Simple Building Tips and Tricks

Clara

Terrarian
I made a thread recently on the Obsidian Academy Building Group with simple building tricks and tips. I recommend joining this group if you are interested in building. I got some ideas from the group and included a lot I have learnt and compiled a giant list of little simple building tricks or tips. If you have any ideas that can be shown simply with one sentence and image then post them in this thread and I shall add them.

Here are some other good building resources and guides:
-Block List
-Furniture Themes
-The Builder's Toolbox
-No Wood Boxes: A Building Guide
-Fancy Builds
-Top Rated Steam Builds
-TCF Building Forum
-TO Building Forum
-Obsidian Academy Building Group
-Wiring Forum

Bamboo
- Long vertical sticks of hay painted deep line creates great bamboo
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Fruit - Painted single pumpkin blocks look like different fruit
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One Way Doors - Players are only able to go from left to right in these two set-ups, it is also useful to note that projectiles will go through the first door also
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Open Teleporter Doors - Place shadow paint over a teleporter in a rectangle area to create a blackened out door that can teleport you
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Curtains - Banners placed next to each other can create curtains, different banners work better than others
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Taps - Slime banner looks like flowing water
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Coloured Waterfalls - Waterfalls change colour depending on the colour of gemspark block they come from. Rainbow bricks cause them to change colour constantly
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Single Chain - A single chain creates a circle, many uses such as a bolt or door handle
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Actuated Blocks - Actuated blocks have a lot of uses, such as pillars and 3D background effects
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Gemspark Walls - Gemspark walls will light up blocks they are behind
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Platform Doors - Platforms can count as doors for NPC and sleeping housing
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Alphabet - Basic 3x5 pixel alphabet
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Snow Tops - Placing a single layer of snow creates a simple and easy snowy effect
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Pillars - Most blocks/walls work well as pillars, good to use underneath buildings, especially over uneven surfaces
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Painted Grass - Custom biomes can be made by painting grass and trees, normal paint works better than deep
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Cobwebs - Easy way to make a build look old, abandoned or creepy
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Flags - Single post of blocks with sail walls connected create a flag, cloud wall is good for large flags as light goes through it
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Painted Candy Canes - Get different flavour candy cane blocks with paint, normal works better than deep
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Bubbles - Bubblegum block painted blue looks like bubbles
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Nostalgic Look - Using gray paint over an area gives a nostalgic look
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Potions - Create different potions by painting bottles
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Slime Banners - Create different slime banners by painting them
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Support Beams - Hammer blocks placed in a zig-zag pattern to create support beams
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Lava Blocks - Place lava on top of actuated blocks, then actuate the block. The lava will light the block up, though it disappears on world reload (needs confirming). Link to more details
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Gray Dungeon Bricks - Gray painted dungeon bricks are good alternatives for stone slabs/gray bricks and for castles/foundations
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More Wood - Painting different wood types brown gives a large variety of different looking wood, for example brown shadewood looks good as single line posts
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Painted Living Trees - Painted living wood and leaves can create different biome living tress, normal paint tends to work better than deep. Examples include purple leaves and gray wood for corruption and lime leaves and red wood for jungle
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Fence Windows - Fence walls work well for windows
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Static Screen - Gray painted waterfall walls create an animated static screen
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Painted Waterfalls - Paint waterfall blocks and walls to get different types of liquids, like a poison or candy type
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Painted Living Fire - Paint living fire blocks to get different types of fire
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Smoke - Cloud looks like smoke, paint it gray or black for thicker smoke
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Placeables - You can place gems, crystal shards, coral, seashells and starfish
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Coins and Bars - You can place coins and bars
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Natural Walls - Use the clentaminator on stone, grass, flower and jungle walls to create corrupt/crimson/hallowed stone/grass walls
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Mushrooms - You can place glowing mushroom blocks down and create large mushrooms
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Painted Minecart Tracks - Minecart tracks can be painted, intersections make the paint fit smoothly, deep paints work best
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Building in the Sky - Use the ice rod to place a block in the sky you can build from
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Flowers - Deep painted cloud blocks look like flower petals, leaves can be used as vines/stalks
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Candles - You can place living fire blocks on top of single platforms to make cool looking wall torches, the named platforms work best
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Fancy Window - Use 4 platforms and a table
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Fibonacci Roofs - Use the Fibonacci sequence to make roofs and curves
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Background Waterfalls - Use deactivated blocks to make waterfalls look like they are in the background, use painted active blocks next to them to try to get the inactive blocks to match
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Black and Yellow Barricade Tape
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Waterfalls - Using cloud, raincloud, waterfall wall and living fire block
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Fantastic index of build concepts. Almost got enough here to publish a little, glossy game companion book... Very helpful of you to post up for everyone. :) The Google drive repository reminds me of my own collection of favourite images downloaded from Reddit posts and such. Shame that kind of collation tends to anonymise the creations, loosing context, etc, but the ideas are the key thing of course. Thanks for the T-MEC link too! ;)

Edit: to make your post even more compact you could edit the spoiler box text to that of the description above... Although I'm pretty ambivalent about the use of these in general; very neat, but having to click each one is very cumbersome - hard to get a quick overview f you're more visually minded (or to refresh one's bad short-term memory).
 
Fantastic index of build concepts. Almost got enough here to publish a little, glossy game companion book... Very helpful of you to post up for everyone. :) The Google drive repository reminds me of my own collection of favourite images downloaded from Reddit posts and such. Shame that kind of collation tends to anonymise the creations, loosing context, etc, but the ideas are the key thing of course. Thanks for the T-MEC link too! ;)

Yeah I got that collection from a certain anonymous forum, there are quite a few builds there I recognize from reddit and other places. As for the list of tricks and tips I expect there are a lot more things that can be added, I might spend some time looking through as many builds as I can to get more. I'll wait a while to see if anyone else has anything to contribute. I also plan to make another thread linking to all the different Terraria communities, guides, resources, maps, mods etc as they are all so separated.
 
This is really useful, thanks for posting it! I've been trying to compile my own list of blocks that go well together, or that look like something else when painted, so this was a great reference. If I find enough good ones I'll suggest them later, thanks again :)
 
That bamboo one is a lifesaver for me. I've actually been puzzling on how to make it for the last couple days, and your idea is a lot better than any I've come up with.
 
Fibonacci roofs. The first 2 are the Fibonacci sequence with every member repeated twice, like this: 11 11 22 33. Everything else is the normal Fibonacci sequence arranged in some way or another. I have made versions that fit the width of both odd and even buildings.

detail roof fibonacci.png

Black-yellow barricade tape.

detail barricade tape.png

Waterfalls
http://a.pomf.se/qmjyxu.webm
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That bamboo one is a lifesaver for me. I've actually been puzzling on how to make it for the last couple days, and your idea is a lot better than any I've come up with.

It is not an idea I came up with but rather something I learnt from looking at other builds and I think deserves sharing, it's one of my favourite little building tricks.

Fibonacci roofs. The first 2 are the Fibonacci sequence with every member repeated twice, like this: 11 11 22 33. Everything else is the normal Fibonacci sequence arranged in some way or another. I have made versions that fit the width of both odd and even buildings.


Great tip, I often use the Fibonacci sequence to do curves in Terraria, it works really well.
 
Living fire blocks painted white make a better replacement for Clouds in the Waterfalls.
I know, that's why I posted a webm(http://a.pomf.se/qmjyxu.webm) so you could see how it looks like in movement. The problem with living fire blocks is that they glow orange-yellow, so you need some other light source nearby to nullify that light they naturally give off. Keep in mind that the images are to give you an idea of what can be done and some nice combinations. They're general guidelines you have to choose from and combine however you want.
 
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I know, that's why I posted a webm(http://a.pomf.se/qmjyxu.webm) so you could see how it looks like in movement. The problem with living fire blocks is that they glow orange-yellow, so you need some other light source nearby to nullify that light they naturally give off. Keep in mind that the images are to give you an idea of what can be done and some nice combinations. They're general guidelines you have to choose from and combine however you want.
Yes, I have found this topic really useful and it gave me ideas I never thought of. Thanks for it.
 
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