- Building a house in Minecraft can start with simple materials like wood, stone, and glass.
- A good Minecraft house provides safety, storage, and crafting space.
- If players are short on resources, they can build an underground house with lesser materials.
Building your first house in Minecraft is one of the most exciting milestones in the game. It all starts as a dirt house, which becomes one of the most common shelters to survive your first night. As time passes, you collect better resources like wooden logs, stone blocks, and you think of adding fancy blocks to your survival house. Hence, a well-built house not only protects you from the hostile mobs, but it also becomes a space to store items, craft tools, and unleash your creativity. Later, you can also add flowers, pots, lanterns, and other decorative blocks to add detail to your Minecraft house. However, to get started, we will show you how to build a Minecraft house using easily accessible materials that work well in both the early and late game.
Why Do You Need a House in Minecraft?
Before we move to the building process, let’s first understand the need for a Minecraft house in the game. A house serves the following functions:
- A safe house that protects you from hostile mobs.
- The perfect storage location to keep all your resources and items.
- An easy to manage space for automatic Minecraft farms and mob trapping.
Now, you need to find the perfect spot to build a Minecraft house. To speed things up, you can use one of our best Minecraft seeds to scope out the perfect spot for your house in the latest update. But make sure your chosen location meets the following criteria:
- Enough open area for building your planned house
- Sources of food, wood, ores, and other common items
- Some altitude to save you from most ground-level mobs
- Access to the ocean and rivers for easier traveling using Minecraft boats.
Materials Required to Build a Minecraft House
From dirt to obsidian, you can practically use any non-floating block in Minecraft to make your house. If you are playing by yourself or are building a temporary house, you can use any in-game block. Most speedrunners and beginners usually stick with soil blocks as their houses aren’t supposed to last long. For your first house, we suggest you use the following blocks:
- Wooden Planks or Logs (Oak, Spruce, Birch, etc)
- Cobblestone or Deepslate Bricks and Chiseled Blocks
- Glass Blocks or Panes
- Wooden Door
- Slabs and Stairs (for roofs)
- Lanterns, Campfire
- Bed
- Utility blocks like the Chest, Crafting Table, Furnace, and Enchantment Table
We recommend that you avoid gravitational blocks like sand. Such blocks have the potential to get you killed in unforeseen circumstances. Meanwhile, blocks like obsidian can help you make your house blast-proof later in the game.
How to Build a Minecraft House: Step-by-Step Process
Once you have collected the materials and selected a location, you can follow these steps to build a Minecraft house.
1. Build Walls

Much like a real-world building, the first step in how to build a Minecraft house is making the walls. Other than the main four walls, you can construct as many rooms as you want. But don’t forget to leave openings for doors or windows. You simply need to place the blocks and stack them as high as you want the ceiling of your house to be.
2. Add Doors & Windows

Once you have constructed the walls, you can use wood to make doors and glass panes as windows. Using a single door or a double door is your choice. Hostile mobs can’t open either of them. As for the windows, some players leave them open without any glass. But it is an open invitation to mobs like skeletons that can attack you from a distance.
3. Expand the House

After creating the basic structure, it’s time for you to add more practical elements and areas like rooms, roofs, and more to the house in Minecraft. Many players opt for multiple rooms, but going for separate floors adds a certain aesthetic to your house.
Just don’t forget to add a ladder or stairs to climb onto that floor. Alternatively, you can use this stage to customize your house with personal design elements and unique shapes.
4. Light It Up

It is true that a house in Minecraft stops hostile mobs from reaching you, but that doesn’t stop these hostile mobs from spawning inside the house. To safeguard your casa against them, you need to add various light sources inside your house.
Torches are the most popular option, but you can also go for glowstone, lanterns, and other light sources. Some players even place light sources around and on top of the house for extra protection. Having good lighting inside is a key part of building a Minecraft house
5. Add Basic Amenities

After your house structure is ready, it’s time to furnish it. You can have a variety of items in the Minecraft house you build. However, here are some must-haves:
- Crafting table
- Bed to set the spawn point
- At least one chest
- A source of food, preferably a basic farm that you can use to plant seeds and grow crops
Additional Things to Add to Your Minecraft House
Now, once your house is ready, it’s time to make the most out of it. You can use your creativity or head over to our list of the best Minecraft house ideas to choose one that suits your fancy. Then, you can spend some time carefully modifying and rebuilding the house as you make progress in the game.

Later on, you can add more in-game items to your house. Such items can hold decorative as well as practical value. Some of the most common practices that people follow include:
- Adding automatic farms with a separate section for villagers, who can a variety of jobs
- Using Redstone to make a security system to protect houses from looting on multiplayer servers
- Bringing iron golems and other entities like cats as pets in the house
- Creating furniture using slabs, planks, and wool
- Building separate rooms for the treasury and storage
- Create paths leading to underground Minecraft caves. To explore caves, you can check out some of the best lush cave seeds and best dripstone cave seeds in Minecraft via the linked articles.
- Adding decorative items like paintings, flowerpots, terracotta, and more to your house
How to Build an Underground Minecraft House
At times, it can be way easier and resource-efficient to build an underground house. So, rather than finding materials and blocks to build above the ground, you can dig underneath and make a cozy space for yourself. So, here’s how to build an underground Minecraft house:
- For a cave or underground house, the best locations are mountainside caves. These are relatively easy to find, and you can use their opening to quickly escape the cave biomes in case of emergency.

- Unlike above-ground houses, you will find the building materials on the location itself.
- Just dig out an open field of at least 6-8 blocks in every direction to make a reliable base area.
- You can use a pickaxe with some of the best Minecraft enchantments to make things easier.

- Then, add ladders and a trap door if you want your house to have an entry on its top. In case it’s located on the side of a mountain, a regular door will also work.
- Don’t forget to add lights around this time, too, as caves are prone to mob spawning.

- Finally, to complete the house, add a bed, a crafting table, an anvil, and chests with food in them.
- Just like a regular house, you can expand and improve it as you progress with your Minecraft journey.
- The main purpose of the house is to offer you shelter and a storage location while mining.

And just like that, you are now an expert house builder in Minecraft. You can take inspiration from the players building a model of the earth in Minecraft as well. So, what are some of the coolest Minecraft house ideas you have in your mind? Share them with us in the comments below!
Among all the Minecraft biomes, only the mushroom fields biome doesn’t allow any mobs to spawn in it. But you can also choose biomes as per your interest.
Among the variety of house designs, the best house design depends on your priorities. If you are speedrunning or mining, an underground house is the most convenient design you can pick.
If you want to keep things easier, you should use a creative game mode to make your house. This mode allows you to float and gives you a creative inventory with every single block and item from the game.