Dangerous Forays

Roofing 101

A brief intro to roofing and graceful slopes using stairs in Minecraft.

Because Minecraft is a world built with 1m cubes, the challenge is to make creations not look blocky. Stairs and half-blocks make things better, for not a lot of extra effort. Each stair block is only 1.5x the cost of a regular block (6 wood makes 4 stairs), and slabs are a friendly 1 to 1 conversion rate. So even if you’re playing in Survival, this won’t strain your resources.

There’s another reason to use stairs as roofing in Survival especially: monsters don’t spawn on stairs or half-blocks! If your roof is made of whole blocks, however, you need to be extra careful to light it up, or you’ll have creepers raining down on you from above.

Fig. 1. 1/1 Slope

Make a simple 1/1 slope with a single stair block.

Fig. 2. ½ Slope

Make a ½ slope with a half-block next to a whole block.

Fig. 3. 1/3 Slope

Make a 1/3 slope with a half-block, a stair, and a whole block.

Now, usually I stick to the 1/1 slopes, because I like a style that looks a bit more northern, and the steeper the roof, the less it’s affected by rain and snow. Plus, in a world of blocks, the more angular something is, the more it stands out.

Fig. 4. Odd-based roofing

If your roof is an odd number of blocks wide, use a half-block to cap the roof. This lets you use a different material to highlight the peak of the roof if you want to (for example). Or, just use the same material to make it blend in.

Fig. 5. Even-based roofing

If your roof is an even number of blocks, back-to-back stairs make the peak. Notice: this has almost the exact same profile as the odd-based roofing above, but you can’t highlight the peak as well.

Fig. 6. Blocky profile

This is what the odd-based roofing looks like if you use whole blocks instead of stairs. Just look at the difference in profile and you’ll see why using stairs is the best idea!

Obviously, if you use stairs as roofing, you can’t put torches all over it, so lighting is a bit more of a challenge. I’ll post more about that later on!