Have you seen the recent Minecraft mini biome trend? It’s blowing up on Reddit as a new way for players to get creative by shrinking down various aspects of the game world to a smaller size. You might want to build one of these yourself, but it could be trickier than you think. Our Minecraft mini biome guide will help get you started with making your very own tiny terrarium!
Minecraft | Mini biome how to build guide | Selecting your size
Much like any other artist, the first thing you’re going to want to do is to select your canvas. The charm Minecraft mini biome is packing a lot of detail into a small size—making some 12×12 monstrosity kind of defeats the purpose. Typically, most mini biomes are either 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5 in scale.
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Building a 3×3 mini biome would be impressive depending on the kind of detail you can pack in, but it’d be challenging to make the most use of the space. Conversely, a 5×5 canvas might be a little easier to build with, but you’ll also have more space to fill up to make it look good.
One thing I can say for certain is this: You should figure out your design in creative first. It’s much easier when you have the entire game’s tools available to you at your fingertips rather than trying to track down various things in your storage.
Once you have a size selected, it’s time to figure out how to make things tiny!
Minecraft | Mini biome how to build guide | Scaling things down
Your next step will be selecting a biome and then figuring out how best to represent it. There are some good examples on /r/Minecraft if you’re curious. Strictly speaking, you can’t “shrink” things in Minecraft, but you can build something smaller that looks awfully close.
There are two examples in the above image. To represent a smaller oak tree, I’ve decided to use an oak fence post and a single block of oak leaves sitting on top of it. It looks like a tree and it’s not that hard to get the materials, either.
I’ve also figured out a way to make a smaller cactus: Simply use a sea cucumber! Experiment around and figure out what you want to shrink and how best you can shrink it. I’ve given you some ideas, but this is a creative exercise that is best solved by some thinking and creative application of Minecraft’s many items.
Minecraft | Mini biome how to build guide | Build it!
Now that you have a size and some items figured out, the time has come to build your Minecraft mini biome. In the above example, I’ve gone with something simple: A desert featuring a pyramid.
First, place down your floor blocks. (In this case, it’s sand.) Next, you’re going to add your detail. I placed four sandstone stairs in a clockwise pattern to make a miniature temple and a couple of sea cucumbers to look like cacti. I also used birch trapdoors to nicely frame the creation.
There are hundreds of different items in Minecraft—the only limit is your imagination!
Minecraft | Mini biome how to build guide | Taking a cool picture
Presumably, you’re keen on taking a cool picture of your mini biome and putting it online somewhere. What’s the best way to go about this?
In the above example, I’ve decided to show the contrast in size by placing the full-size creations next to it. Other people have simply put a neat colored background, or applied texture packs and messed with the FOV to give the mini biome a grander sense of scale. As with most things, the easiest way to figure it out is to look at how other people are doing it.
Minecraft | Mini biome how to build guide | What to do with your mini biome
Now that your mini biome is built, what are you going to do with it? Well, you can be like a bunch of industrious Redditors and put a cool picture of it online for internet points on some website, but that’s forgetting something important.
You see, the mini biome craze is much like bonsai trees—you’re creating an interesting decoration. It doesn’t make much sense to make it one time, screenshot it, and then forget about it forever. Why not take your new creation and use it to decorate someplace cool in your world?
