17/09/2021MMDL

100×100 Minecraft micro city build!

Another random creative build, but minimalist. This 100 by 100 block micro city offers everything for the urban explorer. From roads to buildings of all shapes and sizes, solar farms, train station and even hot air balloons!

Most of what you see was build by hand, with little use of the World Edit mod. In general, the city contains everything and nothing. Order and chaos. Simple shapes coming together to make a rough whole. Nothing ultra realistic, but there are skyscrapers, apartment blocks, homes, lakes, construction sites with cranes, and more. Vehicles are helicopters, hot air balloons and a plane.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a certified town planner!

ROAD LAYOUT

I started with the road network. First major highways with light gray wool to set them apart. I added an inter change near the center. From there, I made all other thinner roads in dark gray wool (rough grid patterns like real towns, I hope!)
Building by hand allowed me to leave accidental imperfections in the layout to make it more organic and realistic. You can’t achieve perfections building on a micro scale with huge blocks anyway!
The roads are lifted a block above ground as I felt they would have been too flat otherwise. Maybe I could have used slabs?
There’s a train station top left, and I used anvils and slabs to imitate rails (actual rails looked off scale in the city).
Also there are two lifted highways from purpur slabs in the city (lifted on cobble stone wall columns). I build them to the side as a straight road, then copied, rotated and pasted (-a) with World Edit into the city.

CITY BUILDINGS

Next, buildings, the life of any city! I built in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, colors and styles for diversity. Buildings go up to about 15 blocks in height, though most are smaller than that.
I started filling the bottom left of the city, which would become the densest area, the downtown. The buildings fill most of the available space, with maybe a block of space between them.
Blocks used include stones, bricks, terracotta and wool, sandstone, woods, prismarine and more! Glass doesn’t work well on the small scale, so I mostly used compressed ice to replicate glass office blocks.
Roofs are from slabs, stairs or carpets. Some decoration comes from fences, walls, iron bars and buttons.

FILLER DETAILS

Lastly, I went over the city multiple times adding layers of detail!
I added slabs to the roads to imitate alleyways and such. Some nether fences on the highways are meant to be large road sign… things.
In between buildings, I put in pressure plates for pavements. Plant pots were added as chimneys to some homes, and I added red stone torches to the taller buildings.
Where there was empty space left over in the city, I put in simple structures from singe blocks of moss stone, note blocks, pistons etc. Other random slabs and things around the city are also meant to add detail and variety.
I added large solar farms towards the emptier top side of the city (daylight sensors). Lastly, I bone mealed everything! I made a lot of double tall grass so it stands out like trees in the city.
Actual tree saplings could potentially cause problems and randomly grow into trees if the world wasn’t properly set up.