As a building game, Minecraft incentivizes the construction of sprawling and impressive houses, where players can stress test their building material reserves with new room after new room. However, once the final block of a building’s structure has been laid, even the most masterful of architects often struggle to find anything to fill these rooms with, save for maybe a few torches and some chests.
While it can be difficult to accomplish, the game’s building mechanics can allow for a highly detailed interior build whose complexity rivals that of the building’s exterior facade. All that fancy interior decor requires is some slightly more complex woodwork and imagination.
Room shapes: Corners and edges
Minecraft’s art style is very simplistic, owing to its usage of minimalist 16-cubic-pixel blocks in almost every conceivable structure. In practice, building walls and ceilings out of these blocks results in the final product looking very flat and uninteresting.
When it comes to building more interesting rooms, angles are a builder’s best friend. Devising structures that accentuate a block type’s sharp corners can work to add visual depth to an otherwise bland corner of a room.
For example, roofs can be tapered toward the ground using sequentially lowered slab blocks, providing them a lean-to-like, cozy quality. Stair blocks, as jagged as they appear, can serve well when detailing corners, such as in locations where pillars meet the ceiling, or where inward alcoves would provide depth to a wall.
Related: The 8 Best Minecraft Bedroom Ideas, Designs and Builds
Furniture: Form over function
If there is anything that Minecraft’s extensive block catalog is lacking, it’s functional or aesthetically-pleasing furniture pieces to fill up a player’s big, predominantly empty house. Some players may attempt to remedy this situation with a bit of creativity, fashioning chairs out of stairs and constructing tables with extended pistons.
However, creativity has its limits, especially where the shapes and appearances of some blocks become more unique. While most of Minecraft’s blocks serve an overt utilitarian purpose, many players will struggle to repurpose and pass trap doors off as seating arrangements, or incorporate furnaces and anvils into a kitchen setup.
What’s most important to realize when freestyling furniture is that, outside of the limited number of interactable blocks, such as crafting tables, very few indoor structures will see active use by players. Simply put, Minecraft furniture is more likely to be seen than used for its intended purpose, so making a “couch” or a “chimney” look believable takes priority over its functionality.
