Minecraft — great on its own, better with add-ons. Thanks to the robust and incredible creative community, avid Minecrafters have thousands upon thousands of different plugins, mods, minigames, servers, maps and other content that we can play with when we get bored of the vanilla grind.
If you’re new to the Minecraft modding community, you’re in for a treat. Minecraft mods can introduce new blocks, foods, mechanics, recipes, quests, models and mobs — all at the click of a button once you’ve got the installation process down. Of course, while you can certainly venture into modded Minecraft with your guns blazing, and put together your favorite mods, I’d highly recommend going with a modpack, such as those in this Best Minecraft Modpacks of 2020 list.
Or, if you already know what kind of mods you like, you can refer to a mod list like this one!! Today, we’re going to cover the Top 10 Decorative Minecraft Mods for Builders. While there are some tools in here to help with building, this list will mainly cover aesthetic, decorative mods that add lots of new blocks and models that builders can go ham with. And remember, it doesn’t matter if you’re strictly good at building — as long as you have fun putting your structures together!
DecoCraft
Perhaps one of the biggest decorative mods, and the most aptly named one, Decocraft certainly blows the competition out of the water. It comes with over 3,000 new decorative furniture blocks, each with custom and super detailed models. Really, there’s everything you can think of in here: sofas, chairs, lamps, bathtubs, barrels, sacks of spices, a grand piano… There are over a hundred different bed models alone! Plus, each model comes in over a dozen color variations, at least.
If you’re a builder to any extent: whether you professionally place blocks for a living, or if you just like having a nice little house to live in whenever you play Minecraft, you’ll definitely want this mod. Seriously. When I play modpacks with my friends, I tend to add this mod into the pack as an afterthought even if it didn’t come with it, just for the aesthetic that it brings to the table no matter what the situation.
As for how to obtain these new furnitures, the mod adds in a perfectly balanced yet simple way to do so: you model them out of clay, and then paint them with a mix of three colors: red, blue and green (dyes)! It’s easier than it sounds. You’ll want to craft a DecoBench as soon as you get into the game with the three dyes mentioned above, a crafting table and a block of clay. After that, you can just start throwing clay, rose red dye, lapis lazuli and cactus green into the bench, select the furniture you want, and click craft. It’s incredibly easy to do for the nuance and detail that it brings to the game, and I’d highly recommend giving this mod a try as long as you’re planning on building something during your playthrough.
Chisel
While Decocraft is the go-to mod for adding furniture and custom models, Chisel is its counterpart when it comes to blocks and textures. Chisel adds in hundreds of decorative blocks to the game — namely, variations of existing blocks. For instance, in the picture above, you can see the variations that it adds to spruce wood planks. This adds so much to the game, especially with the custom blocks that the mod adds to the game, such as the factory block, which introduces animated textures.
Whether you have a roleplay server, or you’re just looking to spruce up your builds, Chisel is almost certainly a must-have at all times. If you’re playing in survival, Chisel is also incredibly easy to use and balanced around actual gameplay. All you need is one simple tool, the chisel. This is crafted with iron and a stick in a crafting table, like a diagonal shovel (but with just one stick). You can also use diamond, if you’re feeling extra fancy!
You can “chisel” blocks into their variations right in your inventory by right clicking the chisel in the air and choosing the blocks to chisel in the resulting GUI; or you can directly chisel blocks that have been placed in the world by left clicking on them with the chisel. There’s also the iChisel, which you can use to chisel blocks in specific shaped areas — but you can fiddle with that and figure it out yourself!
Fairy Lights
Fairy Lights definitely deserves a mention among the aesthetic mods of this list, having quickly climbed to popularity recently among casual players and builders. Fairy Lights adds dozens of different kinds of fairy lights, including garlands, lanterns, drip lights, and various holiday-themed ones (there are pumpkins and bats, just in time for Halloween!).
You can also add effects to each fairy light, similar to fireworks, with different items like glowstone and redstone powder. This allows for so much customization, no matter what, you’ll find the perfect fairy light for your building. The custom model of the fairy lights also just looks pretty great. Even though it’s a small and relatively simple mod, its flexibility and customization options have landed it a solid place on this list.
Chisels and Bits
Despite sharing (some of the) same name, Chisels and Bits is vastly different from the aforementioned Chisel mod — and, somehow, adds infinitely more block options, literally. What this mod does is allow players to isolate and pick up “bits”, or rather, each individual voxel from each block (that is, each individual pixel), then place them down to create whole new custom blocks.You do this by using a chisel to pick out each voxel, then placing them in your Chisels and Bits bag — after all, if each of the little bits took up an inventory slot, you wouldn’t be doing much else other than inventory management. Why not take a look as some examples of the best resource packs for Minecraft in 2021.
That all sounds lovely and all, but what it really means is that once you’ve gotten past the horror at having to handle each little pixel from blocks (I never really got past that stage, myself), you can create structures that look like the picture above. Of course, I probably don’t have to stress just how much customization can come out of a mod that lets you dissect each block into their individual pixels, so I’ll let you decide whether the tedium is worth making creations that can make anyone gasp in disbelief.
Cocricot
A mod and resource pack wombo combo that’s made the homepage on the official Minecraft blog, it’s not hard to see why Cocricot has absolutely exploded in popularity recently. The resource pack has been featured in our Best Stylistic Beautiful Minecraft Resource Packs list before, so it’s no surprise that I think highly of the beautifully detailed, homey artstyle that the modmaker has so clearly mastered.
The mod, of course, brings all that to a whole new, gorgeous level. The Cocricot mod adds tons of furniture and decorations that Minecraft writer Marsh Davies so aptly describes as “[making] me feel warm and comfortable and strangely sad at the same time”. From cafe awnings reminiscent of old Europe to chiselled wood panels and stair banisters, while Decocraft shines in the sheer amount of custom models it introduces to the game, Cocricot shines in the little details and transports us to a world that we’re nostalgic for despite never having lived in.
Carpenter’s Blocks
Carpenter’s Blocks is a must-have for aspiring builders who value customization and have found themselves frequently wishing for variations of existing Minecraft blocks — like stone fences, wooden flower pots and golden ladders. Carpenter’s Blocks brings all that to reality by introducing “Carpenter’s Blocks”. These essentially look like the skeleton framework of default blocks, such as stairs, doors, pressure plates. fences, pots, etc. You can then place ANY block into these frameworks to texture them as the new block. It also adds in slopes, which are just really long overdue for when stairs don’t really cut it.
These carpenter’s blocks are created with a simple mix of wood and sticks, making it a great mod to play with in survival mode as well as when messing around in creative. Unfortunately, the mod is only for 1.7.10 and hasn’t been updated for later versions. However, an alternative called BlockCraftery is available if you’re looking to play on the shinier, new versions!
Better Builder’s Wands
While not necessarily an aesthetic mod, this mod is a godsend for aspiring builders, whether you’re building a house or a nuclear reactor slash factory. For those unfamiliar with Builder’s Wands, they let you place down entire stacks of blocks, as long as you’re pointed at a surface made of the same type of block.
This means you can easily extend the 100-block dirt platform you’re building for your farm, or fill in the framework of your stone brick house, within seconds. Of course, you’ll need to work a little to obtain these wands: you can create them out of any ore by crafting a diagonal shovel in a 3×3 crafting bench, as well as use netherstars to create unbreakable, unlimited builder’s wand that can place down inventories of items at a time at record speeds.
Download Better Builder’s Wands
Bibliocraft
Bibliocraft is a fantastic storage, organizational and decorative mod for anyone looking to populate their homes and builds. It adds a ton of storage options such as 3D bookshelves for books, item cases to display individual items in glass cases, desks and usable chairs, plates, armor / weapon stands and shelves. It also adds some little additions such as measuring tape (no longer do you have to crouch and inch backwards while counting block distances), an in-game checklist, and coordinate compasses that always point towards a defined coordinate.
What really makes this mod stand out is how interactive each Bibliocraft block is. You can actively see, place in and take out items from each of the aforementioned storage solutions, adding tons of interactivity to your home decor.
Conclusion
Part of why Minecraft is so incredibly appealing is its nostalgic quality, the familiarity that you can load into your new world and know exactly how everything works, know exactly what you want to do.
However, sometimes, what makes Minecraft so appealing is that it is what the player makes it, that it’s so receptive to player creativity. And nothing demonstrates player creativity like player-made mods!
Whether you’re an experienced builder or someone just looking to make a nice house, we hope that this list has given you some ideas to add into your game and create the custom, perfect build that you’ve always wanted.
