How to Build Circles and Spheres in Minecraft - For Dummies

In a world where everything consists of squares and cubes, creating anything that’s perfectly round in your Minecraft world is impossible. But if you have your heart set on circles or spheres, there’s have a trick: You can come close by stacking blocks.

Constructing a circle

Building a circle relies on techniques similar to those used when building with slanted lines — you make both with small segments of blocks.

To build a circle like this one, follow these steps:

1. Construct the longest line segment.

   It should be, at most, 1/3 the length of the circle’s diameter.

2. Construct a shorter line segment just behind the first one.

3. Continue making shorter lines, with the difference being smaller and smaller each time.

   This step composes the arc at the top of the circle.

4. Turn around and repeat.

   When you estimate a circle in Minecraft, it should have 4-way symmetry: Whether you’re looking north, south, east, or west, the circle should look the same. Thus, the process of constructing each side of the circle is exactly the same.

5. Fix any lopsidedness.

   If a segment looks too long, destroy a block at the end and extend the adjacent segment to fill the gap. If a segment looks too short, just do the same thing in reverse.

Even though you can’t get a truly round circle, any rounded room tends to have the same effect.

Constructing a sphere

Spheres are much trickier to build than circles — it’s a lot more difficult to estimate a three-dimensional rounded object than a flat one. However, there’s a clever way you can build a sphere:

1. Build a flat circle whose diameter is the same as your sphere’s diameter.

   This is the ring that will go around the middle of your sphere.

2. Build two more circles in the same way, except that these circles are vertical (with their diameter perpendicular to the ground) and surround the sphere lengthwise and widthwise.

   The result should be a cluster of three rings, each of which intersects the others twice.

3. Fill out the sphere by building extra circles parallel to the first one, using the second and third circles as guides.

Spheres can be used for all sorts of things — dome-shaped roofs, balloons, and blimps are just a few. Three-dimensional rounded objects are useful for making structures smoother and more elegant.