking’ door. But in reality, this is quite realistic because clearly, there are many cases in real life where doors are shifted below the street level (for whatever reason). You can clearly see that the door lower door and the higher one are not aligned horizontally, so their floors are on different heights. This is actually very useful for interior design, because that’s how you can create something very unique and fantastic looking (as long as you’re being creative).
Another thing you should have noticed is that the walls are, once again, curved. It is mostly visible on the right hand side picture, when you look at the section between the roof and the walls. As I’ve previously said, think about doing this in your own builds!
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Here is another example of a doorway going downwards. For those of you with the eyes of a hawk, I’m inviting you to skim through the wall behind the balcony. Can you see the overhang? The house is extended for whatever reason in that part. This is another oddity that plays a crucial role in the building’s character. |
Let me give you another source of inspiration for unique entryways that you most definitely should integrate into your Minecraft builds. Staircases up to the living space and a basement door right below. Notice how it is below the street height, again. |
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Other character-giving characteristics
Finally, let’s simply talk about some of the elements you should consider adding to your builds to make it feel a lot cozier, natural, unique and that help improve the atmosphere.
Look at how this house is clearly separated into two, with the difference between the colours of the walls right in the middle. Separating a house into two with a clear visual difference actually happens very often. It sometimes depends on the local laws; certain jurisdictions force you to make the houses uniform, to preserve cohesion in the environment. Other places have more flexible laws, and don’t restrict how much you can change your part of a building.
Look also how the windows are all over the place. Observe thre doorways, each on a completely different ground level. Despite all the irregularities, this house is beautiful.
What I wanted for you to take away, beside the oddities to be added that we’ve covered in the previous section, is a principle to hint separation between two entities. The colours of the walls, the colours of the shutters. One side has many flowers that are used for decoration, the other one has none. The window frames are ornamented, on one side, and they’re plain on the other. Many little details like that add up to form an important sum that helps bring so much character and background to your builds.
Here’s another picture that gives you some good ideas. Pay attention to how the doorway is built, to the different components that form this door (the unique door frame, the little windows beside and above, the door itself, the little flower pot, another little decoration to the right, etc…)
Notice the bench right outside, for sitting. Take a look at the tiny flowers/stars that decorate the walls. Don’t forget to take good note of the window disposition, their different sizes. There’s even a circle window at the top, something that quite likely to find on other buildings (such as one of the earlier photos showcased in this article). Watch how the balcony is built. It’s roofed, and the wood is beautiful. You can even take this design right as it is shown and build it in your Minecraft village or town.
This building might seem very regular, but in reality this one too has some traits of uniqueness. Beside the obvious windows, flowers, doors and the balcony on the left side, shift your focus to the shadowed side of this building. Can you see now, that it has a little smoothened overhang? It even has a little balcony. |
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A photo that we have already seen for storage, let’s slide back to the center and the left side. The house includes an extension with a beautiful terrace with pillars, that can be accessed via stairs to the right. Below, another gateway into what is likely a basement. The walls here, too, are not straight. They are curved. |
Look at how fantastic this building looks. There is a stone base that is complete by wooden planks up to the roof. On the right side of this building, you can see a unique extended overhang with more wooden logs above it. The door on the left side of this building has a tiny ramp that leads up to it, with a stone wall morphed into a bench on the right side, protecting you from falling down to the ramp that goes to the basement. The basement doesn’t have to be a dark place, it can also be a workshop with windows. The building on the right is very simple and yet it’s very beautiful. You don’t always need to ornament your houses with a million different blocks and pillars. We’ve seen that ‘pillars every 3 blocks’ aren’t really common at all, and are mostly a Minecraft construct for people who haven’t mastered “The Flat” facades yet.
I cannot emphasize this enough, but do not be afraid to embrace steep streets! Example below.
As we’re slowly approaching the end of this article, let’s look at more miscellaneous elements that you should consider adding to your Minecraft builds.
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How often have you had a walk in a medieval Europpean city and couldn’t help but notice archways like this? This is a really tiny detail, but very much forgotten in our Minecraft builds. You should definitely add more of them, especially in the narrower streets! |
Another thing I really loved about Zuoz, were the fences. This is a very cool fence design that you should consider using. Give it a try! |
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Well, that’s all of the pictures I’ve taken. There is of course a lot more that could be covered, but I think this is plenty already. With this analysis in mind, you should be ready to improve your builds and make them feel more realistic!
We’re in a sandbox game, so still try to have some control over the regularity of your houses. Don’t neglect a mistake you’ve made just because of this post. But also don’t make your builds too perfect (unless it’s a palace)!
If this analysis was useful for you, please do leave a like because that will help me understand if I did a good job or not. Do say in the replies section below this post if you have something to add to this, would like to clarify something or if you want to share your own experience. I would be happy to discuss this with you!
If this post gets 10 likes, I’ll write another one in the future, on a completely different place!