34 Creative Minecraft Builds for Update 1.21

What are some cool Minecraft build ideas? The sandbox game remains one of the best of all time over a decade on from its release, but such a long time in one game means you might be running out of ideas. We’ve been there: you’ve already built a city, a castle, or even a Wild West outpost, so what’s next?

Luckily, there are plenty of unique builds, farms, and creations out there to inspire your next Minecraft project. Unlike our favorite Minecraft house ideas or Minecraft castles, for example, this list is more varied, and contains plenty of inspiration. From a stylish Minecraft Nether Portal to automated farms, from massive decorative builds to homely aquariums, these ideas can be copied directly or simply used to inspire your future Minecraft builds.

Here are 34 of the best, unique Minecraft ideas to build next:

Gravel Pit

Gravel is one of the most useful blocks in Minecraft. It’s used in multiple crafting recipes, such as colored concrete, TNT, and course dirt. It’s one of those blocks, then, that you tend to need a lot of if you want to experience the most of Minecraft.

While you can get gravel anywhere, from the collecting it from the bottom of the ocean to obtaining it naturally while mining, the best place to source gravel in large quantities is gravelly hills biomes, where the blocks replaces most other blocks on the top layers of ground.

So, if you need to go and harvest lots of gravel but still wish to keep your Minecraft overworld looking pretty, why not build a gravel pit and digger on your nearest gravelly hills?

Tower

Of course, the first thing you think to build when starting a new Minecraft world is usually your base. You need a safe and good-looking house to come home to after a day of adventuring, and somewhere to keep your ever-growing inventory. When that’s done, though, why not build a nice watchtower to look over your base. You can keep some extra valuable items inside, safe from nearby creepers, and keep an eye out for any approaching pillager patrols from the top of your tower.

Minecraft pet shop

Now there are multiple wolf variants, just as there are cat variants, and a whole host of other passive Minecraft mobs, we can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t want a cute pet shop in your Minecraft world – especially if you play with friends.

We needed to look this one up recently for build inspiration on our Minecraft server, and were so inspired by these cute and easy shops by My Minecraft House that we needed to add them to this list. While there’s tons of Minecraft shop inspiration out there, and we already have market stalls on this list, we just love these pretty small shops, which you could make any color you like and build an entire street of them, in different shapes and sizes, even.

There are lots of options for XP farms, but the simplest is using a dungeon spawner in the overworld. It’s a fairly good rule as you’re exploring the caves that, if you find one, don’t destroy it, simply cover it in torches to prevent anything spawning from within. Then, when you’re ready, come back and turn it into a farm like this super simple cave spider farm from Shulkercraft that we used to build the one pictured above. Remember, though, that different mobs might require different builds, so have a look around for a tutorial that suits your spawner.

Bridge

A Minecraft bridge is perhaps one of the most varied things you can choose to build: from a giant, looming stone bridge between mountain sides to a small wooden bridge over a stream, there’s plenty of design ideas here. And, not only can they be beautiful additions to the area around your base, they’re also incredibly useful, allowing quick and safe passage over bodies of water or deathly falls.

There are so many Minecraft bridge designs that it’s hard to choose just one idea to place here for inspiration, but we narrowed it down to this small stone bridge from Spudetti. Not only is it gorgeous, but we think it’s the perfect inspiration for what you can do with stone, be it a small, pretty bridge like this, or that mammoth bridge to which we allude above – just picture this bridge on a bigger scale. Alternatively, keep it small and switch out some of those stone bricks and cobblestone for mossy variants for a more natural, aged look.

The above image of TheMythicalSausage’s cave entrance build is just one way to do this, and you build depends on the surrounding area, such as whether you mine down from a flat space or find a cave entrance in a mountain. When it comes to your own mine or cave entrance, the world is your oyster: you can make it look like a building like this image, terraform a natural looking mound, have a simple realistic mine entrance, or use a theme or color palette to build something up. But take this as your sign to do something with the space while you’re looking for new build ideas.

End Portal room

The spectacular build above was built by the creative Proof_Potential2956 on reddit entirely in survival mode, and it certainly gives us ideas. That said, we’re not sure we’ve the patience for this incredibly tough job. Presumably, the builder must have cleared out the Stronghold from around the portal before building this room, and we know from experience how much work those foggy glass floors take to build. Respect.

Fountain

If you’re anything like us, you’ve tried – and failed – to build a fountain in Minecraft multiple times. Whether you want one outside your home, in your local village, or near your magnificant large city builds, it often seems Minecraft water just has a mind of its own and it’s near impossible to build a fountain of any size.

Luckily, ItsMarloe is here to help with a handy guide to four different fountain designs, each getting bigger and more magnificent. From these simple designs, you can add your own details or change up the blocks and colors to make it your own.

The key to the perfect pond is in making it two or three blocks deep, replacing the floor with the perfect mix of stone and dirt, and decorating the area with natural blocks like mossy cobblestone, moss, and course dirt, and plants that match the surrounding area. Your pond also shouldn’t look like it’s man made, so try to make a natural-looking shape. Light the water with sea pickles, place some pretty lilypads on the surface of the water and rehome some tropical fish in your new pond and voila! The perfect garden accessory. The picture above is from a pond tutorial by Goldrobin on YouTube.

Garden

A Minecraft garden can be anything from just sprucing up some of the space outside your house to a huge public garden full of exotic plants and custom trees. Big or small, there are so many natural blocks and items you can use to flesh out a garden, and you can use every color imaginable or theme your garden to match the biome you’re in.

To get you started with some simple inspiration, BlueNerd showcases five different small garden designs in the video above, from a neutral desert garden, to a rustic wood garden, and even a modern white build with a bandstand.

Statue of Liberty

If you didn’t already know, America’s Statue of Liberty is the color it is because it was originally made from copper. Over the years, the copper color transformed into the oxidized state we see today. Given that the statue was built in the 1880s and oxidization had completed by the early 1900s, there are no images depicting its original color.

It might seem like an obvious choice, then, but building the Statue of Liberty is a great option for using up stacks of copper in Minecraft, as you can replicate this same oxidization effect in your own world, watching it change color over time.

There are multiple inspiring builds out there to look at, from mammoth realistic Lady Liberties to Minecraft-inspired mock-ups. Our favorite, though, has to be this villager-style statue built by Goldrobin. With the latest 1.21 update, there are even more copper blocks to decorate your build with, too, so you could place copper bulbs around the base, or stylize the surrounding area with industrial grates to for a New York feel. Goldrobin builds the statue in oxidized blocks right away, but if you want to watch it change color, make sure to use original copper blocks in yours. The prismarine blocks will look a little strange at first, so if you want full immersion, you could change them to copper grates or trapdoors following the addition of the new blocks.

Sandcastle base

Some of the best memories a lot of us have are of digging around in the sand on a sunny beach, attempting to build the most majestic sandcastle known to man. Well, why not try and recapture that feeling by building an authentic sandcastle base in Minecraft?

This isn’t like the majority of the more realistic Minecraft castles over on our separate guide, and this isn’t just a castle build of sand – though it is – Cr1ato’s Minecraft sandcastle tutorial captures the feeling of summer with the perfect recreation of a bucket-made beach masterpiece. The only problem is that it’s not very safe, but if you wanted to use this as a secure base, you could always add a redstone door.

If you want to bring your TTRPG world to live in Minecraft, or you’re building a medieval town, neither would be complete without a tavern in which to sit back and relax with a flagon of ale. We love this top-heavy tavern from Junopii and Shovel241builds, and while you can use this image for inspiration, the blueprint is available on Junopii’s Patreon to help you build an exact replica. 

Factory

This cool factory build from MrMarkCrafter on YouTube gave us an idea – what better place to hide away all your ugly redstone contraptions than in a working Minecraft factory! Want to build an automated concrete farm, lava farm, and chicken farm? Why not put them all under one roof! Redstone machines can be pretty noisy, too, so you could build your factory fairly far from your home, set yourself up with a Nether or railcart transportation system, and live in peace.

The video above isn’t a tutorial and you can only watch Mark build most of the factory in a timelapse, but it certainly serves as inspiration, and decent Minecraft builders could probably use it as a starting point.

Animal Barn

If you are tired of using a using a boring fence to keep your animals penned in, there are plenty of unique and colorful ways to make your animal farms looks a little more interesting. One of the best, and most appropriate, is a classic farm-style barn. We love this huge, red-and-white one from Goldrobin on YouTube, complete with an easy-to-follow tutorial.

If you’re good at building and don’t need to follow the tutorial to the tee, you can make this barn as big or small as you need it, and you could even add more sections to the outside – like the stables – to expand your livestock capacity. From there, you could even build a huge range base to fit the theme.

Improve your local Minecraft village with some cute market stalls for your villagers to work from! This adorable little flower stall was built by YouTuber Umibogaming, with a farmer villager inside selling their wares. With a lot of villagers and market stalls, you could have any trade you possibly want. Until now, we’ve usually done this in the form of terrifying and very inhumane villager trading halls, but we’re thinking market stalls might be nicer – both on the eyes and for the villagers themselves.

Villager Trading Hall

Speaking of terrifying villager trading halls, you might prefer something dark and gloomy to the colorful market stalls above, so we’re covering that, too. In the video above, MythicalSausage builds four trading hall styles to inspire your own, but we personally love the dark, Nether-themed room. You can always use these as a base for your own palettes and designs though – perhaps an Ancient city or Trial Chamber-inspired hall – and remember you can make them as spacious or claustrophobic for your villagers as you deem fit.

We immediately fell in love with this awesome haunted mansion built by redditor YouIndependent, and we think it works perfectly with the build idea below, so we’d love to combine the two ideas. We’ve lightened the image for the sake of visibility, but the real thing is suitably dark and spooky, exactly as you’d expect from this sort of Resident Evil-esque mansion. What makes this stunning mansion even more creepy, is those custom paintings – just look at that eye in the top right of the image! That said, you could try and build your own terrifying mansion without such details if you wanted something simpler.

Library

There are librarians, there are interactive bookshelves, and there are even naturally spawning libraries inside Strongholds, so it should seem like an obvious idea to try building a stunning Minecraft library if you’re looking for a new idea.

OK, it might not be the most useful build, but it is more so since Redstone bookshelves were introduced in Minecraft 1.20. Just think of all the traps doors and secrets your library could hold. We also think it would be the perfect place to house your Minecraft enchantment table, and could be a simple addition to your base, even if it’s not as big as the one above.

Love This Blocks is one of those people, and we just love this gorgeous, warm bedroom interior, which seems to be inspired by a small, modest, medieval house, but would look equally as good in a cabin in the woods or a small stone cottage. From the unique steps into the room to the shelves lining the walls, and the warm stone hearth to the terracotta blocks as a rug, we love the details in this room. Love These Blocks’ design could be used as inspiration for a bedroom of any size, or even another room in the house if you take out the bed and replace it with a couch, your brewing room, or even just storage.

The Fox Lodge

If you aren’t sure what sort of base you want to build, why not build one inspired by your favorite Minecraft mob! This Fox base, inspired by the Fox Lodge Minecraft Lego set, is completely adorable from the outside, and spacious and useful from the inside. The simple build tutorial by ManDooMiN on YouTube includes the full interior, which is helpful if you’re as useless as we are at kitting out your Minecraft base. If you want to make it truly yours, why not make it white like the arctic fox, or try building a similar base inspired by the Minecraft Armadillo or even a Minecraft Ender Dragon to scare off enemies.

This one’s a big undertaking if you want to try it yourself, but we couldn’t not share this stunning build after it left us speechless. This incredible Minecraft village in the trees comes from Slooter2 on reddit, and the image above is the best to give you an idea of what you’re looking at, but it doesn’t do justice to the village itself, so we recommend checking out the other screenshots by following the link above to the original reddit post. In short, though, Slooter2 has built this gigantic custom tree to house an entire village on multiple branches and levels, with a majestic view of the world below.

Cool Nether Portal

Turn your Nether portal into the centerpiece of your base by giving it a unique design – in this case, a massive sword lodged into the ground. This design also includes the other half of the sword in the Nether to give the effect that it’s being pierced through the ground. You’ll need almost 60 obsidian for this build among other things, but the design more than justifies its crafting cost.

Easy, automated cow farm

Hunting for food can be a time consuming process, but you can completely eliminate this chore by setting up a cow farm with a built-in lava cooker. Look, we never said this was going to be the most humane farm you’ve ever seen, but it sure is efficient. The general idea is that the adult cows breed at the top of the farm, creating new cows which fall to the bottom of the structure. These cows are then pushed into lava, cooking them instantly. The cooked food is sent directly into the chest located below, giving you access to cooked meat whenever you need it.

Automated Villager wheat farm

If you want to sleep well at night and would rather use a farming method that doesn’t harm any animals, you could set up a wheat farm. Creating a wheat farm does require quite a bit more effort than the cow farm, but once you’ve finished you won’t ever have to make changes to it. The wheat farm runs automatically thanks to the Minecraft villager who works tirelessly to ensure you always have wheat in your chests.

Burj Khalifa

When it comes to Minecraft builds, there are pretty much no limits, especially since the world height was increased in Minecraft Caves and Cliffs. Well, Minecraft YouTuber DeltaFlame did just about the most impressive thing you could think to do with the new world height, and built a replica of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. Whether or not you want to go to this much trouble yourself, it’s a very impressive build to watch come to life, and is the perfect inspiration for replicating any real-world building or monument.

Minecart railway and station

Looking for a new way to travel throughout your Minecraft world? Create an underground minecart rail station in each of your settlements instead of having to trek everywhere. This can be incredibly useful when mining for resources as you always have a minecart nearby to take you back to any of your homes.

Pyramid

Ever wondered how some large-scale Minecraft monuments are built? Here’s a time-lapse of a pyramid being built using Minecraft WorldEdit, one of the best Minecraft mods designed to make building massive structures much easier compared to doing everything by hand. This pyramid build took FallenQbuilds just under 18 hours to complete, though we imagine it’ll take a newcomer much longer to build something like this.

Minecraft Aquarium

You know what they say: there’s nothing classier than having your own custom aquarium. Create your own aquarium inside your home, or go all out and build a dedicated aquarium within your base. Take your build to another level by using Minecraft mods to add even more fish including the Minecraft Axolotl. A custom aquarium is a great way to add color to your home in a natural way. Sure, you could just use flowers like everyone else, but where’s the fun in that?

Underwater Base

If you’ve built every type of base you can think of on land, why not go for an underwater home? An underwater build is perfect for players who want a relaxing area to zone out in after a hard day. A secret advantage of an underwater home in survival mode is that it’s arguably safer than having a home on land – you won’t have to worry about any stray creepers lurking in the darkness. This build does look a lot nicer if you use Minecraft shaders to make the water clear, but it isn’t essential.

Secret pirate cove

Have you ever discovered a small air pocket while exploring underwater? You can use this space to create a secret pirate cove hidden away below the depths. These areas are surprisingly large inside, but be careful when chipping away at the walls as you may accidentally break into the surrounding water. As long as you avoid any sudden leakages, you should have a permanent underwater base to surprise your friends with. This could be a great way to start an experimental run where you do things you’ve never thought about trying.

There’s no doubt you’ve lived in a regular house, but have you ever thought about living inside the corpse of a giant serpent? Though Minecraft mobs aren’t anywhere near as big as this serpent is, the idea of taking shelter within the bones of a giant creature sounds perfect in a survival game. If your building skills are up to it, you could also take a similar approach with mythical creatures like dragons.

Hopefully these creative Minecraft ideas have given you enough inspiration for your next world. Sometimes, all you need to inspire your next build is a beautiful site though, so check out our Minecraft seeds guide if you’re still struggling for ideas. There are a few farms in the guide which have been made to be efficient, but if you’re looking for something more traditional, check out our Minecraft farm guide instead for plenty more inspiration.

Additional contributions by Christian Vaz.