Home Building in Minecraft- Part 3, Treetop Building- Article 3

How you use the trees around and in your treetop home is also an important consideration.  Basically speaking, building in trees can take three forms.

The fastest form is building your structure on top of the tops of the trees without altering them.  This can be really difficult, though.  Trees are rarely flat on the top, and so you wind up dealing with a lot of strangely rising and falling floors.  The gaps between trees will need to be filled in pretty carefully, and it becomes difficult to separate your living space out into nice rooms.  To a point you can alleviate this by chopping down and rebuilding trees, but that only becomes fully possible once you’ve got shears- and if you’re building your treetop home right away, you’re simply not going to have the iron to hand to do that.  It also tends to be less secure- unevenly shaped walls and fences at the edges of your home will make falling off or accidental breakage a lot more frequent, and that can be hazardous to your health, to say the least.

The most visually pleasing form tends to be that of a wooden treehouse built around and into the foliage of an existing tree.  This is generally where I start, leveling off the tops of a few trees near one another and constructing simple bridges across the intervening spaces.  I then build up plank walls around the spaces I want to live in, sometimes in the midst of the leaves of a particularly large tree, and set in fences around the edges of the spaces I want to leave open.  Whether you use a leaf or plank roof is up to you- but this form of building offers a lot of opportunity.  Once you get access to shears, it becomes very easy to extend the treetops you’re building on in order to extend your home, and you can always extend the trunk of the tree upwards to give yourself more vertical space.  The visual effect can become either disturbing or beautiful, depending on how you extend the structure to the side- an unbalanced building can look like it ought to be falling out of the tree, or ripping up the plant it’s based in, but a well-shaped one simply looks like it’s floating in the air, suspended by will and carpentry.  Of course, you can also make such a structure with uncarved wood blocks for an entirely different shape- which brings us to the last form of tree building.

Once you’ve established your home, you can take the time to gather more wood and replant the trees it came from for a while- and then you can build up your tree.  Like a baobab or certain forms of fantasy treehouse, it’s easily possible to build yourself a gigantic, wide-boled tree whose massive trunk is actually full of rooms and living spaces.  This can be one of the most impressive and pleasing to look at forms of the tree-house (or as I call this one, the house-tree), despite the potential problems griefers can cause when your home is made out of simple wood.  Of course, there are all sorts of possibilities in constructing your home like this as well.  You can craft branches to be side rooms, or platforms for farming.  You can make the tree gnarled and slaunchwise, or you can build it straight and true.  It takes a lot of wood to make, but that’s not too hard to get ahold of with the ability to plant saplings.

Of course, this also means you have easy access to a food source- and while apples aren’t the best food in the game, if you’ve been planting and harvesting trees regularly it isn’t too hard to build up a nice supply of the fruits to keep you from going hungry.

Shears are, of course, an absolute necessity for the latter two kinds of tree house, as leaf blocks you have placed will not randomly despawn from lack of attached wood- and can be shaped to suit whatever you want to build, rather than forcing your building to conform to them.