Modern Builds
Modern houses, skyscrapers, apartments, and contemporary architecture.
A multi-story modern apartment complex with balconies, a rooftop terrace, ground-floor retail space, and interior furnished units. Each floor is a repeatable template.
A sleek modern house with flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling windows, a minimalist color palette, and recessed lighting. Features an open floor plan with clean geometric lines.
A towering glass-and-steel skyscraper with a distinctive silhouette, lobby, office floors, and a penthouse. A landmark build for any server or city project.
A modern in-ground swimming pool with underwater lighting, quartz decking, lounge chairs, and a shallow entry with stairs. Great addition to any modern build.
Blocks that read as modern
Modern builds lean on flat colors, big windows and light you cannot see the source of. A handful of blocks do most of that work.
- Concrete
- Comes in all 16 dye colors with a flat, even face. It forms when concrete powder touches water, and it needs a pickaxe: mined with anything else it drops nothing.
- Glass panes
- Thinner than glass blocks, and they connect to the panes next to them, so a row of them turns into one long window strip.
- Quartz
- Quartz blocks, stairs and slabs give the white trim; slabs make thin flat roofs and overhangs.
- Iron trapdoors
- Only redstone opens them, so as balcony railings or shutters they stay put when someone clicks them.
- Lighting
- Sea lanterns, glowstone, froglights and lanterns all give light level 15, the maximum. Carpet lets light through, so a sea lantern under a carpet lights the room without showing.
Copper that changes color
Copper blocks age through four looks, from bare copper to exposed, weathered and finally oxidized teal. It only happens on random ticks, so rain doesn't speed it up and covering the blocks doesn't stop it. Wax a block with honeycomb to keep the stage you like, or scrape it back with an axe; a lightning strike also removes oxidation.
In Java a copper block slows down when copper within 4 blocks is at the same or an earlier stage, so a big copper roof takes far longer to turn green than a few blocks spaced at least 4 apart.
Light you can switch or hide
- Copper bulb
- Turns on or off with each redstone pulse and stays that way without power. Its light drops as it ages: 15, then 12, 8 and 4 when fully oxidized, so wax it at the brightness you want.
- Tinted glass
- Looks like dark glass but blocks light completely. Four amethyst shards around a glass block make two, and it drops itself even when broken by hand.
- Light block
- An invisible block with any light level from 0 to 15. It only comes from the Creative inventory or /give, so it suits creative builds and adventure maps.
The apartment building and the skyscraper repeat the same floor many times. Finish one floor first, then copy it: with cheats on, /clone copies a whole region in one command. The minimalist house and the swimming pool are smaller places to try the style first.