Build With It: Terracotta!

Welcome back to Build With It! Every week we choose a brilliant building block, show off several great community builds that feature it (like this snazzy Creeper Sphynx by Joker Collison), and give you some tips and suggestions for how to use it to improve your builds. This week we’re focusing on the terrific block called terracotta.

Fortunately, there are several ways to get terracotta. While uncolored terracotta can be found in villager houses located in the plains, savanna, and desert biomes, you’ll have to do a little extra work to find colored terracotta spawning naturally. We recommend you keep looking around those villages for the best results.

For those of you who like to put a little mining into your Minecraft (now there’s an idea!), grab your pickaxe and head to the badlands for a rich, natural source of materials. Or if you’re determined to do things the really old fashioned way, smelt some clay.

With the arrival of 2019’s Village & Pillage Update, terracotta can now be bought from stone mason villagers, making your new favorite building material a little easier to get a hold of. Once you’ve collected all your terracotta, it’s time to get building.

You could build your house out of plain terracotta. In fact, there are several biomes where it wouldn’t look out of place at all! Or, with some patience and a little dye, you can turn your house into a snazzy creation to show off to your friends! Remember our old friend quartz? Stack your dyed terracotta to create a colorful new set of walls and then add a few glass windows and some fancy quartz pillars out front. Once your home renovations are complete, you’re set to entertain in style.

Terracotta by itself is great, but we know it may not be everyone’s style. Dye adds some color, but it still is a bit softer and more muted than some people prefer. Perhaps you want something bolder? We understand, which is why Glazed Terracotta exists. To make glazed terracotta, grab some terracotta of any color (but not plain terracotta!), and then smelt it with any fuel you have on hand.

You’ll discover a whole new world of design has opened up! You can artfully arrange the glazed terracotta blocks into beautiful, varied patterns, or just place them randomly and say “I meant to do that”.

Fortunately, when we put out the call for some great terracotta creations in our last article, everyone put on their creative thinking hats and gave us a lot to work with! Were the creative thinking hats also made of terracotta? Er, hopefully not. Such heavy headwear is probably bad for your neck.

Check out some of these great submissions:

Have you designed something amazing with Terracotta after reading this article? Show us! Put down your pickaxe and email FeatureMe@minecraft.net with screenshots of your creation and some info about it! Everyone is welcome to submit their terracotta designs (or something created with our upcoming materials acacia wood or diorite). If you’re lucky, you may just see your build featured in an upcoming article!