Step Up Your Survival Builds!

Minecraft builds getting bigger and concrete needs exploding? It might be time to rethink how you gather materials. This guide breaks down a simple four step system that turns concrete crafting from a painful grind into a fast, efficient workflow:

We need concrete for our Minecraft world, a lot of concrete. Our current build methods however need serious help. So are you ready to step up your concrete game with us. Oh yeah, let’s get into it.

So as far as we’re concerned, there’s four steps involved with concrete:

Step one: get a lot of sand. This is pretty easy as our base is close to the water and there are a lot of sand dunes around. Gathering a large amount of sand however can totally destroy your shovel in just a couple of minutes. Until we had a diamond shovel with Unbreaking and Mending enchants on it, we first just stuck to burning through a lot of stone shovels. If you have an iron farm and iron isn’t a problem, you may want to use iron shovels instead.

Step two: get a lot of gravel. We started off hunting for gravel at the bottom of the river next to our base. Gravel deposits are fairly common here and you can also find quite a bit of clay as well. We eventually mined out all the gravel from the river near the base. At that point we switched to gathering gravel out in the deep ocean. Ocean floors are covered in sand and gravel, so there’s certainly enough to go around. As long as you have the right enchant and some water breathing potions, this can be a great way to get a ton of gravel.

The way we get our gravel more recently however is in the Nether. We’re already down there anyway strip mining for netherite, so the gravel deposits, which are super common, are really easy to dig out. Definitely consider getting your gravel in the Nether if the ocean floor isn’t doing it for you.

Step three: get some dye. Fortunately for us, we’re just using white concrete at least 90 percent of the time. We started off using the bone meal taken from skeleton bones as white dye, but quickly ran out.

So we decided to set up a bone meal machine using a composter. We already had an iron farm that produces way more flowers than we need. Whenever they start taking up too much space, we dump stacks of them into the composter and it chews them up into bone meal. We also have a small sugar cane farm that often gets full. Sugar cane is great for making bone meal, so our extra sugar cane gets dumped into the composter as well. White dye problem solved.

Step four: just add water. Adding water to our concrete started off as the most tedious step by far. We needed to set hundreds of blocks at a time, so better methods were called for.

We built a simple concrete machine that uses a piston to quickly push the concrete blocks through a water stream. We could then harvest the finished blocks all at once. In some cases we also started to lay down the concrete while it was still in powder form. For something like a floor, we often lay out the entire thing in powder, then throw a water bucket all over it to set it in place.

So what are your preferred methods for construction materials in a survival Minecraft world? Are you also a big concrete builder? Let us know in the video comments!