Making a Minecraft Chunk Tower Part 1

Created // 2022-08-05

Tags // minecraft, chunk, building, gaming

TL;DR // We're going to build a 16×16 block Minecraft tower where each floor generates different resources. This is part 1. See part 2 and part 3.

What's a "Chunk Tower"?

First, what do we mean by a "chunk"? A Minecraft world is divided into 16×16 squares called "chunks". These are the building blocks of the world. When you explore the world, you are moving from chunk to chunk. (For the 'official' definition, see the Minecraft Wiki 'Chunk' article.)

The image below shows part of a Minecraft world with a grid of chunks overlayed on top.

A Minecraft world is divided into 16×16 squares. The overhead view above shows an area 5 chunks wide (80 blocks) by 3 chunks tall (48 blocks).

So what's this "Chunk Tower" then? It's a challenge to build a self-sufficient base inside a single chunk. It'll have multiple levels, but each level no more than 16×16 blocks.

Why are we doing this?

Why not? The idea started when my kids were trying to get me to spend more time playing Minecraft. I wanted a way to keep it interesting and this seemed like a suitably arbitrary challenge.

The discussion started while we were camping. Having only pen and paper at the time, it was also a good excuse to help the kids understand how you can think, problem-solve, and create when you're not at the computer. (Novel concept, right?)

I could get into the whole idea of how limitations spawn creativity, but I'll leave that for another time...

Let's start with something simple: wheat

To demonstrate the idea, we started with a simple floor for 2 things: wheat and cows.

Wheat floor: This shows how we're going to work with the 16×16 grid. It's just a simple layout of wheat around some water, as well as a small area for some cows. Really it's just here to create enough wheat for easy food generation.

What's that hole in the corner?

In the bottom-right corner, there's a single hole in the plan. We're building a tower and we're going to have many floors producing resources. How are we going to get all those resources to a storage area?

That hole becomes our "delivery chute" down to the bottom of the tower which is where we'll put a storage room. Every floor is going to have that hole.

Next: The storage floor

The storage floor will be near the bottom of the tower. It's where we're going to store all the resources we generate on different floors. That means we'll need lots of chests.

Now, we could just fill the entire 16×16 chunk with chests, but that's not ideal. I don't want to have to walk around a lot to find things so let's keep it compact.

Storage room floor: Our goal? Fit as many storage containers as we can into a small area, and keep things easily accessible without requiring much movement. We put special crafting blocks (crafting table, anvil, loom, etc.) in the floor. All other floor blocks are barrels to increase storage.

This layout gives us 152 different containers to put things in.