’Tis the most wonderful time of the year – if you like scaring the wits out of people in Minecraft! We do, so here are some of our favourite tips and tricks for creating great Halloween builds!
SPOOKY BIOMES AND MATERIALS
Whatever you decide to build for your Minecraft Halloween project, it pays to take a little time to think about where you want to build it, and what materials you want to use to do it. We, personally, think swamp biomes are already a little bit spooky, and suited to dark and rainy conditions (see ‘Controlling the Weather’ section), we also like to use plenty of mossy stone, vines and other plants in our Halloween builds to make things look Gothic and abandoned – bringing the outside inside is the key there.
That’s just us, though. If you want to build a snowy nightmare for your friends, you go for it! Just take a little time to make sure your build fits in with its location; it all enhances the effect.
CONTROLLING THE WEATHER AND TIME OF DAY
Nothing sets a scary scene like a dark gloomy night, so why not create one for a Halloween world? Again, this can be done with a console command; so, to make it rain, you can type /weather rain. If you like, you can also add a duration for the rain in seconds – so /weather rain 999999 would set up a very long period of rain even on Minecraft time! If you want to try out something more complicated, there are clever ways to set a world to permanently rain using observers, farmland and command blocks – but it’s not a simple process, and there’s an easier way explained below.
With the /time command, we can also do a lot. For example /time set night would make it instantly night (you can also use day, sunrise or sunset here if you like), and you can also set specific times based on the 24,000 ticks of a Minecraft day (/time set 21000 is good for making it very dark).
When you have the time and weather set how you’d like them, you can then – at least on newer game versions – also use the /gamerule command to make sure that never changes in that specific world. So, /gamerule doDaylightCycle false will stop it ever becoming day again and /gamerule doWeatherCycle false will mean it rains until you tell it not to.
BATS (AND OTHER MOBS)
While bats can only usually be found in underground caves, you can add them to any build by using a bat spawn egg from the Creat
