Brainstorm Your Village

Step One: Pick a location

Planning your first village can be the hardest part, but I recommend choosing an easy area to start with. This can be your main village and from there you can explore and make other villages. When I am deciding on a location, I look for the following features.

Naturally Generated Structures Generated structures are a great way to help create a story and bring life to your villages. There are many types in the game; igloos, woodland mansions, portal ruins, pyramids, underwater temples, and pillager outposts to name a few. I found a portal ruins close to spawn and will be using that to help craft the story of the first village in my new world. Resource Types

Get inspired by the local resources around your chosen area. Villagers would have most houses made from common materials found locally. This means you don't wanna travel more than a day to get your main resources. If you find yourself in a desert biome, blocks like glass, sandstone, cacti, and sugar cane are going to be abundent. If you find yourself in a plains biome like me, you'll have an abundance of oak, flowers, birch, and cobblestone easy to access. Building Difficulty Before you start building, you should evalute the area. In a mountain biome, it might be best to go for a 'messier' design because clearing out mountains in survival mode takes ages. Plains biomes are good for more complicated and detailed village designs. Jungle biomes are great for tree house style villages. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Step Two: Gather Abundant Resources

Now that you have a general idea of your main resources, you'll want to start gathering lots of these materials to build with. I like to make the resource gathering part of the village history. The cobblestone mine entrance looks like a mining entrance, the trees are planted and cut down in the same 'tree farm' area, and I have a short path to a clay and sand source. These details add life to the village before villagers even arrive!

Step Three: Plan Design

When planning the design of your village, you can just jump in if you like. I like to write out features that I know I want to include, draw a quick sketch of the layout, or even map it out block by block on graphing paper. There is not one way to do this, just whichever way feels right to you and works for you. This is meant to help guide you if you get stuck, not to be a mandatory replica. When you are building you might find you want to change up some things - this is okay! Think of this as your first draft of the village. Above you can see my quick sketch of the area I have chosen as well as a few features I plan on adding.