Tutorials/Building a metropolis

Ancient Greece — A landscape based on ancient Greece

A metropolis or a city is a complete urban area with buildings and a dense population. As a project, players may find building a metropolis of their own to be an outstanding project, though it should be remembered that building a metropolis requires using a large number of resources and a lot of time.

This tutorial should only be a reference, not a step-by-step lecture. You should make up your own ideas along the way. When editing, keep the buildings list in alphabetical order. This tutorial is aimed for fantasy, medieval and modern buildings, feel free to find the tone that fits better for your world or multiplayer modded server.

Preparation[]

Before starting a metropolis, the player should decide on their project's theme, limitations, goals and tools. If the player needs help with finding a theme, suggestions are given later. For some players, building a metropolis in Survival mode may be the most rewarding. Others may want to work on the project in Creative mode so they do not have to spend time gathering resources. To make building quicker and easier, the player may also want help in their project in the form of friends, commands and structure blocks or even third-party programs. Plans also have to account for what the project's future use is, who will view it and what will those viewers' needs be.

For most themes, the easiest location to build would be somewhere that is generally flat as it removes the need to clear-out large areas. Such an area can be found through a variety of ways including finding a generally-flat biome (such as plains and oceans) or loading a different world type such as superflat or buffet. The player could also use a third-party program such as WorldEdit, MCEdit, VoxelSniper, and WorldPainter to clear an area. The theme may work best in specific biome and the terrain generations, and as such, the player will need to consider those things while finding/preparing an area.

If the player plans on building their project in Survival mode, they should ensure they have the basic materials they need to keep the project going, such as good tools and armor, food, and perhaps even a beacon or scaffolding. The player also needs methods to collect all the blocks they will need for building their project. As such, they may want to try using more common blocks.

Getting started[]

The player should start planning out where a couple of large features of the city will go before they begin building. Then they can ensure they and any other players can begin building the structures. Note that your first buildings will most likely end up near the center of the metropolis.

Before building, it's best for you to know what blocks to use in your theme. A project will usually look better if built with blocks that work well together. The best blocks to use together will vary throughout the build, but generally the block types used will gradually shift from area to area. Lighting should be remembered throughout the build. Building interiors are something the player may want to work as well. If the metropolis will be used for a multiplayer world or custom map, the player probably should be careful to not use blocks in their builds which players can easily break or grief. Also, you should plan for the residents of their town. The needs of villagers are different than those of a couple of friends.

The player may also want to avoid overusing rare and hard to acquire blocks such as emerald, gold, and diamond since they work best as attention draws to areas such as spires, corners, or doors and not for main building materials. Making large areas of these blocks make a build too shiny and overwhelming, and lacking in variety.

City Plan[]

Before you create your city, you should make a city plan. One way to make a city plan is to follow these steps:

First make (in your paper, drawing, etc. for your city plan) all the blocks needed for your buildings. It is preferable to make a grid, but some city styles may need other shapes. Other shapes can be more difficult to build: circles, for example, usually require one to search for an online circle generator due to Minecraft's being cubes.
Then you can draw the shapes of your areas or districts. These can have different topics, like residential districts, work districts, industrial districts, etc. You can also classify them by classes: poorer districts, and richer districts.
Make your district borders messy and odd-shaped. This makes the barrier between one district and another less notable and will make the city feel more natural.
Next, start filling in the blocks, with the things you want to put there according to the district (like houses for a rich residential district). It is recommendable to only fill in around half the blocks, to leave space for other things.
After that, start filling the remaining half with other things that belong to other districts (like schools in a residential area), with things like parks, markets, etc. or simply with other things that look nice or that you want to put there.
Then add other more important buildings scattered across the city plan, like big commercial centers, airports, municipalities, stadiums, or anything that comes to your mind.
In the next place, add some big avenues across central locations. Make the things that are in front of the avenue bigger (instead of a house, an edifice, instead of a shop, a market, etc.)
Finally, you can add your own touches to the city, changing things you don’t like or adding things you like more.

To start your plan, you can make the outlines with scaffolding, wool, terracotta, concrete, or any other easy-to-collect blocks you have in large quantities. You can match colors with different things.

Note: To make it easier, try to visualize the city plan in your head, and try make it fit into Minecraft.

Population is another important thing to keep in mind when building a great city. Keep in mind that the size of your population is the key to how large your city can expand. The following Key* below will help you understand how large your city is and the components that it needs based on its ranking and population. Population can be calculated by estimating or counting the amount of beds in your city. Every family home will have between 3-5 people. So a viable option to calculate population is count up family homes and multiply that number by either 3,4, or 5. Apartment buildings and hotels will also house more people so make sure to keep that in mind as well.

-Village; 50 to 150 population

-Suburb; 150 to 600 population

-Town; 600 to 2,000 population

-City; 2,000 to 10,000 population

-Metropolis; 10,000 to infinity population

Materials[]

Minecraft has a variety of blocks and ornaments you may use. Try to find a color that matches the theme.

Building Up[]

Consistency and planning are possibly the two most important things in a build. Planning can be anything from a simple bullet list of materials needed to a full-scale blueprint of all the aspects of the metropolis. It is best if a town can keep its theming, block choices, sizes, and areas somewhat similar between buildings. Make sure that the first buildings and roads are close in size and appearance to how you want the rest of the city to be. Part of a natural city flow are zones--different areas which better fulfill certain needs for town members than other areas. If the player allows the city to develop into zones as it is built, the city will appear more natural. Building outward and in zones allows different portions of the metropolis to have a different feel to the builds as different building heights, materials, and the amount of space changes. Planning of where to place and how large to make certain zones should ensure that the build fulfills the needs of any actual or imagined residents of the metropolis.

Roads and Paths[]

An important piece of planning and building a metropolis is the roads. Roads and pathways connect all the buildings and zones together and usually act to keep a sense of order to the space. Generally, larger areas should include more orderly roads while smaller spaces should have rougher, more mixed pathways. The sizes of roads should also differ by area to fit the spacing of buildings. For this reason, roads should generally be created as needed and not used to force buildings to follow their path. Materials such as cobblestone, coal blocks, obsidian, gravel, stone, sandstone, nether bricks, concrete, dirt paths, and terracotta are all popular blocks for roads and paths. Roads can also be decorated with plants, road lines, and lights. Generally, paths should be fairly flat so they can be easily used for quick travel. Adding options for travel along different roads such as minecart rails, ice lanes, or even just fences to tie horses to can increase the efficiency of roads. If you make a tunnel, it should be at least three blocks tall so players riding horses can use it. You should also be able to navigate the roads easily.

Scale[]

You should also consider what scale your city is. A smaller-scale city will be faster to build and consume less resources, but a larger-scale city can be more detailed. In a larger-scale city, it is also possible to construct interiors to the buildings, which is not possible in smaller scale.

Lighting[]

One light source for a metropolis is lampposts. A lamppost can be built with a redstone lamp hooked up to an inverted daylight detector so that the lamp will turn on when it gets dark. You can also use a torch, as you can put them in houses. Another indoor lighting trick is to put the light source under carpets. The source of light will be hidden from sight, but the light will still shine through the carpets.

Residential Zone[]

Primarily a metropolis needs to have places for its citizens to live. Generally, these areas should be large, yet organized. Smaller roads, shorter buildings, more greenery, and small blocks keep the area more friendly while the opposite create a larger, busier feel. Most residential areas will keep houses spaced close together. Some areas may work best with tall apartments. A residential zone usually feels more lively if the player includes a couple of small shops in the area. Some shops can be added as part of a living space. When working with multiple players, it may work best to allow players to build their own housing.

The deeper within the city, the more urbanized the housing generally should be with larger buildings. If the metropolis works well with it, smaller, single housing can make up surrounding suburbs and even further out rural zones can allow large swaths of land to be lived in by a very spread out population.

Commercial Zone[]

These zones are for trade such as through markets, shops, malls, restaurants, or grocery stores. Trade allows for citizens of a city to get all types of items and services without having to specifically work for each type of item or service. Some shops work better mixed in with residential zones. A commercial zone can allow for lots of shops to be clustered together and for large stores to be neatly separated from the housing. If the citizens are players, commercial zones can create extra opportunities for player interactions.

Public Transportation and Transit Stations[]

Since a metropolis should be quite large, efficient transportation is important to keep the city together. Public transportation hubs can create efficient travel. Some cities might work best with ice roads, minecart rails, or piston bolts. Some might work best using the Nether to decrease the travel time and distance. Command blocks can be programmed to teleport players when triggered. Infrastructure fitting to the theme of the metropolis should also be used to give more life to the city.

Industrial Zone[]

Mass production greatly decreases the space needed for many people to live, but it isn't the prettiest sight. Nobody likes to have a house with cluttered views of smog-belching factories, so make sure your industrial zone is not next to any nicer houses, and preferably none that are owned by those who don't work in the industrial zone. Plan a green area in the 100 blocks, or maybe a river. Industrial zones keep giant farms or mass production plants away from where residents live. If the farms produce items, this also may reduce lag by keeping these large, item-creating structures unloaded when unneeded. These areas are generally best kept further from any type of residential or commercial zone since their function is often practicality over appearance.

Capital[]

A city really can appear to have more pride just by adding a capital area. Adding larger, flashier buildings to stick out in the city skyline gives the city a sense of power. The area can be decorated with statues and monuments. Such areas are usually more expensive to live in, so rarer materials fit into the block palette well. You can build a large building for the government(You may not need it).

Suggestions[]

Here are some ideas to help the player get started on their city. You can mix and match multiple types.

City Themes[]

A - D[]

Biome Dependent: A city's features could be directly based off of its land. Buildings and roads would then remind the player of where they are no matter the biome or land features.

Block Limitations: To force more creative use of specific blocks (especially important since using fewer blocks improves the quality appearance of a build), the player could force themselves to only use specific blocks or to not use blocks that usually show up in their builds. Sometimes, using specific blocks could act as a way of theming or adding a story to the city. Possible limitations might limit the material, color, or rarities of blocks used. Another variant is to only use blocks available in a certain version, for example only building with blocks available in Classic.

Cloudy: Build your city in the sky or even at cloud level using light tones and soft looking blocks such as snow and wool as well as transparent blocks such as glass. By utilizing dripping water or particle effects, weather such as rain, snow, lightning or even a rainbow could be seen as coming from the city.

Colorful: Make the entire city with one color or color scheme possibly also utilizing particles or mobs of certain colors to contribute to the theme. You can also make a bunch of cities of different colors, or make parts of the city of some color and other parts of another similar to a rainbow.

Cultural: Base your domain around traditional architecture employed across the world. Every country or group has its own style of architecture, with East Asian and European architecture being probably the most well-known styles. For example in traditional Japanese architecture, wood is the most common material, whilst roofs are often tiled or thatched, and buildings are elevated slightly off the ground. In traditional Chinese architecture, wood is also a common material, and buildings are typically bilaterally symmetric and feature enclosed open spaces.

Cultural Obsession: The citizens of a city could have a common obsession. Whether it be a sport, craft, or trend, the city could reflect that through its decorations. This gives the player opportunities to create many different decorations. It also adds a personality to the city, since it can be somewhat seen what is important to the citizens of the metropolis.

Disorder: If the player makes certain areas disordered while creating them, they can add a special story to parts of the city and make something unusual. The player could also make a point of making a certain feature to always appear disordered such as city walls.

Domed: Build your city completely out of domes. The domes can be floating, on the ground or underwater, and can be made out of glass or any other material. You can connect the domes with bridges or tunnels, or make each house a small dome.

E - H[]

Ecumenopolis: Turn the whole world into a ecumenopolis (read: an extremely big city), stretching from bedrock level to the world height limit. At the top, there could be high-rise penthouses with panoramic windows, while at the bottom, there are slums and gang headquarters. If you have limited time or resources, you can skip the underground part and just make your city a colossal skyscraper. Regardless of how you do it, this project will be very time-consuming in Survival mode, and even in Creative mode will take quite a while.

Electric City: Use nothing but redstone! Build out of redstone blocks and use iron doors. Also use lots of complicated redstone mechanisms, like doorbells, elevators, and flashing indicator lights. Use flying machines and minecart subways for player transportation and an item transportation system for post services. Try using redstone for defense too, like hooking up dispenser machine guns and "spike traps" made by arrows shooting out of the ground. Iron golems fit well in this city, due to their robot-like appearance.

End Fortress: Build a massive version of End cities in the End using mostly the materials found there, such as End stone bricks, obsidian and purpur. Build rooms and entrances at least three blocks high to allow endermen to enter and build three block long "beds" from wool blocks. Use shulker boxes and ender chests for storage. Add End crystals for mysterious-looking decorations, but be careful not to blow them up. Inhabitants should either have black and purple clothes or just be endermen. Add a chorus plant farm, a harbor for end ships and high towers for flying with elytra. Use End rods for lighting. Outlaw water, and if your rules ever require executions, do it by knocking people into the Void.

Empire: Instead of building just one city, build a lot of cities. Make one city to be larger than others, and make it the capital of the empire. Connect the cities with roads or a minecart network. Add smaller villages and farms outside the larger cities. If you want a more militant country, build huge walls around the borders, build many large military bases and add battle damage or wipe entire cities off the map with TNT to make it look like they were conquered.

Flaming City: Make a town and set it on fire without destroying it. Netherrack and magma blocks are good for this purpose. Use lava in places where water would normally be found. Striders are one possibility for transportation, but make sure they won't be exposed to rain. Utilise fire-resistant mobs as inhabitants. You could also allow players with Fire Protection armor or potions of Fire Resistance to take up residence. You can also use mycelium, gray concrete powder and basalt as burnt Grass, ash and burnt logs, respectively. You can also outlaw water, and if you need to execute somebody, do it by burning them alive. Make sure not to build with any flammable blocks, for obvious reasons.

Floating: Make a city on the water, preferably on the middle of an ocean or lake, as there is most space for this city type. The houses could be boats or rafts, and the main building could be a big flagship. The city can be also built on a large platform on the top layer of water, so it looks like it is floating. For transportation, you could build connected Nether portals in the city, and the mainland. Boats and Frost Walker boots are also a good form of transportation in this city type. The city might also be built inside a single, giant ship. If you choose to make only one giant ship, you might fill it with animals of all kinds, to make it resemble Noah's Ark.

Frozen: Make a settlement out of snow and various forms of ice. Using normal ice isn't recommended, as it will melt in bright light. buildings could include igloos or much larger structures such as a icy castle, and be inhabited by snow golems. This is a fairly easy metropolis to gather resources for due to the ease of farming snow and ice. If you are using Creative mode, the "Snowy Kingdom" Superflat preset with a few extra layers of stone is ideal.

Generated Structure-Based: Find a generated structure, like a village, stronghold or woodland mansion, and expand it into a city. Sometimes, the generated structure might need some modifications before being inhabitable, as some generated structures don't have light sources, might have monster spawners or traps, and might be even partially ruined.

Giant: Make a gigantic city! Build giant buildings, preferably skyscrapers, and have sugar cane, cactus, and tree farms. To cap it off, have the whole population be endermen, and, if you have cheats enabled, giants. (Be sure to have high entryways so your residents can get in and out.)

Heavenly: Make the city seem divine using a bright white colour scheme. Give each citizen an elytra to make everyone look like angels and maybe build the city in the sky. You also might make a Nether city with a few adjustments to make it look like Hell, and build a guarded portal as a connection between the cities.

Historic Setting: Using a style based off of historical places such as ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, native American villages, English colonies, Wild West settlements, medieval cities, or prehistoric-style can allow for some fun block choices and zoning. Game block choices also match up easier with older time periods, so using such a style may save the player the difficulty of creating modern objects in-game. Creating a metropolis based off of ancient or historical civilizations or settings can help the player understand old challenges and history.

Holiday Focus: The town could be built based on a specific holiday or season such as Christmas or autumn. The entire city could have subtle and major ways of reminding the other players about that specific focus through the details, structures and regions of the city.

I - M[]

Invisible: Make everything in your city made of glass blocks, glass panes, barriers, and/or ice, with no doors for your buildings and use Light Blocks to ensure brightness, if in creative. However, leave the ground grass, snow, or whatever block it already is.Alternatively build the entire city out of blocks that disappear if a player is too far away from it. Examples are chests, shulker boxes, item frames, and banners. It may be expensive, but it's worth the surprise factor when an entire city suddenly pops into existence. A third option could be to Use redstone to make the city pop up out of the ground. Bonus if it retracts back into the ground! You can stop interiors from collapsing by placing carpets inside. The redstone may be complex, and the city may look messy, but it would provide for an amazing surprise to anyone trying to attack you.

Industrial: Build a city entirely around producing things from raw materials. For this theme, you may want to limit the population to mainly workers. You could have the performance of the workers tracked through a server rule. The buildings may be made of grimy metal and stone and there could be a limited number of buildings that are not for work. Try and create a grimy, dirty, polluted feeling around the city as a whole. Large logistics networks could be set up, like minecart trains carrying ore from mines to the smelters, carrying food from farms to processing plants, etc. You can put security features in place to prevent industrial espionage or stealing of the goods produced in your city. This kind of city might be quite competitive, trying to outsell or accumulate more wealth than other places.

Impoverished: This is an interesting challenge, as instead of building a city filled with the rich, this land can be filled with poor people. Instead of large buildings and roads full of expensive materials, the city might be filled with smaller huts, slums and shanty towns squeezed into each other and made with simple resources. It can be a refreshing build as it moves away from the normal order most cities have.

Island: Find an ocean in the middle of nowhere, or use the water world in Superflat and reduce the amount of water. Then start building an island, or use a natural one and make the buildings look like they are in a real island city. Don't forget to build a port that connects the island with the outside world. If you want to add a tropical island, include miles of beaches and beautiful scenery, try building palm trees and make numerous tourist hotels.

Magical : Place brewing stands, cauldrons, and enchantment tables in abundance around the city. Magic cities can sell things like items related to brewing and enchanting and bottles o' enchanting. Using ender chests instead of regular chests adds to the effect. Use witches, evokers and illusioners as inhabitants for fun, but they are likely kill you in Survival. Build multiple Nether portals and possibly expand the city into other dimensions.

Maze: Make your city a maze: hard to navigate, easy to get lost in. Make your city hall/capitol in the middle of your maze city. Having the city streets to be narrow and twisted alleys instead of broad and straight boulevards helps, and expanding the city underground can even add a third dimension to the maze.

Militaristic: Make a huge city surrounded by a wall made out of a highly resistant block (bedrock, obsidian, etc.). Try and make the city as scary-looking as possible, with armor and weapon factories, lots of smog, and some lava. Also add TNT cannons facing outward beyond the wall, dispensers filled with poison or harming tipped arrows facing out, and armed guards patrolling everywhere. You could also add iron golems for some added protection. If you're playing on a server, constantly attack and overtake other cities, villages, or fortresses. Loot them, and then leave them ruined.

Mob Town: Creating a town for non-human creatures can add extra creativity for a build. The player would need to figure out how mobs would live in a city environment, this is likely to require different spaces such as underground tunnels, being built high in the sky or space, deep underwater or even in another dimension, so it might be easiest to make the entire city devoted to just one or a certain category of mobs. A city inhabited by hostile mobs will likely be very dangerous, so it might be a good idea to take precautions to protect visitors. The citizens could be mobs or something that doesn't exist within the game.

Modern: Just build your city like a city you would see in real life today. Make skyscrapers, train stations, apartments, office buildings, cars, and more!

Movie Town: Make a city/town/village based on a place in your favorite movie or a movie that you liked. It can also be a place from a video game, TV show, or book. You could use items, mobs or status effects to truly replicate these environments.

Multi-Biome City: When you make your city have sections for each biome. Sections could be snowy, desert, forest, swamp, jungle, savanna, or the badlands. Have buildings built out of the native materials in each biome, e.g. build houses out of stained terracotta.

Mushroom City: Build your city on the top of huge mushrooms connected with bridges and build some of the houses inside red huge mushrooms. This works in most biomes, but the best place for this is the mushroom island biome.

Mythical Location: The player could recreate some location from mythology, a book or movie series, a fairy tale, or a video game. The city may need to be set in a specific biome or area such as underwater. The details from the source could be carefully added into the city to let other players feel as if they have really stepped into the recreated world. Many details may need to be imagined up by the player since most fictional sources cannot capture the full extent of details in the worlds they create.

N - R[]

Nether City: Build your city in the Nether. Use materials found in Nether, such as Nether bricks, red Nether bricks and warped and crimson planks. You can also build the city around a Nether fortress or bastion remnant, using the structures as the basis of your city. You can have piglins living in this city. Farm hoglins for food and use striders for mounts. Use lava, glowstone and other materials naturally found in Nether for illumination.

Otherworldly: A metropolis could be made to exist as if in a different world or dimension. As such, the city should have elements depending on the special rules of that dimension. For example, the world could have weird gravity, special technology, exist on clouds or be entirely made out of candy. The way a city functions within a different world would have to be fully considered while creating the metropolis and add many opportunities for creativity.

Peaceful Place: Make a city with passive mobs. Put pretty things like flowers, and make the whole population passive mobs. You can decide whether other players can live there and if using animals is legal e.g shearing, taming. One thing that is illegal, however, is killing anything in the town. Make sure to keep out monsters that could harm the inhabitants and separate animals which could harm each other or alternatively play on peaceful mode.

Pirate Port: Think back to the time of pirates and sea shanties, and build off of that. Be sure to add ships off in the distance, lighthouses, docks, and a tavern or two. Add some parrots and dolphins to make the port more lively. You can also fit the ships with TNT cannons. Using pillagers as the residences can be good since they "pillage" other treasures and loot. Any other illagers can work.

Ruins: The city could have sections that feel old and forgotten. Rougher textured blocks, soil, and plants can be added to create overgrown or damaged feels to city areas. The player could also utilise darkness. Larger ruins could have holes, missing windows and doors, entrances blocked by debris and piles of blocks. Whilst ruins usually are abandoned, they don't necessarily have to be. If the city was destroyed, survivors might be still be in the ruins amongst the dead and undead mobs. One method of building this city is to destroy most of a pre-built city, although it might not look natural as manual detailing contributes to a ruined feel. You could make it a sort of explorable structure with chests, treasure and secret rooms. Features of the city could hint at why the area is in ruin such as disease, population shift, disaster or just poor management.

S - U[]

Shrunk: The inhabitants of the city may appear normal-sized to the player, but they would exist in this scenario as tiny people in a giant world. Part of creating such a city would be making the area around the city to show how small the inhabitants of the city are. Plant large jungle or spruce trees around the city, and spawn giants and huge slimes using commands. You can also build large statues depicting other mobs.

Sky: Make a normal city using one of the ideas above (or below) but add something that will make it float (an anti-gravity engine, several jet engines, etc.) in the air.

Soviet-esque: Build a city that resembles the Soviet Union. Center your city around a grand square for the government, and construct wide roads and tall concrete buildings for the city's inhabitants. Always include statues or pixel art of the leader. Your city should also have an extensive metro system, as well as parks, athletic centers, public bathhouses, and schools, all using one or two materials. The outskirts of the city should consist of large wheat fields and farms.

Space: Consider building your city high in the sky and permanently setting the time to night to create a space-like atmosphere or alternatively surround your city with dark blocks. You could also build the city in the [[End] due to the dark void and starry skyscape, but the Endermen that spawn there wll likely damage your builds, unless you use commands to prevent mob griefing or play on peaceful mode. You can add Nether portals as "wormholes" to your city although these won't work in the End. Make asteroids, planets, comets and other space phenomena to build on or simply for ambience. You can also build spaceports in your city, containing spaceships which might take flight into the final frontier.

Minecraft Enterprise — An example of a spaceship

Special Feature: The town could, like Venice, Italy, have a special feature. Features could include the city being connected by waterways like the aforementioned Venice, be underwater, underground, hanging from some roof, supported on arches and stilts over the land, be filled with or surrounded by walls, or be deep underground. Fitting such a theme adds a unique element to the metropolis.

Spooky: This type of city might be built in many places depending on the theme, but dark forests and swamps, due to murky water and dark foliage, are some of the best settings for a city like this. You could remove mobs or replace passive mobs with hostile ones, but if you want an abandoned feel, their presence may be quite effective. You could use various commands to create permanent thunderstorms and night and have your city illuminated by moonlight. Use dark and dilapidated-looking materials for buildings and use stairs and slabs to emphasise disrepair. There could be graveyards (with spawners), flooded houses, shrines, dungeons, trampled farms or more. You could have spooky caves near the city, to produce ambience noises, or use command blocks to produce them. Maybe even have a statue of Herobrine or his castle.

Steampunk: Use architecture from the 19th century for this city type. Have infrastructure and technology be steam-powered in the city, and have many factories with lots of cogs and smokestacks. You can use airships for transportation. You can even make the city flying and "supported" by giant fans. Wooden and metal blocks also look steampunk-esque.

Teeny Town: Make a little, tiny town! Make the whole population very small mobs such as cave spiders, spiders, small and/or tiny slime and magma cubes, and silverfish. Make small houses (you may even think of putting the dragon egg as a roof) out of fences, slabs, pressure plates, and carpet, using fence gates as doors. Use ferns and dead bushes for a touch of plant life. You can also use saplings, but be sure to put them in flower pots, or they'll grow into trees, which are far too big for a town of this scale unless you want a giant redwood forest.

Trap City: Fill your city with traps. You can even make the city itself a giant trap, making it impossible to escape. Building a city out of TNT or flammable blocks would make a city entertaining as well, with the entire city destroying itself if you want it to, this might require a hardy device however. Backups of the world can be made so the city can be destroyed for the player's entertainment.

Treetop: Build your city in any forested biome, but rather than cutting the trees down, build your city on top of them, construct or hollow out giant trees with logs, bark, stripped logs and stripped bark blocks with buildings and pathways hanging from the trees or wrapping around and inside them. This city can be quite easy to hide, if you use blocks and armor that blend in. To defend, construct hideouts in the trees for archers. Using lava or fire is heavily discouraged, as almost everything in this city is flammable. Some of the best biomes to build this in are the jungle or Old Growth Taiga biome, due to the abundance of large trees there.

Tree houses — An example of a forest city

Twin Cities: Have two cities next to each other. They could be deadly enemies, or opposites like a rich and a poor city, an electric and a magic city, an evil and a good city, or an elvish and a dwarvish city.

Underground: Build your entire city underground or in a mountain. One way to do this is by building a maze-like network of tunnels or a large cave system or chamber where the people live. Buildings could hang from or be built into the roof or walls of the cave or sit on the floor. Lighting could be provided from lava, luminescent stones and plants or rely on sunlight through Daylight Sensors or skylights, themes could vary widely from fantastical, to futuristic with mines, bunkers and dwarven treasure hoards all fitting very well into this category of city. A city built underground should usually be quite easy to defend and hide, as only entrances and windows will be visible from the surface. A more paranoid player might want to rely on chorus fruit or [nether portal]]s as an extra step.

Underwater: This city can be very difficult to build, especially in Survival due to the player's inability to breathe, see or mine effectively underwater without certain items or enchantments. Build your city in one large or a series of glass domes, or otherwise waterproof buildings, connected with clean-looking or transparent blocks, or have a more magical underwater setting like a merfolk city, perhaps your city makes up the ruins of Atlantis. The entrances should be waterproof, possibly made with doors or trapdoors. It is also possible to make the entrance a tunnel, tube or cave leading to land, or sea level. This city should be easy to defend, assuming you build it deep enough, as any potential attacker would need potions of water breathing just to reach it.

Upside-Down: Forget logic! Make your city upside down! Make a giant ceiling, or just build midair constructing the buildings literally from top to bottom. Have all furniture fixed to the ceiling. As for the roads, you can use overhanging bridges to connect the buildings, or you can use a railway system. If you can fit creatures inside your upside down houses you can rename them with a "Dinnerbone" name tag and they will be upside down! Use the flip shader for help.

Utopia A perfect city! Build a city that is idyllic and perfect to live in in every way. Perhaps as a twist, something more sinister is going on secretly.

V - Z[]

Village: Make your city like a normal ''Minecraft'' village and use villagers as the residents. See here for the full list of blueprints for the village structures. You can even create your own buildings related to the other village buildings. Be sure to keep iron golems around the village or else your village will become a zombie village!

Venice: Make your city have canals of water or lava for roads. Add bridges as well. Boats or Striders can be used for transportation. Also, if you use lava, avoid flammable materials in buildings.

Vertical: Build a huge tower out of any material you want. Then, use ladders or scaffoldings to travel across the city and make the buildings stick out of the tower. Make this tower very tall and wide. You can also build this city underground, on the side of a cliff or a hole.

Void: Either create a superflat world with the Void preset or build a city just like you normally would, but with the buildings floating over the void in the End. A city like this will be a dangerous place to live in, as the risk of falling into the void is constantly present.

Wild West: This is best to build in the badlands or desert biomes. Have something like a cowboy town, with a sheriff. You could add dead bushes as tumbleweeds and simulate pistols with crossbows with Quick Charge and Piercing. Enforce the laws with cowboys on horseback. Make a huge herd of cows for the town's food supply.

Zombie Apocalypse: Make your city look like an apocalyptic city with ruined buildings everywhere. Make broken vehicles and fallen trees, add vines or mossy versions of stone to the houses. Have various zombie types infesting the city.

Transportation[]

You need a method of transportation for your city to get around. Here are some ideas:

You could make a series of TNT launchers to work as elevators to higher levels of your city (remember to make with block resistant to explosions).

Boats: If your metropolis is spread across several islands, then build a boat network. Have harbors at every island and make buoys in the water with signs directing people to other harbors. You can also have canals, but these might get in the way of your construction. Boats can also be used on land, moving especially fast on certain blocks. This is a great way to transport mobs!

Command Hub: High above the city, place a platform with command blocks on it. These command blocks can teleport the player to a new location with the press of a button. Label all the command blocks with signs. All the locations labeled on this platform should have their own command blocks teleporting the player back to the hub. It is also a fantastic place to place a community end portal, nether portal, elytra launcher, and other contraptions.

Elytra: Create several elytra launchers, each with fireworks, and let people fly to wherever they want. Put the launchers in convenient places. You could also have some other transport system (like minecarts) to serve your city, but have a central airport in which you use elytra to get to other cities.

Flying: This will need either command blocks or an admin. Basically, have an "airport" where command blocks and/or an admin will give players spectator mode so they can fly from the new airport to another. Creative mode also gives players an ability to fly, but isn't recommended, as creative mode abilities can be easily abused.

Flying Machine: You can make a flying machine, or use Slime Block Machines.

Mounts:Horses and Pigs! Build a stable to keep them in. You could create separate lanes on your roads, maybe marked with a slightly different material than your normal roadblock. At your gas stations sell saddles, horse armor, wheat, etc. Using a donkey or a mule also works.

Minecart: You can make a subway or overground railway to get people around. See Tutorials/Train Station for more information. Set up ticket booths and charge people, allowing them to drive the minecarts once they pay. An interesting tactic to try out, if you want to have actual trains, is to automate the fare collection process and make people drive trains. An even more interesting way to do this is to have two minecarts be pushed by a furnace minecart on and off of powered/unpowered rails to create a great and automated system. Plus, you get to brag that you have a use for furnace minecart.

Sea Roads: Build a small road across the oceans and use dolphins to increase your speed!

Teleporting: You can now create redstone circuits which activate console commands with command blocks. Build "stations" with command blocks in them, which have the command " /tp @p <coordinates> " to teleport the nearest player to the command block to the specified coordinates. You could also have various chests with ender pearls inside.

Walking: The most common way is by walking, so build wide roads out of stone and pavements out of stone slabs or other materials (See the Roads section below for more details). Rest stops are optional, but may be useful for players wishing to log off or stop for a moment without being attacked.

Buildings and Structures[]

A - D[]

Acropolis If you have an Ancient Greek city, find a hill, then permeate it with temples and religious complexes. You can build a ruined variation of this in a modern city, too.

Airport Build an airport and add a runway to "fly" planes off of. Most of the largest cities should have one. Some things to have in your airport include:

Baggage Claim: This is where players get their items after getting off their flight. You could have chest minecarts continuously go around a little track to imitate the conveyor belts where luggage is retrieved.

Security Checkpoint: Have a long line made with fences leading to a body scanner and an ice conveyor belt that players put their items on. If you want, have a contraband list of things you cannot bring through security, like TNT, firework stars, fire charges, lava buckets, swords, bows, and arrows, and use the clear inventory command to enforce.

Check-In: Where players can check-in their luggage and present their "boarding pass". This could be a piece of paper or something more valuable.

Food Court: Nobody wants to wait for a flight with an empty stomach. Have a large room with lots of tables and restaurants to get food from.

Departure/Arrival Gates: Where to wait for and board your flight. Have lots of benches and a desk. (See Tutorials/Furniture for furniture types.)

Runway and aircraft: You could use command blocks, two aircrafts in both the destination airport and the departure airport and a third aircraft in the air. Make the command blocks teleport players from the first aircraft to the aircraft in the air and after a few minutes, teleport the passengers to the requested destination airport. Build different types of aircraft classes. You could have windows in a non-moving airplane and using pistons, make blocks flash by as if the plane were moving. With slime blocks, you can also make a functional aircraft.

You can build replicas of real-life planes, or design something completely new. In a more fantastic world, consider using airships instead of planes.

Ender pearl launcher: If you know how to make an ender pearl launcher, you can do that and allow your citizens to travel large distances.

Amphitheatre Build the half-stadium like theaters just like in Greece and Rome, and use it to hold plays, speeches, and even executions. Be sure to make it out of clean-looking stone material.

Amusement Park You can build roller coasters with minecarts and rails, ticket booths and small shops around the park, and a ferris wheel. You can make the park small or large. You could even build a water park! See also Tutorials/Building a rollercoaster for more tips.

Apartments Build a tall building out of bricks and fill it up with rooms with a single bed and small chest in each. People rent the rooms for whatever you are using as currency and can store their stuff there and sleep.

Animal Shelter This is for pet owners (example: tame cats and dogs), that want to give their pet away. Maybe their wolf is attacking people accidentally. Have cages and maybe a barnyard for the farm animals like horses. These animals are given shelter, food, and water until someone comes to get a new pet. You can sell the animals or give them away for free to whoever wants them. you could choose between making it a kill-free or a kill shelter. If you make it a kill shelter then you should have a certain timeline posted on a sign at the front of the building telling visitors how long you keep animals before killing them. You can do this manually, have a room devoted to killing, or possibly automate it. Expand the shelter and add more cages if you're not killing them, as the animals will pile up more if you're not regaining space.

Aquarium Build huge glass tanks and fill them with water, coral, water plants and, most importantly, animals, such as squids and all kinds of fish. You can even have hostile water monsters, like guardians, in the aquarium, but if you have, be careful that they don't attack the visitors or other animals.

Aqueducts Aqueducts are bridges for conveying water across gaps such as valleys, rivers or ravines. Not only is it an aqueduct to supply your town with water, but you can also have a nautical highway.

Arcade Build a building and make the walls out of colorful blocks and fill it with fake games made of iron, paintings, and signs. You could even get/make a resource pack or use maps that makes the painting "screens" look like real games!

Archery Range A place where people can practice their archery skills. Use target blocks for normal targets, and if you want, you can have mobs riding minecarts for moving targets.

Area 51 A place for admins to manage private matters. Make a small building far from the city and hire guards to kill intruders on sight. Add lots of rooms for top-secret projects and make sure there are no windows at all. Fill the interior with command blocks with levers and buttons attached, and useful notes. You may want to use illagers as guards.

Arena A player arena, a mob arena or both! . Have lighting, and mob spawn egg dispensers or mob spawners for the arena. Have plenty of temporary weapons for rent in the "arena store" or whatever you want to call it. Be creative.

Armor & Weapons shop Use the city's currency (e.g. emeralds, nether quartz, diamonds) to buy weapons and armor. Armorer and weaponsmith villagers could be placed here.

Army Outpost A place where your army is held until they go to war. It may be built out of something strong to keep your army safe. You may keep the armor in it, as long as weapons and beds are inside for the army.

Barracks: A place where soldiers protect your outpost live.

Armory: A place where weapons and armor are stored. This would be a building under heavy guard, with chests filled with swords, bows, arrows, and armor, all of the various tiers.

Guard Tower: Put guards up here with bows and arrows, swords, and sets of armor. Place these near the walls to protect the outpost.

Walls: Surround your outpost in a wall of strong material (like obsidian) to prevent those with malicious intents from getting in. For extra security, you could place Guard Towers nearby to prevent people from scaling the walls.

Auditorium A place for people to gather and watch something, like a concert, speech, etc. It should be able to seat a lot of people. It can be placed in the Town Hall.

Bakery Make a building with a baker (a player) who sells bread, pumpkin pies, and cakes. Could be attached to the cake factory. Make a pumpkin, wheat, chicken, cow, and sugar cane farm.

Bank People go here to store their money. Have a trusted person work there and have vaults deep underground to store their gold and diamonds (you can also use dried kelp blocks to represent banknote or money stacks). Only let the trusted person and the owner of the vault into it. You can use piston doors on the vaults that need a special "key" (Lever) Variation: Use /blockdata ~ ~-1 ~ {Lock:keyname} when standing on a chest. Then, give a player an item named 'keyname' or whatever you typed in the command.

More complex version: Have people have a simple account by giving access to an ATM (ender chest). People can also send a request to have a personal vault underground by writing a book with their name and requested combination and putting it into a minecart with a chest along with their items, and sending the minecart into the main facility. Then, the owner (with redstone knowledge), can build a working vault with combo lock and message the player when they have finished, so the player can access their vault. NOTE: This method will take up a lot of space, build it preferably underground (Think Gringotts from "Harry Potter"!)

Bar Make a store that only sells negative-effect potions, such as potions of Poison. You can make chairs, brewing stands, and note blocks or other music generators. This can be combined with the dance floor to make a night club.

Batting Cages Make a building , making it an ample size, such as 27 by 27 by 17. Spawn or transport a ghast in the structure. Players can pay admission to practice deflecting the ghast fireballs back at the ghast. When the ghast is killed and the player leaves, spawn another ghast for the next player.

Bookstore Fill a shop with bookshelves. Have a librarian villager work there and have authors write in book and quills to buy or borrow. Also, to make citizens happy, let them write their own books with book and quills.

Breeder Make an Industrial Farm and agricultural rooms with chickens, pigs, etc., and when necessary, kill them for meat.

Butcher's Shop Make a building with the front having a counter, and in the back have furnaces to cook meat. Have a butcher villager work there and sell the meat. You could also have hunters to go hunt the meat for the butchers, again, just an idea. You could have an automatic furnace to cook food when you aren't there. You need 3 hoppers, 1 furnace, 6 (or 3) chests and 2 levers.

Campground Somewhere far from your city , you could make a campground! A campground is a place with many sized "campsites" that customers can set up "tents" (triangular structures made out of wool) on. This is a very good alternative to a large hotel, if you want to save time. On each campsite, don't forget to create a fire pit with logs, enough space for at least a medium-sized tent. Building the campsite in a natural or artificial forest is a good idea. Add a gravel path connecting the campsites, perhaps a shack for restrooms (completely optional), a lake or pond (if you're building by water) and a playground. You could even make it in a State or National Park, if you don't want visitors cutting down trees for wood.

Capture the Flag Arena Have a 41 by 20 area split in the middle with a wall using pistons. Add 2 chests with 3 stacks of 20 arrows. Also, have 3 bows. Have 2 trapped chests with your "flag". If someone is shot, they are out. Have a dispenser that shoots fireworks connecting to both trapped chests. The fireworks should be different. This lets people know who won. To make this, you'll need some redstone knowledge. You'll need 20 wool, 2 dispensers, 20 pistons, 4 trapped chests, 4 chests, and a lot of redstone. Or, instead of just shooting people, you could have to kill them to get them out. You could use banners as flags.

Casino Have a big fancy building with minecart with a chest slot machines (minecart in, random items out) or pig slot machines (using random pig movements.)

Cemetery Build a cemetery complex, Make tombstones and dig holes under them. You can place zombie or skeleton spawners under them if you have access to creative mode or cheats. You can also expand the cemetery by building an underground crypt.

Cinema/Theater Build a large building with a ticket counter and a hallway leading to the screen rooms. Have a food bar selling food and drinks. You can also have actors or pistons and redstone moving things about. There could be a dark cave under the seats for monster sound effects, or a note block circuit or jukebox for music. Consider having various screens of different sizes

City/Town Hall This is probably the first building players usually make when building a metropolis. Have a huge building for the mayor, the mayor's assistants, and the people in charge of certain things (such as law enforcement, health and welfare, ...) A good place to put this is the very heart of your city. You can have an auditorium and the city's archives located in this building. You could even build a huge political complex around it with a secret service headquarters, embassies for mobs or other cities or servers, and of course, parking for everyone.

Clothes Store Make a lot of leather armor, dye it custom colors, and put it on armor stands for players to trade. You could arrange by color, arrange it in outfits, or whatever other way you come up with. You can also sell other kinds of armor. To look extra authentic, either put the armor on armor stands, or add "models" by luring a skeleton or zombie into a glass case and give it the armor. If you are in creative mode, you can put a human head on as well to make them look more like humans. (If you are using the latter, you must give them name tags to prevent them from despawning.) Make sure that the people who are in your city can't release the monsters. For added safety, you can use barriers instead of glass.

Cobblestone Plant Make a factory that produces cobblestone by the thousands!

Dance Lounge Have a multi-colored blocks for a dance floor and use bright lighting (whatever you want to do with it). You'll have a blast! Have note blocks and music discs for the DJ to use.

Department Store/Mall Make a huge building with many floors that sell different items. Have a floor for blocks, armor, food, and mob drops, etc., for different prices. In a mall, have each store in a separate room or stall.Stores could sell items ranging from materials to music discs, or various kinds of blocks and even mobs! A store might also provide a service such as a trading hall, repairing or enchanting items, building/landscaping for or looking after a customer's property or even just grinding.

Scrap Shop: Where players trade in beaten armor, damaged tools and blocks they have no use for, then the owner sells them to people who can't afford full grade armor.

Distribution Center: This is where things can then be delivered to the place that requests them where they can be bought, to someone who requests them for a price, to a rest stop, or to a hotel. Delivery requires a delivery system. Chests store the things that are requested, and there are signs for the places that requested them, so that they are delivered to the right place. Things that are requested are stored here until delivered.

Dump A place to place all your junk in, Place double chests in a small shack inside the dump where you can store your old tools and junk or add an area to place your useless blocks in. And when its full have workers collect the blocks and make them into something new or just destroy them. Put a few around the town for citizens to dispose of their useless junk.

Dungeon Arena A dungeon that a player goes into to fight hostile mobs. You could go into the Nether and slay Nether Mobs and the Wither to find the end of the dungeon, a bunker containing a prize and a portal back to the Overworld.

E - H[]

Editorial A place where people create several books on guides, tips, crafting recipes, etc.

Embassy Make other peoples' voices heard! Build offices that represents another server, a nearby city, or even mobs like villagers, creepers or endermen!

Enderman Art Show Put endermen in a room of blocks they can pick up. After a set amount of days, see how they changed it! Players can bet on certain blocks being moved. Make sure that the endermen are kept in a glass cage, though, or players might anger them. Make the room out of bedrock, as Endermen cannot teleport through them, and the glass only 2 blocks high as endermen cannot teleport through blocks that are shorter than them. Also remember that Endermen can despawn over time, unless they are named with a nametag.

Execution Zone- If somebody cheats or griefs, then you could have them put on trial and if they're found guilty, exile them, make them fight in the arena, or publicly carry out the death sentence in this place (Makes the most sense if it's a dictatorship OR medieval themed.)

Farm Have crops growing, with farmer villagers to take care of them. Raise and breed cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep. Sell the materials you get from the farm. You could sell animals as well.

Fire Station Griefing protection is first and last, but your wood constructions need a plan B. Fill a house with water buckets, lots of splash and lingering water bottles, armor enchanted to fire protection as well as potions of fire resistance, and horses ready to move out in maximum speed. If your city has a minecart network or a channel network, you can use minecarts or boats instead. As an extra measure, you could have a button in all of the houses to call the fire station, connected with redstone. In the fire station, you could have a wall of redstone torches, corresponding to the town's buildings, so when someone presses a fire button, the corresponding torch would turn off. Another way is to have a button in the fire station over the redstone torch connected to dispensers which will flood the house with water. This is not a very good idea since it will wash away all most redstone and decoration blocks, but it will save your city from burning to the ground.

Fountain – An aesthetic addition to any city. Hugely customizable, with many unique designs. Fountains can be used as a centerpiece, on roads, in parks, in buildings, etc.

Garden Make a big grassy area in the center of the town full of trees, flowers, and tall grass. Use street lights along a road to keep hostiles from spawning. If you feel creative, construct a lookout tower with a spiraling staircase up to the top, which has a view of the whole city. You could also add attractions such as caves filled with ores and charge people for a guided tour. Be creative with it!

Gas Station A place to buy minecarts, carrot on a stick, and 'snacks'. Make a duty so players must show what they're carrying. Build 'pumps' where you can get food for your horses, pigs, etc., (for transportation). For extra décor, you could even build a car wash at the gas station!

Glass Factory A large room with small rooms with many furnaces and glass manufacturing workers, you can also make automatic glass manufacturing with chests, hoppers and furnaces.

Great Under-Tier: This should be built at the very bottom of the city. Add lots of factories, refineries, et cetera. This place is likely to be heavily polluted and can have many workers. Add large "disposal pipes" that eject waste or slag (unwanted trash like smelted stone) either out of the city or into lava pools and fires or incinerators. Build large disposal furnaces that you can burn waste (or execute players) in.

Gym This is where you could work out. Have a practice fighting area and a parkour challenge. You could connect it to the swimming pool and other areas.

Hair Salon Make a place with chests and fill them with hair salon tools such as swords or shears for scissors, water bottles as hair gel, etc. Use "chairs" and make people who work there wear hairstylist suits. Add glass as mirrors so people can see how they look, and black dyed armor (or any color) as the capes that keep your clothes from getting "hairy".

Hall of Crafting Create a large building with displays of crafting recipes. Though this has little practical purpose after the introduction of the recipe book.

Harbor/Port Can only be built if your town is near the ocean or a river. It will be useful if your town is spread across several islands. Craft boats and build giant ships. Charge money to rent a canoe or rowboat and charge even more if it breaks. You could also have a fishing area with shops selling fish and fishing rods.

Hardware Store Build a big building and fill it up with hardware materials such as wooden planks (in all colors), cobblestone, stone, etc., make the shelves high and use ladders to get to them easily. Have many checkouts with people manning them.

Highway System Make a highway system in your city! Make exits and entrances in the highway. If your city is a big one, you can make several highway roads around your city and you can have them connected to each other. These can also be used to connect two or more cities. A beltway would be useful for navigating around the city's outskirts. You can even dig a long tunnel under the center of the city.

Hospital A place to care for injured players. Fill it with beds, healing potions, surgery rooms, and so on.

Hotel Where players can sleep and reside away from home.

Food Bar: Where hungry players can get something to eat. If you want you can have a "Food of the Day" or "Food of the Week", and maybe specials for the different times.

Twobedhotelroom — This is an example of a hotel room in Minecraft, albeit a rather small one. It contains two beds, an iron door with a button, and several other accessories.

Rooms: Obviously, the hotel rooms! Put in "dressers" (see Tutorials/Furniture for how to do that), chests for guests to put their luggage, a TV, some couches, perhaps a bathroom, and beds. Add an iron door to the entrance and put a wall around it with a button, so players can access a room with an authority. However, if you want more privacy in the rooms, consider using dark oak, spruce or birch doors instead, as they don't have windows in them. Don't forget to put an obvious button, lever or pressure plate on the inside of the room, or players won't be able to get out without an authority.

Swimming Pool and Spa: For the pool, remember to have a shallow end (players can touch the ground without going underwater), a drop-off (where the water gets deeper), and a deep end. For a hot tub, remember to have a seat along the edge and water with no current. This is where players can go to relax. For a more realistic hot tub, place soul sand at the bottom of or under the floor of the pool, so it creates bubble columns in the water.

Minecart with Chest: Some players are willing to carry their luggage all the way to their rooms, but others, well, others don't want to haul their luggage around. Place a few minecarts with chests between the 2 entrances in the hotel. Have an authority send the minecart that leads to your room out. After all, only they know which minecart leads to your room.

Stairs: Make stairs leading to the floors. You can do simple stairs, or you can do fancy spiral staircases. Make sure to add railings - the last thing you want is for your first customer to be your last customer because of falling to their death at the hotel!

Elevators: If you do not wish to use the stairs you can just use the elevator! it could be a series of pistons, for example, so the only walking you'll have to do is from one piston to the next.

I - M[]

Ice Rink Place packed ice or blue ice on the ground inside of a building and skate around on it. Using normal ice is not recommended as it melts easily. Have contests to see who can skate the fastest or spin the longest.

Incinerator Build a chamber open in the front and add lava or fire at the top, then allow citizens to throw their unwanted items into it so they can be incinerated. Best placed on highly polluted areas like dumps and manufacturing districts. For some extra realism, you could add a chimney with a campfire near the top so that smoke comes out.

Inn It could have an elevator, rooms, bathrooms, a lobby, even some miscellaneous rooms. Make sure that you have some chests, furnaces, a fridge, a crafting table, and maybe even other items. Use this for a passerby who stays for the night.

Jail When people break the rules, you could send them to jail. Build lots of cells and lock people inside. consider having an admin change them to adventure mode so they can't mine their way out. Using strong blocks for the walls is also a good way to prevent people from escaping. Another way is to put lava Or inside the walls, so if a prisoner attempts to dig out, the lav will flow on them, killing them. If you don't want a jail, you can fine people, instead if you are using money, or execute them.

A jail cell example.
Another cell.

Library: A place with many bookshelves, lecterns with books written about crafting, or the history of the city, comic books, novels or maybe even books about legends of Herobrine. Have librarian villagers running the place. You can also have a public enchantment table.

Lighthouse Build a tall tower with a light source on the top to serve as a navigational aid for players. Most modern lighthouses are automated and unmanned, and not likely to have much interior space, but older lighthouses typically have enough space inside to accommodate the lighthouse keepers.

Lodestone A place where players can adjust their compasses with a lodestone so they can easily find their way back to the city if they leave. The lodestone can be free to use, or you can have a usage fee. If you are building your city in Nether or End, this building is even more important, because compasses can't work without lodestones in those dimensions. In Nether or End, it might be a good idea to place a lodestone near the return portal.

Map Room A place where there are maps. It can be anything from a small, simple 1 map in the map room to a map room with the entire world. There can also be historical maps that show the past. It should not include locations of other players. It can show locations of important places.

Maze Mostly for people who get bored. This can be used for prizes. It should be made out of mostly materials that are hard to break, like obsidian.

Memorial What better way to express yourself than build a giant statue/building to someone or something? Or how about a huge statue of your skin? Perhaps build a zombie villager monument if you want to pay respects to all the villagers that got infected or killed.

Mine Build ladders down to layer -48 and let people have easy access to ores. They can extend it and you can block off some caves and ravines. Destroy spawners in dungeons and operate a first come, first served policy. You can also use a deep, natural cave for a mine, if you find a good one. Remember, you cannot make any mines if you play on superflat, unless you customize it in certain ways. A good way to mine is to branch-mine. It's efficient, safe and useful. It is recommended in extreme hills because of the emeralds available. It might be a good idea to build this near a surface smelter or refinery.

How to start a branch mine:

1. Dig a 3×3 staircase (Not going straight down).

2. Figure out what level you want to miners to dig at.

3. Dig a 3×3 tunnel connected to the end of your staircase, it can be off any side(s).

4. Dig 1×2 tunnels in your 3×3 tunnel for your miners to use (Optional: Pre-mine some tunnels).

5. Continue your 3×3 tunnel for as long as you wish and add as many 1×2 tunnels as you wish.

Museum Make a huge art museum to show every painting in the game. You could also build pixel art and statues with blocks and put them to your museum. You can also make a historical museum showing the history of your city, a museum to show every block in the game, or reconstruct structures or biomes.

N - R[]

Nether Colony Build a village in the Nether to expand your city beyond the realm of the Overworld.

Observatory Make a building with a ladder in the middle and fences on the roof to stop people from getting hurt by falling. Use to see the stars and the moon and the sun. Remind players to switch to far render distance and use spyglasses!

Palace A place to consolidate your power and live. Not usually used by the humble. May include a personal tower to overlook the city.

Parking Add fence posts in front of stores and other buildings, where players can leash their mounts. If the city has a channel network or a port, you can have docks for players' boats.

Parkour Arena Make a structure of your choice, and start creating parkour stages. Be sure to include a way for players to get back to a starting point if they fail a jump.

Legislature If you choose to make your world a democracy, build a Parliament, Congress, Senate or National Assembly where player representatives can meet and discuss issues and vote on national issues. Make it unicameral or bicameral, for example, maybe a Chamber of Representatives that is popularly elected on the server and a Chamber of Elders that is elected by player interest groups (For example, "Miners" elect a representative, "Doctors" elect one, "Farmers" elect their own, as well).

Pet Shop Here, you can sell animals such as Axolotls, wolves, parrots and stray cats. They are sold untamed, and then the buyer can tame them if they want to using the animals respective foods. If you want, you can even sell spawn eggs (Watch out with the hostiles) and golems. Remember to keep the pets in cages, and optionally have a home delivery service. Be careful, as the wild cats will despawn unless nametagged

Racing Stadium Have an arena of various shapes and have racers who could race pigs or horses. See who can get to the finish first! See the race referee section in the command block tutorial, multiplayer applications section. Players can bet on what rider or animal they think will win and prizes will be given to winning riders.

Police Station Make a building for law enforcement to work in, Send them to bring criminals to jail or to kill monsters.

Portal Stations Place stations all around your city (depending on the size) so that your residents could easily travel to the End and the Nether. You could decorate the station with end stone and/or netherrack for a cooler touch. Note that you can't create an end portal in survival mode without cheats.

Post Office Make a large building with a main desk and stores off to the side that sells paper, ink sacs, and feathers. Hire people to be mail carriers that carry mail to other users. Users can (for a fee) write letters and send items to other users. You can also make chests on fence posts to be mailboxes.

Power Plant - A large factory-like building that can be a variety of types, used to create energy, possibly in the form of a redstone signal. You can also have "power lines" made of tripwire running from the plant.

- Nuclear - Use gray blocks to simulate uranium. Add large exhaust towers with mass smoke generators inside. Remember to have it maintained. You can use command blocks to inflict the Wither status effect to anyone who comes too close to the reactors, to simulate the effects of radiation.
- Hydroelectric - Build a dam near a large reservoir.
- Fire - Use large fires and use wood to fuel them. Furnaces work, too.
- Mob - Put captured mobs in glass cages to use as a kind of fuel by either suffocating, physically killing them, or dropping gravel or anvils from above. Add fires where the drops will go so that they are a kind of fuel.
- Solar - Use a lot of daylight sensors to create power.
- Microwave- Same as solar, but place the daylight sensors on a space station that is beamed down with beacons.
- Fantasy- Maybe a more mystical or science fiction like source is used? Perhaps the city is powered by the lasers of guardians or an ancient wizard's mind.
- Wind- Build a lot of wind turbines in a relatively open area.

Psychic This house may be built with netherrack or any dark blocks. Torches and candles will give it an old feeling. Hire someone to be psychic, and to use command blocks, chat, books or any other way you like. Place some enchantment tables, if you want. Adding cobwebs is another idea.

Pyrotechnics This shop is where you buy gunpowder, fire charges, firework stars, fireworks, TNT, flint and steel, charcoal, etc. Hire pyrotechnicians to make these items and have them put on a fireworks show for holidays. Utilizing a fireworks license system will work, too.

Radar Center Build Have a lot of giant satellite dishes and control centers. Make sure to put a map on it to detect vehicles, planes, etc.

Refinery / Smeltery Build a building and add a lava farm and a lot of furnaces. Ores brought from the mines can be smelted and brought to silos or factories for storage or use.

Religious Structure This could be a modern-day real-world structure such as a Church, Mosque or Hindu temple, a historical one such as a Greek or Aztec temple or something entirely fictional. These could vary in size from an enormous cathedral to a tiny shrine You can have an area for worship and devotion, or the carrying out of rituals such as Baptisms or Wudu.

Some might have a way to practice magic or perform sacrifices, Gather players to be priests or use cleric villagers.

Repair Shop Make a store that repairs items for players, for a fee. Have lots of anvils in it.

Restaurant Sell drinks and foods.You should be able to order meals from a menu.

Build tables outside or inside so that customers can enjoy their meals on the premise. There can be chests behind the counter, you can hire people to work at the restaurant behind the counter, or the villagers could be placed here to sell food. Just in case the food runs out, there should be a room behind the counter for the kitchen with even more food storage and crafting capabilities. If you are good with redstone, you could automate the process. For cities inhabited by zombies, put a bunch of redstone cages that can drop villagers so zombies can eat them.

S - U[]

School Have a school to teach players about building, mining, crafting, brewing, enchanting, farming, fighting, and redstone. Make a building (size depends on the kind of school — for instance, an elementary school would be small (20-50 blocks), while a college would be much, much bigger (150 to 300 blocks) and fill it with desks, chests with textbooks in them, a teacher's desk. You can have all kinds of rooms at school. For example:

Classrooms: Where your students come to learn. You can teach Science, Social Studies, Arts and Crafts, Magic, etc. Put desks, chairs, a teacher's desk, chests with textbooks (written books), and a blackboard, or use the chalkboard if you're in Education Edition). Perhaps the teacher could have a stock of signs and could use them to 'write' on the board, by putting the signs on it and typing the information.

Detention: If students are naughty or break the rules, they go to detention! Detention can be anything, from sitting there thinking about what you've done to extra homework. If the students are exceedingly naughty, they could get suspended or even expelled!

Cafeteria: After many long school hours, this is where the kids can go to grab some grub. You may have a menu. Maybe the kids need to spend "lunch money" for lunch, food may be free, or the students may bring their own lunches. Make sure no poisonous food gets in.

Nurse's office: If your students are injured or ill, send them here! The nurse may be able to help!. Be sure to utilise potions, milk and food.

Halls: Finally, the halls. It may be a simple hallway, or it might be a big, bustling corridor. Don't forget lockers! An example of a locker is iron blocks in the shape of a rectangle with an iron door and chests inside to lighten your load.

Science Lab Build a place to test potions and create new inventions. Don't forget those safety goggles!

Sewers Make sewers underground that link all the houses and buildings. You can have the sewers flow into a sewage treatment plant, unless you are building a medieval city, so the filthy water can be cleaned. Use mossy cobblestone or mossy stone bricks as walls and add a water stream. Don't forget to light it, as otherwise, the sewers will become a dungeon. You could also use the sewers as a secret way of transportation and hide entrances in important buildings.

Silo Build a large warehouse-like building and add ladders and chests for you to store the output from factories and it can double as a store of waste to be taken to incinerators or a contraband destruction facility.

Ski Hill Build paths down mountains and hills. Different paths can appear to have different difficulties based off of the hill incline, bumps, and turns. Spruce trees, chairlifts, ramps, cabins, and snowmen would all make great decorations for the trail.

Skyscraper Build an incredibly tall building out of gray or brown blocks and have lots of windows. You can add a piston elevator that allows players to choose which floor to visit. If you are building your city in superflat, you can build extremely tall skyscrapers. Make a floor plan, which include thins such as shopping centres, offices, apartments, hotels,or something related to leisure activities such as an observatory.

You can add mechanical floors at intervals which includes something like a control room that controls the redstone signal in the building.

Slaughterhouse Build a medium-sized building where unwanted animals are lined up to drown or burn (not with lava though) or whatever suits you. Collect their drops and give them to meat and/or wool shops. Note: Do not build this if your city is a Peaceful Place.

Space Station You could build a place either on the ground or just under the build limit, or in the End, You could use a TNT cannon facing upwards to propel you to infinity and beyond! Remember to have a ground control and all the other stuff. You could build a fake moon out of end stone or normal stones and add slimes as aliens. Make it very futuristic and have lots of redstone. You could build two: one in space and one on the ground. You need to hire astronauts. Build a 'rocket' to explore the universe.

Stadium Have a big stadium where players can compete in sports such as spleef and paintball. Add lots of seating for people can sit and watch.

Surveillance Room/Security Office Get somebody to explore the whole city with a large map. Then, put the map in an item frame, and you will be able to see where other players are! Tip: Hide this room.

Suspension Bridge Build a large suspension bridge across the river. Build towers out of iron blocks and use wool to make main cables and use fences as vertical cables. You can use most expensive blocks like diamond blocks, gold blocks and emerald blocks.

An example of a suspension bridge.
The same bridge at night.

Tattoo Shop A place where you can change your skin. (Note: Only possible in Bedrock Edition.)

TP Hub: Use Command Blocks with the /tp [coordinates] command to make a TP Hub for fast travel. A cheap alternative to making a massive minecart railway system.

Train Station (Life Size) If you want to build a train station with the trains about the size of real-world ones and not minecarts, this will help. Make sure the trains are big enough so players can walk around in them but not so big it seems off (train carriages 5-6 blocks wide is probably the best option). For a small station, you can just build platforms alongside the tracks (make sure they're far enough away so the train doesn't appear to scrape it), sheltered benches, a vending machine, a wheelchair ramp, a small single-level parking lot, and an automatic ticket machine. If you want, the tracks the platforms are next to can be sidings so trains not stopping at the station can pass by. For large stations, feel free to take inspiration from large stations in the real world (eg; Chicago Union Station or New York Grand Central Station). Be sure to add lots of tracks and platforms (maybe with a large dome covering them all), fast-food restaurants, small stores, escalators, elevators, a ticket counter, bathrooms, a hub outside on the road for buses/trams and taxis, and a large, maybe stacked, parking lot.

Tropical Island A perfect vacation spot which only needs a boat dock or bridge to the mainland. Decorations can add to the feeling of vacationing with tropical trees and beaches filled with tourist items.

TV Studio Gives people something to do such as filming soap operas or winning rewards on a game show. Hire directors, producers, actors and actresses, build TV show sets, have ratings etc. This could provide a lot of fun for players on a server.

Upgrade Shop A place where people can upgrade their tools or armor for a price that depends on what level of armor you're upgrading from.

W - Z[]

Wall — A tall wall made of wood and stone

Walls An important part of a city's defenses, keeping both hostile mobs and attacking players out of the city. Walls should be tall and made out of sturdy materials like stone. Walls should have gates which can be closed if the city is attacked. For more tips for constructing walls, see Tutorials/Defense#Walls.

Water Tower A tall building with a tank filled with drinkable water on the top. As water towers are usually very tall, it may also have an observation deck at the top.

Water Treatment Plant Make all of your city's waste and sewers run into it.

Zoo Try to get one of each mob in a chamber or enclosure where players can look at them. You can make mini-biomes resembling a mob's home, perhaps showing off the mob’s natural behavior, such as areas for dolphins to jump between bodies of water, prey animals for foxes to pounce on, or flowers for bees to pollinate. Be careful with mobs that might despawn or escape and harm players. Also, remember that spiders can climb walls and some mobs can teleport. Optionally, you might only put certain kinds of mobs on display.

Government[]

Note: If you don't want to have a jail, you can fine citizens who break rules through money or their belongings. Alternatively, you can use a server ban.

Government Buildings[]

Note: Government Buildings are far more useful in Multiplayer, but if you want you can build it in Singleplayer.

City/Town Hall Have a huge building for the mayor, the mayor's assistants, and the people in charge of certain things (such as law enforcement, health and welfare, city expansions, etc.) You could even build a huge political complex around it with a secret service headquarters, embassies for mobs or other cities or servers, and of course, parking for everyone.

Embassies Make other people's/mobs' voices/sounds heard! Think that pigs have a bad deal being ridden all over the place? Set up an embassy of pigs with other pig lovers to convince the government to stop the abuse. You could also create embassies for servers or mods.

Parliament If you choose to make your world a democracy, build a Parliament, Congress or National Assembly where player representatives can meet and discuss issues and vote on national issues. Make it unicameral or bicameral. For example, maybe a Chamber of Representatives that is popularly elected on the server and a Chamber of Elders that is elected by player interest groups (For example, "Miners" elect a representative, "Doctors" elect one, "Farmers" elect their own, as well.)

Legislature This is a building that lets different faction leaders and operators discuss and resolve server issues. Have government embassies in each faction base. This is perfect if you have multiple cities as there can be a capital and every city can express their concerns and request aid.

Treasury/National Bank Holds valuable items or currency for the government. This could be similar to Fort Knox. These could also be the warehouses used in the communism system.

Palace Here lives the leader, such as the king or president, or server creation, consider taking inspiration from real-world palaces.

Government Systems[]

Note: Government systems are only possible in multiplayer. If you're in singleplayer, these ideas may be useless.

Democracy
- A style of government where elections for a leader [Either directly or through the legislature] and a legislative body are held timely.
- A group of elected players as a legislative body to represents all players and vote for laws and decisions, although in some cases allow players to vote directly instead.
- There will be a document that defines the state and the institutions of government and consists checks and balance in order to protect players from abuse of power of the rulers.
- An independent judiciary to punish rule-breakers.

Plutocracy
- Special privileges to the rich while the poor don't get good treatment
- If someone has low amounts of money, force them into work.
- Everything is expensive.
- If a rich player becomes poor, they join the many other poor in the outskirts of the city where they are then forced into work.
- In this system a player will have to work very hard to achieve success.

Dictatorship/Oligarchy
- There is one player (the owner for example) or a small group that tightly controls all aspects of the state and will often ban or tightly control groups and meetings through harsh laws (such as torture, forced labour, or sent somewhere far away from the city) and secret police that spy on all players.
- The ruler is worshipped like a god through excessive praising, naming locations after him/her and giant statues of him/herself.
- Rebellions start frequently in this system.

Socialism
- All industry is owned collectively; that could mean by the government, or it could mean communally by groups of players, but nobody works for any private individual.
- Wealth is collected by the government from the citizens and is spread evenly among the population.
- There are no classes since nobody is anyone's boss in a company.
- All land is owned collectively, either by the government or by equal groups of players.
- Works best in a world rich in resources to facilitate the even spread of commodities to the masses.
- Leaders in the government or in cooperatives should decide where to build new structures (for example, houses, farms, banks).
- Leaders can be chosen in any way you want

Winner Takes All
- Whoever assassinates the king is the king.
- Alternatively, it's not a case of whoever kills the last king, it's the case of who's the strongest. For instance, the person with the most diamond equipment could be considered the strongest, but this can also be extended to control of territory, influence over the population, etc. It could also be a group of people rather than just one individual.
- Might cause anarchy and constant fighting.
- Leads to totally different governing styles over short periods of time.
- Lots of people will be trying to hire assassins or even kill the king themselves, so be careful if you are the ruler!

Total Anarchy
- There will be no government and therefore no laws.
- There will be much crime — griefing, trapping, murder, etc.
- People will build and destroy anything wherever and whenever they want.
- Note: If you felt that you put too much work into your city to have riots, crime, and griefing, this style of government is not ideal.

Clan Battle
- Have groups together under a clan leader, ideally with clear ways of distinguishing one another.
- Wage war with the other clans on sight!
- The clan leader may be dethroned by a stronger one, and battles will be held to see who is the strongest.

Crime City
- Strictly enforced rules by police and admins.
- Anyone caught committing a crime will be sent to one half of the city, while everyone else lives on the other side of the city. Separated by a wall.
- Poorer people have to live close to the wall, while higher class people get to live in the nicer part of the city away from the wall.
- Note: If you felt that you put too much work into your city to have riots, crime, and griefing on one half of it, this style of government is not ideal.

Feudalism
- There is a single ruler, they rule everything.
- They would rule over any number of lords that govern smaller sections. These sections of would be divided into settlements with local governments which rule over one or two villages.

Anarcho-capitalism
- There is no government; rather, corporations and individual players make all decisions, and enforce them with privately funded police forces.
- Taxes are not necessary as no government exists and any typically public development is undertaken by private corporations based on demand and supply.
- A corporation might be able to exploit its power to harm competing businesses.

Roman Republic
- There is a group of players (the senate) that make the decisions.
- The Senate Chooses two players as their leaders (The Consuls) they only serve their position for a fixed term.
- If the city is in a crisis The Senate and The Consuls can choose a dictator, he will only serve until the crisis is resolved, he has absolute power.

Syndicalism
- A potentially more workable way of anarchy.
- No central government, no banks, no money (players will have to find a way to trade!).
- The economy is run by a council consisting of players representing every part of the economy (potions, farming, cobblestone, etc.); these council members are democratically chosen and represent their industry's workers, but have no more power than the average member of the community.
- No one "owns" any land, not even the council members. Since there is no government, there's no police force to protect private property.
- There are no laws. However, banning is still an option in case of hacking, etc.
- If anyone doesn't like the city, they can just leave, since there is no government.
- Do anything possible to make sure that no one player has more influence than any other (no social or economic hierarchy), but always have the ban hammer at hand to keep things from getting out of control.

Theocracy
- A form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the state's supreme civil ruler. Since said god or deity is usually absent from decision making, a self-appointed or elected leader or leaders of the religion of said god or deity will rule instead through the personal interpretation of the laws commanded by the god in that religion's written law.
- You could use real gods or deities, or make up your own! (Example: make the citizens believe in ancient religions, or worshipping Notch as a god).

Containment
- Useful if your country is in anarchy or high unrest. There are several "safe zones" in the city/country.
- The safe zones are controlled by the police and/or army.
- If you want, you can quarantine them. This means making it impossible or hard to get in or out.
- The places which are not safe zones, are anarchy, (civil) war, apocalypse, etc.
- Those are not controlled by the government and you can do whatever you want there.
Autocracy
- This is a form of government where the monarch has complete and total control similar to a dictator but their family and their rein has been long established.
- Power can be passed from the king to one of his self-chosen advisors or proclaimed son where upon that king´s death that power is then passed down to that advisor or son making them the new king.
- Keep in mind if this political system is chosen for your city and on a multiplayer server the king´s own advisors could try to plot against the the king to take power for themselves.

If you can think other systems of government, feel free to put them here! (Tip: Put the suggestions above this line, not beneath it.)

More Ideas[]

Here are more ideas for a metropolis that do not fit any of the previously mentioned categories.

Alliance

An alliance is composed of several cities that agree to protect each other and allow each other to put military forces into each other’s territory. They also agree to not attack each other. When a treaty is signed an alliance forms. Other cities can join or leave an alliance.

Building Contest Hold a contest where the players build structures. The structures can be pretty much anything, ranging from houses and flying machines to pixel art. Include various prizes, such as rare blocks, and make sure to have a few judges. (At least two are recommended). After it's over, winners' entries stay up (and, if you have WorldEdit or structure blocks, you can even move them somewhere else), while the losers' entries can be taken down using whatever method you like, such as TNT. If you need to build an important building, like city hall or central railway station, you can host a design competition where the winning design gets built or is moved to the right place with WorldEdit or structure blocks.

Carpenter Have a carpentry where you can purchase expansions onto your house, as well as have houses built or destroyed. Make the currency to purchase not too cheap, but not too expensive, for example, 5 emeralds for a room 5×9, or whatever you decide. Another example could be 10 emeralds for a 12×12 garage with a fully openable door with redstone. Or you can do other things like making the price cheaper, if they give the carpenter some items to build with, if not free, if all needed items are given.

Deadly Labyrinth Use the general maze building idea but only add lethal traps and dangerous mobs. Add viewing windows and station armed and armored guards at each exit and window. Only throw criminals and griefers in. Make the walls as strong as possible.
- Ideas: Add mobs, bounty hunters and guards and turn it into a "game". Relatives of the criminals can send in healing potions and food and other supplies. If (somehow) they survive then either
  1. Give them a reprieve OR,
  2. Make them fight in the arena

Defense Don't let the monsters take over the city! Make sure you have walls around your metropolis. You can put cacti on top of the wall to keep spiders out. You can also add archer towers if you want. Just make a 3×3 square on the wall with ladders to get up to them. Add moats with lava for the death of your enemies. Just be creative!

Delivery Service Deliver things from the distribution center to where they are requested or to the player who requests them. If you have a distribution center, then this is a must have. Use pistons to push chests plus some buttons and a player or a road made out of redstone blocks if you are in Bedrock Edition, a player/some players that put the items from the chest that has the sign that indicates who/where requested the items into their inventory and then bring them to the place/player that requested them. Then the requested items are put in another chest within a chosen amount of blocks of the player’s bed, where the place/player that requested them wants them to be where a chest is or near the entrance/near one of the entrances of the house that the player is in. If there is no chest that is under any of these conditions, they build one that meets any of the conditions.

Factions Make factions for small groups like warriors, miners, lumberjacks, knights, farmers, et cetera.

Field Trip Hold field trips for the kids at school! You can take them to a museum, or even pay a visit to a nearby village and give them a small lesson on trading.

Fire Hydrant In every important building, put a water bucket in an item frame, so that if a fire somehow starts it can be removed simply by a right-click.

Fireworks Show Use a bunch of redstone, dispensers, and different types of fireworks to make a special firework show!

Foreign trade Make a foreign trade where only the government workers are able to trade out some of the tax "money" they receive to purchase items not available in their region.

Games Build an area where players can play games.

Historical District Make this part of your city more historical such as medieval buildings, Victorian buildings, any old fashioned era you can think of! Make sure there's a good few museums around here. You can even go back to the time of the Neanderthals!

Holidays Have special days to celebrate. They can be real or fictional, just have fun!

Interior Design Nobody wants to live in a house without furniture! In every house you build (you should end up building a lot of them), add special furniture. Use pistons or fences with pressure plates for tables, stairs and signs for chairs, and bookshelves to decorate your houses. Try making a computer with an iron block and a painting, plus redstone and a lever to be a mouse.

Law enforcement Add a set law enforcement such as regular police, the FBI or the CIA, for example. Make the tasks as in real life. Regular police patrol streets and do normal desk work, the FBI do even more desk work and some light crime investigation, and the CIA does most of the crime investigation.

Mob of Honor Why not have a mob that your city honors? Choose any animal or monster to pay tribute to. You can hold festivals, build statues and memorials, or you can even make the citizens in your city that kind of mob!

National Park Close off an area of your metropolis and leave it how it is, with various biomes, mobs and structures. Make a "Leave No Trace" rule here so that players are not allowed to alter the area, so if they do not follow it, they will be punished. While constructing your national park, make cabins for guests to stay in, with a few bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, a balcony, etc., and use gravel roads to connect them. If there is a stronghold located within your national park, you can dig down until you get to the stronghold and then add ladders or stairs so people can get there. It is also advised to activate the End Portal. National parks can also be made in The Nether or The End

Nether Access Build a nether portal and let people get to the Nether. Even better, if it spawns you right next to a nether fortress, then you can make a tour and block off dead ends. Or just make a netherrack mine. Build a nether-style building around the portal so people can easily see where it is. Cannot be made in The End or Nether cities, consider "Overworld Access" there.

Olympic Games Build a massive stadium with different racing and hurdles event where contestants can compete against each other in various sports such as archery or minigames.

Parkour Area Test your parkour skills out! Place hard-to-jump to blocks, and place them in random areas. Also, make more challenges, like nausea for the whole course.

Pest Patrol When annoying mobs invade, call the pest patrol! Remember to include tamed wolves, tamed ocelots, iron and snow golems. Don't forget weapons and armor! Have a chest for them to put mob drops in.

Pet Show For all pets. Have events like cats scaring creepers into a pit, and dogs killing as many mobs as they can. Warning: The animals might die, so be careful! Make sure to heal them between rounds.

Playground Square off an area and build a jungle-gym for the little ones! This creation can include slides, ladders, bridges, huts, and other things like that. Be creative! Also, make sure you build a sitting area for the parents to relax!

Protocols Have protocols! Invite your citizens to the protocol and talk about government changes, e.g., higher taxes.

Public Park Set aside a large grassy area with lots of trees. A lake or a river would look nice, so try to build it near one of these. If players are caught dropping unwanted items on the ground, charge a fee for littering. Fountains, statues and other decorative things can be used to make it more attractive.

Races This would be an arena that is long and has seating on the sides (they could be going up like a slope) dig a 1+ block deep canal in the middle and have it at least 5 to 6 blocks wide. Fill it with water source blocks. Put some turns and obstacles in it and you can have boat races! You can even use ice in boat races! Or, instead of using water/ice, keep it dry and race on pigs or on foot, with speed potions in the latter case. You can also use horses for the race.

Redstone Build weird mechanisms with redstone in your buildings or make areas full of them that makes your city look more advanced. You can do things such as wiring all the buildings, so they have electric lighting. Or make a clock tower, or track your resident's movements, or have streetlamps that turn on at night.

Religion You can make up your own religion that you want your citizens to follow. This religion can include myths and legends about things, such as the ender dragon!

Rubbish Bins In the streets of your city, you could have chests simulating rubbish bins. You could add hoppers beneath and add a water flow or minecart, so it goes to a disposal center or lava.

Save the Mobs When passive mobs invade the streets, call a group to keep mobs from making traffic jams and put those mobs in a farm where they belong. Better established if a group would previously dispose of other mobs killing the passive mobs.

Spawn Base Build a big building as a spawn building for people to spawn in. Put a gate, command give items, and city law and rules to show to newer players to the city.

Story Make your city have a secret backstory, some hidden evil lurking in the darkness, and maybe even recruit some players on a server to role-play for the citizens of the city. At some point, the citizens may have to go into a battle against the Dark Lord or some other monster army. Make sure to add lots of detail and make it exactly as you imagine it to be!

Training Make a massive training area that teaches the player every single trick in the book of Minecraft. From splash potion jumping, to sniping with the bow and arrow. If you think that the player is experienced (both in terms of skill and actual XP points) enough, then it is possible you can recruit them for a guard.

Treaties Treaties are agreements signed between 2 or more cities that change some things, end some things, ban some things, transfer things, and/or allow things. They are either in a book or on signs. They can be very long. Beware when signing it as it can be broken.

War Build forts, bunkers and wage war against castles full of traps, monsters (creepers are not recommended), other players, challenges, or other cities. Build TNT cannons, build an army, and build a navy.

Award loyal soldiers with positions like general or lieutenant.

Weapons License In a peaceful city, players shouldn't be running around murdering people! You can set up a system where anybody holding a weapon without a license is thrown in jail. Set a price and expiration date and only let trusted citizens own them.

WMD Lab You can use this as an animal breeding ground or assembly base. Make a big, multi-level building, add iron doors and branch off into smaller labs. Add crazy experiments and (if legal) you can use POW's (prisoners of war) as test subjects. Make sure there are no windows. Security is likely to be tight.

World War

Same as war, but much more intense, with most/all cities at war, plus air forces added. Be careful as lag machines might be made by the losing side/sides in an attempt to force the winning side/sides to agree on their terms but they also threaten to drop the frames per second and maybe even the ticks per second to near 0 or at 0. This may mean that the server could crash due to the ticks per second being pushed to 0. So be careful and only allow it if you are willing to risk the server crashing due to lag machines.

Currency[]

Note: The use of currency is mainly for multiplayer - to trade currencies to get items. However, it's possible to trade with villagers, of which emeralds are the currency.

Try having a currency so people can buy and sell things in your city. Good currency is usually something with practical value that follows a non-finite standard to prevent inflation. If you want a finite standard, you should be careful in order to avoid inflation. Therefore, great currencies to use are emeralds and emerald blocks (which are worth 9 emeralds each). This has the added benefit of allowing you to make villager shops with no difficulty. Another good currency would be Brick = $1, Iron = $10, Gold = $25, Copper = $40, Diamond = $50, Netherite = $75, and Emerald = $100. Here's a list of common currencies with notes about their usage:

Cobblestone: As one of the most common items, this is a good material for small transactions such as building supplies (ex. 5 Cobblestone = 1 Glass Block) and farm materials
Wood Planks/Logs: This is a good all-around easy to use currency, and it has a definite and well-defined value in crafting and building. It is hard to make automatic Wood farms, so "money farming" is more difficult
Wheat/Bread: Wheat and Bread (also Carrots, Potatoes, and Beetroot) serve as an excellent currency. Though they can be farmed, a slight issue, these are very useful and villager-trading accepted items great for small currency. The farming aspect of these items is not enough of an issue that these should not be used, however
Bricks: The only practical advantage to using Bricks as money is that they look like Iron and Gold Ingots, making them recognizable as currency immediately. They are not able to be farmed, a good thing for a currency, but are nearly useless except to builders of brick buildings. The same also goes for Nether Bricks
Literature: Paper, Books, and Bookshelves, though farmable and mostly useless, could serve as a currency. Remember that you can also write in books, that can be extremely useful. Knowledge is power, right? Also, if you use a books signed by you as a currency, your citizens could never farm or obtain illegally the currency, and it would be very useful.
Coal: This is a very helpful and obtainable resource, making it a perfect currency. It is very difficult to farm as well
Redstone: First, beware of using redstone as currency, as it tends to be very easy to find. It is very cheap, so it could be used a small currency (Like a half-dollar)
Nether Quartz: Though occasionally useful in building or redstone, nether quartz is not as great of a currency as Diamond or Wood. However, being non-farmable and mildly useful, it is an adequate currency
Iron: This is a handy material for currency since it has 3 "levels", those being Nugget, Ingot, and Block. For example, 1 Iron Nugget may be worth 2 Cobblestone, and an Iron Block may be worth a Diamond. Be careful though, since iron is easily farmed. However, the effort an Iron Farm takes may make it worthwhile as a currency
Gold: Similar to Iron, but rarer. Since Gold farms are harder to make, Gold is harder to abuse as a currency.
Diamond: Diamonds are arguably the 2nd best multiplayer currency, as they are rare, their value is well-defined, and they are not farmable.
Emerald: An all-around helpful currency as Emerald is compatible with villagers, but beware of making Emeralds worth too much as they can be bought quite cheaply by anyone with a Paper or Wheat farm
Nether Stars/Beacons: A very hard to collect item, the nether star would make an excellent currency. It could be worth, say, 20 Diamonds. It is not farmable and very useful, making it as perfect of a currency as Diamond or Wood.
Leaves: As leaves are uncraftable and have 8 different types, leaves may be a good currency for your city. And because of that, you could make a system with different types of leaves having different values, like this: 5 Oak Leaves = 1 Birch Leaf, 2 Birch Leaves = 1 Spruce Leaf, 5 Spruce Leaves = 1 Savanna Leaf, 2 Savanna Leaves = 1 Jungle Leaf, 5 Jungle Leaves = 1 Dark Oak Leaf, 2 Dark Oak Leaves = 1 Crimson Leaf, 5 Crimson Leaves = 1 Warped Leaf. As you may see, we have made a system for your currency. Also, here Oak and Birch leaves value less because they are more common, and Nether leaves value more because you need to go the Nether to get them.
Netherite: Netherite is the best multiplayer currency, it does not burn in lava, their value is well defined, they are very rare, and they are not farmable.
Copper: Copper is easy to use as a currency, it is easily recognized as a currency, but it is farmable, however, but this is not a reason to not use it.

Money Plugins: You could find a plugin that is for money, use that for currency. It could involve transactions, etc.
Money Commands: If you are good with redstone, you could set up a system with command blocks that tracks a player's "money", without it being easily hackable with creative mode server builders.

Note that you do not necessarily need a currency as you can do trades and such, but it is a more fun alternative.

General Tips[]

Roads[]

Roads are present in virtually every city, but making them look nice is actually more complicated than one might expect.

To start, roads tend to be direct, fast, smoothly curved routes. Certainly, any road that isn't at least about 7 meters wide shouldn't have 90-degree bends that are intended to run without stopping.

Roads also tend not to be steep, in real life, anything over 1/2 block up or down for every 6 blocks horizontally would be considered moderately steep. Anything more than about 1/2 block up for every 3 blocks horizontally for long sections would be considered very steep, and other than in mountainous terrain, be limited to residential streets.

In Minecraft, terrain tends to vary on a smaller scale than in real life, and be much steeper as well.

Usually, long, wide "highway" type roads are as straight as possible, as cheap as possible, and require the least amount of terraforming possible. If there is a 30-meter-wide circular crater, sweeping around it smoothly is usually better than bridging it.

If there is a tall mountain in the way, going straight up it is not likely to be cheap to make or easy to travel. Go slightly up and around, if there needs to be a route to the top, make it connect to the main road and spiral up the mountain.

There are also multiple scales and types of roads with different qualities.

City Street:

Zombie pigman with enchanted diamond sword an armor — A city street intersection, complete with traffic lights

Recommended material, gray/black concrete and yellow terracotta.

Should have clear lanes.

Should have a lot of intersections and traffic lights.

Should be 3-9 blocks wide.

Should have many branch-offs.

Should cut through any obstacle that can be removed in less than a minute.

Should not be too steep.

Should wind around any other obstinate that is too big to remove.

Dirt/sand/gravel path:

Recommended material: Dirt, sand, dirt path or podzol.

Should wind around any obstacle, even small trees, shouldn't bridge anything bigger than a small stream.

Should be 1 to 3 blocks wide.

Can be any reasonably walk-able steepness (up to 1/2 slope,)

Small rural gravel or partial-stone road road:

Recommended material: Stone, cobblestone, stone bricks

Should wind around any natural structure or well-established construction. Feel free to gouge out rock-formations, place support-beams, etc as needed for road to be placed on. These generally should not be connected to any large long bridges, only small stone or wood ones with no extra support needed.

Should be 2 to 3 blocks wide.

Should be 3 to 7 blocks wide.

Should generally be under 1/3 slope. But avoid sloping in general as long as it doesn't mean tunneling through mountain-ranges or bridging valleys.

Downtown street:

Recommended material: Stone, obsidian, or any other road-like material.

Keep it as straight as possible, even if terraforming is needed.

Keep it as flat as possible, even if terraforming is needed, it may be small, but remember, thousands of people, rickshaws, pigs, horses, cars, chariots, carriages, magic carpets, elephants or pod racers use it daily.

Should generally be the equivalent of 1-2 lanes with 2 sidewalks, this could be anywhere from 5-17 blocks wide if sidewalks are included.

Commuter street:

Recommended material: Stone, obsidian, or other road-like materials.

Should be direct, efficient, but cost-effective as well, tunnels and bridges are fine, but only if they are needed. Preferably at most 1/4th slope. stores mightbe nearby.

Suburban street:

Recommended material: Stone, cobblestone, or stone bricks.

1-2 lanes equivalent, a small sidewalk or possibly not, purely houses nearby. Can be up to 1/3, or possibly even 1/2 slope. Should do as little earth-moving as possible and doesn't need to be very efficient as a through street. Typically 3 to 11 blocks wide.

Intercity Highway:

Recommended material: Stone, obsidian, or other road-like materials.

Curves around things, but avoids sharp curves at all costs. Generally stays flat and direct with no stopping areas. Only becomes steep to go through mountain passes. Does not dodge light construction, simply tramples straight through it. Bridges anything but moderate-sized oceans. Typically 15 to 23 blocks wide, but may be smaller in pre-industrial societies.

Freeway:

Recommended material: Pretty much anything road-like you can get your hands on.

A freeway is a road designed for high-speed vehicular traffic. No walking or parking is allowed in freeways, so allow only people riding mounts to use it. Entrances and exits should be provided only at intersections that connect to other roads. Opposing directions of travel should be separated by median strips or barriers. Goes nearly straight, never exceeds about 1/8th slope, obliterates or bores through anything necessary excluding centers of cities or enemy territory (then wars are fought over its construction). The road should be about thirty blocks wide and as flat as possible. Bridges and tunnels can be built whenever needed, and no bridge type or tunnel is too expensive or extravagant for something like this. You can also include road tolls the players have to pay in order to use the road.

Specialty Roads[]

Clay Road:

Recommended material: Clay or terracotta.

Make a road that is 3-7 blocks wide, keeping turns and slopes at a minimum. If you must go over a hill, gently slope the road with stone slabs. If the incline you encounter is more than 1 block up for every 5 to 7 blocks horizontally, use stone brick stairs or change to a similar type of road. The middle block use redstone. For an automatic lighting system connect a daylight sensor to a NOT gate, and then a redstone lamp. This road type can bridge moderate gullies, ponds, valleys, and small pits are good for rural areas and work well in flat areas. Decorative stone brick guardrails are acceptable.

Musical Road:

Recommended material: Note block, wooden pressure plate.

This road type is actually a feature that can be applied to just about any moderately sized road. Dig out a 1 block wide trench along the middle or side of your road, and place note blocks (with the desired material underneath, see Note Block) in this trench. Adjust the pitches as necessary, and fill in the spaces between note blocks in more complicated melodies. Lastly, place wooden pressure plates on top of the note blocks, and now it is possible to ride along the road and listen to music at the same time.

Unusual material:

Build your road out of an unusual block, such as ores or wood.

General Block Palette[]

It is often advised that, for a specific type of construction, you stick to a specific palette of block-types, to make your city more organized. Example block palettes include:

Medieval: Don't use materials which couldn't be easily obtained in a medieval world. For example, don't use concrete or redstone mechanisms, and use glass very sparingly. Different variants of stone and wood are the best materials to use in construction.
Rustic/Farm: Use almost all planks and logs, with small holes in the walls made with stairs, make rooms irregularly shaped with 1x1 windows (holes in the wall).
Skyscraper: Made with concrete, quartz, or iron blocks with massive cyan or light blue glass windows, sea lanterns for lighting.
Futuristic: Use plenty of quartz and glass blocks (basically anything white).
Aquatic: Use prismarine, with glass block windows and sponges as decorations
Nether: Use nether bricks detailing like window boxing, and use lava and magma blocks for lighting. Build walls with quartz, red nether bricks, nether wart blocks, etc. You can use obsidian as a foundation.
End: Use end stone bricks and purpur, with end rods for lighting and shulker boxes for storage.

This helps other builders, and yourself, to make creations that "fit" together, instead of a random mix. It also helps the build stay consistent. However, following the palette isn't always necessary, as different-looking buildings can make your city look more varied and interesting.

Jobs[]

Note: Most jobs can only be done in multiplayer because mobs do not have the required AI. So if you are in singleplayer, these ideas probably won't be very useful, except for those that can be done (to a limited extent) by villagers.

Job Search Center: A place that helps those new to the server to find work.

After you have built your city, you may want citizens to work. Here are some examples of jobs the citizens of your city can work.

A - D[]

Actor/Actress: Works in plays.

Animal Handler: Works with tameable animals. Also works at the pet store and dog pound.

Apothecary: Makes positive (sometimes negative) potions and sells to players.

Army: Uses weapons for hunting rogue players, mob armies or even enemy armies! Should have stone to netherite ranged items. Salary: Varies by ranking. Example ranks:
- Private The lowest rank in the army.
- Specialist A private with more experience and technical knowledge.
- Special forces member An elite warrior trained to conduct special operations like hostage rescue or intelligence operations.
- General The highest ranking officer of the army, who leads all the other troops and answers only to the leader of the nation.

Assassin: Kills off political or highly placed people for cash. Can be sent from enemy forts or cities attempting to shift the balance of power. Beware as they could double-cross you.

Attorney: Also called a lawyer, this person can do one of two things: defend or prosecute an individual. The system works like this: a judge, two attorney teams (prosecution or defense),usually a jury and of course, the accused criminal in question, go to a courtroom. The attorneys aim to prove that the client did or not engage in unlawful activities respectively. Then, the judge makes a ruling on the matter, and that team gets their wish, either for the criminal to be convicted, or freed of all charges. In this system, the salary goes to the team who wins.

Author: Writes books and trades them to librarian villagers or sells them to players.

Banker: Works with player's money in vaults. Make sure they are trusted or you could lose a lot of money!

Bar Tender: Serves drinks to players at a bar.

Bodyguard: Hire people to be your bodyguards. Make sure you can trust them.

Broker: Sells used goods for fair prices, and accepts anything worth putting a price tag on.

Builder: Someone who builds buildings and structures.

Butcher: A person who sells meat and kills animals. Butcher villagers can sell meat, though they cannot kill animals.

Cashier: The cashier of a store.

Cleaner: Cleans up areas, might do things as removing unused minecarts or shovelling snow.

Cook: Prepares and provides food. Certain villagers (butchers, farmers and fishermen) can buy raw ingredients and sell prepared foods.

Council Member: Part of a group that rules the city or advises the leader.

Dancer: Dances.

Delivery Person: Deliverers things from the Distribution Center to the place/player which requested them. You do not need them if you are in Bedrock Edition and have roads made out of redstone. To get them for the distribution center to the place/player that requested them, they use the roads, elytras, horses, pigs, and in the Nether striders.

Demolitionist: Someone who destroys unwanted buildings. This is definitely a job for people who like to destroy things! Be careful when using TNT for this job, and only let people you trust to use it.

DJ: Someone who works at a disco and is in charge of the music.

Doctor: Looks after injured or ill people in the hospital.

E - H[]

Executioner: Someone who executes condemned players and mobs in private or public. Might try and hide identity to avoid avenging relatives of the executed victims.

Factory Worker: Someone who works in a factory (above).

Farmer: Raises crops and farm animals, and sells to villagers or store owners. Farmer villagers can harvest and plant crops, though they can't take care of animals.

Gladiator: Battles mobs or other players in the arena.

Grinder operators: If you've built a mob or iron golem farm then these people can (if not automatic) collect the drops and put them on a transport minecart train. They could also ensure the safety of spawners. Make sure they're trusted or the drops may end up on the black market or get sold to another city to help their arms production.

Grocery Owner/Worker: Works at the Grocery Store.

Head of Public Power: A person who manages a public authority. This is a very important job.

I - M[]

Job Center Employee: Report offers available jobs, scheduling interviews, job offers add more to the list, etc.

Knight: An elite warrior who follows the code of chivalry.

Judge: Sorts out lawsuits and picks the punishment for criminals.

Landlord: A person who owns a building, and receives the rent. They would have someone make the building and they would take care of any issues.

Miner: Mines Ores and stones.

Magician: Enchants items and makes potions.

Merchant: Buys things from the people that make them or creates their own goods either way they sell them to the public.

N - R[]

Nurse: Helps doctors and tends to patients when no doctors are open.

Pilot: Sits in the front seat in an aircraft. Also tells passengers the remaining wait time and talks to the airport lander for accuracy, etc.

Police Officer: People who fight crime and stop griefing, could be assisted by tamed mobs such as wolves.

Pig Salesman: Sells pigs and carrots on a stick for all your transportation needs. Saddles included, of course.

Leader: Normally the ruler of the city. Doesn't necessarily have to be an administrator, and can even be the person who runs the server. Makes major decisions for the city. Could be elected, hereditary, religious, military or appointed by a group of individuals.

Real Estate Agent: Buys and sells houses.

Redstone Technician: Someone who builds many mechanisms with redstone.

Repairer: Someone who repairs weapons and tools.

S - U[]

Spiritual Leader: Runs religious institutions and leads prayer.

Scientist: Makes potions, tests things, etc.

Smelter: Someone who is paid to smelt materials.

Spy/Private Investigator: Uses potions of Invisibility to spy and looks through the chat, to find out about a player for another player

Supplier: Produces, harvests or finds materials needed by customers.

Teacher: Someone who teaches students in schools about mining/crafting/brewing/building etc.

Terraformer: A person who clears large areas and makes it flat for buildings, clears the water, makes or removes caves and decorates areas or removes tall grass.

Thief: Not very legal. Steals stuff and might sell their mechandise.

V - Z[]

Undertaker: If a citizen dies then these people take the equipment they drop and send it to be stored, destroyed or returned to the owner or their heir.

Wholesale Dealer: Buys items and sells them to stores by the stack or by the shulker box.

Houses[]

Houses are possibly some of the most important buildings in a city. They house most of its population and are usually used for social gatherings as well. In war-zones, houses may act as or be mixed with defensive fortifications as well.

Houses are rarely just dwellings with a bed, chest, furnace, table and door. They have multiple rooms, possibly multiple stories, and are often designed to accommodate between two and five times the number of people who are intended to live there for short periods (For example, as long as they brought their own beds/sleeping bags, there are enough chairs at the tables, etc., to support them).

If you plan on including villagers in your city, you'll also need at least some houses that are suitable for them.

House types[]

Note: Buildings you can build are not limited to the ones in the list below, and designing your own buildings instead of using the ones in the list can make your city look more original.

Home-Shop: A shop on the other floors above inhabits the owner. These are usually in a brownstone-like design, which the store on the bottom, and 1 or 2 floors on top of three shop.

Homeless Shelter: A place in which many people take refuge, in which people who are unable to afford or construct their own home. This building is the ideal start to your life on the server.

Hotel: A building with rooms players can rent for the night to stay in.

Shack or hut: a small structure meant to accommodate the most basic needs. Village huts and swamp huts both fit in this category. Lots of land nearby, but rarely does the resident officially "own" it. They're typically made from wood and are usually single-story structures that aren't very large.

Bungalow: A one-floor house, but very broad and square, consists of very few rooms such as a bathroom, bedrooms, a hall, A basement, a dining room and kitchen. It has a roof terrace on the roof.

Pied-a-terre: A small living unit, such as apartment or condominium, used as a temporary second residence by its owner. Pied-a-terres are usually found in large cities, some distance away from the owner's primary residence. Pied-a-terres are usually owned by wealthy persons.

Apartment Building: A tall building containing multiple apartments, almost always located in a city. Shorter than a skyscraper but usually taller than a normal house. The apartments might be owned by their occupants, or the occupants might have to pay rent.

Penthouse apartment: Singular or nearly singular nice apartment on the top floor of a high-rise building. Easily over 200 square meter exterior with at least 1 bedroom per couple/individual and many additional rooms of all sorts. Anyone who lives here is likely the equivalent of at least a millionaire.

Farm house: A small to medium house intended for to house a farmer and their family, probably 1 to 2 stories, plus a basement, and a room with about 5 or 6 pens, for animal keeping.

Rural house: Often big, but rarely have much structure above the second story. Typically has one or two stories, with a fairly large (up to 20 x 15) exterior, as well as various features such as bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, bathrooms, etc. Can have yards or farms surrounding the house, usually very big.

Holiday Home: Build a comfy house away from your primary residence. Use this home as a getaway from your regular home. This type of construction is best built when you have completed the majority of the more advanced necessities of Minecraft. Spend your vacation in your library writing the memoirs of your adventures.

Modular house: Build your house out of approximately 5x5 block cubical "modules" connected to each other. Each module can be either a single room or a hallway connecting the modules. You can even have multiple floors in a modular house, but having only a single floor is the most common.

Skyscraper: A tall building with more than 40 floors. A skyscraper may host offices, retail spaces, and residential spaces. Due to their tallness, it might be a good idea to build an elevator inside the skyscraper to make the higher floors easier to access.

Modern home: Modern houses are mainly found in the richer parts of cities, make them out of lighter materials, and add dashes of color if necessary, materials like terracotta, bricks and concrete are ideal. and be sure to add mini floors! (Mini floors are stories of a modern home that are up near the ceiling and have glass panes for fences.) Add smaller rooms off of the bigger ones.

Duplex: A two-story house, where both stories are separate apartments. Suggested size is around 14x14, with a kitchen, a living room, some bedrooms (at least one or two per floor), and a balcony. They can be made with things like bricks, wood, etc.

Suburban house: At least moderate-sized, usually gets a little bit of all mid-quality materials. Rarely very unique and often very squashed outside, but comfortable interior with at least 2 bedrooms. Should generally have 2 or more stories, being usually up to 15x15 in size, and having a small yard. These should also have at least two bathrooms.

Town-house: Usually 3 stories of roughly equal size with essentially no yard. Rarely over 8x10 wide, and placed in rows within 5 feet of each other. Like the suburban house, but more like 120–240 square meters area.

Tent: Very small, Usually made of wool. Contains basic furniture such as a bed, crafting tables, a furnace, and tools.

Mansion: Any house which is unique and singular within a large area, much larger than necessary to support the people inside, extremely nice, has more area than any conventional home, and has more than 1000 square meters. Typically used by either very important or very rich people.

Other type of houses that don't fit in these categories: There are many, in fact, countless types that don't fit very well into any category mentioned above. Examples include: towers, tree-houses, mass-living areas, sleep-tubes, house-boats, converted asteroids, cave-homes, continuous mazes of rooms of all types, bridge-homes, general store-homes, gas station-homes, motor-homes, space-module houses, worker barracks, wall-houses, hive-apartments, bunker-houses, manor houses and even some more unusual builds.

Last Note[]

Whatever you decide, this is your city. These are just suggestions. Be creative and do whatever you want with it. You can use all the suggestions on this page or you can ignore everything and build the best city Minecraft has ever seen! It's your call, so get building!

After Building a Metropolis[]

After you've spent a long time building a city, you may think that is the biggest thing you can do in the Minecraft world, but this is not true. Minecraft has an infinite number of possibilities that you can do, that never run out. First of all, you can defeat all of the boss mobs in the Minecraft world, or complete all the advancements.

Cities, Structures, and More[]

If you have completed all the advancements, defeated all the boss mobs multiple times, have gathered several stacks of diamonds, and have made a city, consider modernizing your world. Here are some suggestions:

Make roads and railways to every part of your world that you ever go to.
Make multiple cities, with roads connecting them.
Build yourself a giant mansion.
Build every type of farm, and make as many as possible automatic.
Build a giant bridge across a whole ocean.

Minecraft is a versatile world and you will never run out of the ideas of things to build, fight, and find. What you do in it is all up to you.

Good City Mods to Use[]

If you are using Forge 1.12.2, you will have access to literal thousands of mods. Other versions also support mods, but must use Forge or Fabric. Cities can look even better with mods, such as realistic signs, new products, new blocks, and even pilotable vehicles.

Tutorials/Building a metropolis

Preparation[]

Getting started[]

City Plan[]

Materials[]

Building Up[]

Roads and Paths[]

Scale[]

Lighting[]

Residential Zone[]

Commercial Zone[]

Public Transportation and Transit Stations[]

Industrial Zone[]

Capital[]

Suggestions[]

City Themes[]

A - D[]

E - H[]

I - M[]

N - R[]

S - U[]

V - Z[]

Transportation[]

Buildings and Structures[]

A - D[]

E - H[]

I - M[]

N - R[]

S - U[]

W - Z[]

Government[]

Government Buildings[]

Government Systems[]

More Ideas[]

Currency[]

General Tips[]

Roads[]

Specialty Roads[]

General Block Palette[]

Jobs[]

A - D[]

E - H[]

I - M[]

N - R[]

S - U[]

V - Z[]

Houses[]

House types[]

Last Note[]

After Building a Metropolis[]

Cities, Structures, and More[]

Good City Mods to Use[]

See also[]

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