Home Building in Minecraft- Part 3, Treetop Building- Article 1

When you are building in Minecraft, there are a lot of considerations you have to be ready to make- and one of those is security.  As opposed to safety, security is specifically about monsters and their ability to get to you and into your home.  Perhaps the easiest and fastest way to get a lot of territory to build on that is safe from monsters is to build in treetops.  In light of that, this series of articles is about building yourself a home atop the trees of your Minecraft world.

The reason treetop building is largely safe from monsters is because of the properties of leaf blocks- as a block that lets light through, a ‘transparent’ block by definition even though they do reduce the amount of light on the far side, leaf blocks cannot have monsters spawn on top of them.  This means that if you feel like it, you don’t even have to set up lighting on the tops of trees in order to avoid monsters appearing.  Because of this, it is generally safe to continue to work on building your home all throughout the night, even if you haven’t got any torches.  You will want to learn how to get around in the dark without falling off of your home, of course, and practice dealing with darkness as an environment.  It can be difficult to see where the ground lies in the middle of the night.  There is, of course, no actual reason not to plant torches where you can.  It simply stops being as much of a worry.

Curiously, this does not help you if you intend to use a bed to ‘sleep’ through the night, because the programming in Minecraft doesn’t recognize a treetop as being secure from monsters enough to allow you to use a bed.  This can be alleviated by sheltering your bed, but then you’re already increasing your risk of monsters appearing in or around your home by providing more non-transparent terrain.  As if that weren’t enough, you can’t actually place a bed on leaf blocks.  This necessitates digging up a couple of blocks and replacing them- likely with wooden planks, which are easy to get access to and very plentiful when you are building on the treetops.

However, as leaves cannot have monsters spawn on them, and usually where there are trees, there are more trees, having a treetop home means that you may well be able to work all through the night on your home.  After all, once you’re up there, the only things that can actually reach you are skeletons’ arrows, an occasional lucky spider, and the rare Enderman passing through.  Do keep a watch out for those skeletons, though.  There’s nothing quite like leaping from tree to tree and getting caught by an arrow halfway, leaving you plummeting into the middle of a mass of monsters that have been following you on the ground below.

This also gives you an easy place to set up an open-air structure, if that’s what you want to have- either to live in or as decoration.  A bit of care and some practice jumping from tree to tree and you can easily learn what you need to set up an entire treetop village.  Whether you level off the tops of trees, build around the sides of taller trunks, or simply work with the topiary terrain the game gives you, living in the trees can be a reward and a challenge all its own- so don’t be shy of climbing up there and setting to work.