5 starter house plans in Minecraft, from 153 to 2,342 blocks

Build the Plains Village House on your first day: 153 blocks, oak and Cobblestone, a bed inside. Once you have stone tools and a few stacks of logs, move up to the Contemporary Chalet or the Small House. All five plans are in our Blueprints section, with every layer seen from above, a 3D view and the exact materials. The plans are checked in Java Edition 26.3; the /place command in the last step is Java only.

• Plains Village House: the house of plains villages, one room with a bed and a stepped oak roof. The only one you can finish on day one.
• Contemporary Chalet: one storey, two bedrooms, a living room around a fireplace and a covered terrace. Stone and wood only.
• Small House: one storey, one bedroom, a garage and a terrace with full-height windows. Its walls take 392 Clay blocks.
• Pueblo House: two storeys, three bedrooms and grass roof terraces. The 226 Grass Blocks need a tool with Silk Touch.
• Traditional House: two storeys and four bedrooms around a square tower. Its roof alone needs more than 1,200 Bricks.

Each plan page has a Materials box with two lists: the blocks to place, and the raw resources to collect, counted in stacks and Shulker Boxes. Switch to raw resources and gather everything before you lay the first block.

The conversions you will use most:

• 1 Oak Log gives 4 Oak Planks; 3 planks give 6 slabs; 6 planks give 4 stairs.
• Smelt Cobblestone into Stone; 4 Stone give 4 Stone Bricks.
• Smelt Clay into Terracotta; 8 Terracotta and 1 Light Gray Dye give 8 Light Gray Terracotta.
• 4 Sand give 1 Sandstone; smelt Sandstone into Smooth Sandstone.
• Smelt a Clay Ball into a Brick; 4 Brick give 1 Bricks block; 3 Bricks give 6 Brick Slabs.

Every plan is drawn with north at the top. Clear a flat area 2 blocks wider than the footprint on each side, for example 31 by 22 blocks for the Small House. Press F3 and read the Facing line: when it says north, the layer view matches what you see in front of you. Mark the four corners with a block before you start.

On the plan page, go to Layer by layer. Layer 1 is the floor; each next layer is one block higher.

• Count from a corner block, one row at a time.
• The layer below shows faded: use it to line up walls and windows.
• Stairs show an arrow that points to the tall side. A hollow arrow means upside-down stairs, a corner mark a slab in the top half.
• Print the layers or save them as a PDF to keep them next to the game.

When a layer is hard to read, turn the 3D view on the same page and use its layer slider.

Most mistakes happen on the roof. Start at the eaves, the lowest row, and work up one layer at a time, from the outside in, with the stairs turned the way the arrows show. To reach the high rows, place Scaffolding: 6 Bamboo and 1 String make 6 Scaffolding. Jump to climb it and sneak to come down.

In the Overworld, monsters only spawn on blocks with a block light level of 0. A Torch gives light level 14, and light drops by 1 per block, so one torch keeps the floor safe up to 13 blocks away, counted along the floor, as long as no wall is in the way. A Lantern gives 15. Put at least one in each room and one outside every door.

To see a house before you build it in survival, place it in a creative world with cheats on. The village house is a template of the game:

/place template minecraft:village/plains/houses/plains_small_house_1 ~ ~ ~

It leaves 2 jigsaw blocks: replace them with what the plan shows. The four other houses are Blockaria builds. Download the .nbt file from the plan page and put it in this folder of your Minecraft directory:

saves/<world>/generated/blockaria/structure/

Then run:

/place template blockaria:small_house ~ ~ ~

Use contemporary_chalet, pueblo_house or traditional_house for the others. The house appears with its north-west bottom corner at your position. Rotations are on the /place command page.