Building tools

These are the tools that place and remove blocks. Pick one from the tool column on the left; its settings appear in the options bar across the top.

• Build — place the current hotbar block. Click and drag to lay down runs. With Orient on (see Precision & modifiers), blocks that have a facing point the way you place them. With Snap on, a drag stays contiguous, filling 90° corners as you draw — no diagonal gaps (see Snap).
• Erase — remove blocks. Removing one half of a door, bed, or tall plant takes its partner with it (when Orient is on).
• Brush — paint a sphere of blocks with an adjustable radius; good for organic terrain. Its Mode also offers paint/erase/smooth and terrain sculpting — Raise, Lower, Flatten, and Roughen push the surface up or down within the footprint (with a falloff and a Strength slider), keeping each column's own surface block.
• Line — click points to draw a run of blocks: two points make a straight line, three or more make a smooth Catmull-Rom curve (tick Straight segments to keep them straight). Adjustable Thickness; a live preview follows the cursor. Enter (or Build) draws it, Backspace removes the last point, Esc cancels. With Snap on, segments route orthogonally (contiguous 90° corners) instead of diagonally.
• Fill — flood a region or a selection with the current block.
• Shape — drop exact geometric primitives (sphere, box, cylinder, cone, pyramid, torus). Size it with the resize handles or by typing X/Y/Z, optionally as a hollow shell, then Apply.
• Text — type a word and stamp it into the world as blocks; set font, height, depth, and facing (it auto-faces the camera). A bounding-box preview shows where it lands. Besides the default sans lettering there are five pixel fonts (Micro 5, Tiny5, Press Start 2P, Silkscreen, VT323) — for those the height slider snaps to multiples of the font's native letter height (5, 5, 7, 5, and 7 blocks respectively), so glyphs stay crisp. Type emoji right in the string: letters use your selected block, while emoji are built from color-matched blocks (wool, concrete, terracotta…) and render at a minimum height of 10 blocks so they stay readable.
• Nature — grow and paint biome-aware nature, in three modes:
  • Place — click to place a procedural tree or rock (with a size slider); each click varies. Trees grow up from the clicked block. Pick a species (oak, fancy oak, birch, spruce, jungle, acacia, dark oak, cherry, mangrove, or giant mushroom) or leave it on Auto (biome) to drop a tree suited to the biome you click in (spruce in taigas, acacia in savannas, mangroves in mangrove swamps, giant mushrooms on mushroom islands…). Trees come in three styles: Vanilla grows shapes the way Minecraft actually does (classic pruned-corner oak canopies, tiered spruces and stubby pines, 2×2 giant jungle trees and dark oaks, jogged flat-topped acacias, prop-rooted mangroves), Natural is a freer parametric look with noise-gnarled branches, and Wild goes beyond vanilla — taller, thicker, root-flared trunks with hanging strands and flowering accents in the canopy. Rock mode is biome-aware too: it chooses the stone (sandstone in deserts, red sandstone in badlands, basalt in deltas…), varies the shape (boulder / spire / cluster), and speckles in an accent block. Dripstone mode grows a single speleothem off whichever face you click — up from a cave floor, down from a ceiling — in pointed dripstone, sulfur spikes or amethyst crystals, tapering from a thick base to a fine tip. Spike height sets how tall it tries to grow; it stops short if the cave is smaller.
  • Paint — drag a brush (its own Radius) over terrain to fill the area with vegetation that suits the biome under each column: grass and ferns, the right flowers, leaf litter and moss carpets, mushrooms, berry and azalea bushes — and cacti, dry grasses and dead bushes on desert sand. Five layers can be toggled independently — Trees sits right in the bar (it turns a stroke into a forest), while Plants, Ground detail, Shrubs, Spikes and the Density/Tree density sliders are behind the bar's ⋯ button; the Trees layer keeps natural spacing between trunks, so one stroke paints a believable forest. Painting only lands on bare natural ground (grass, dirt, sand…), never on water, builds, or existing blocks, and a whole stroke is one undo step. The write mask applies, so you can restrict painting with the Mask section as usual.
  • Spikes — the one layer that works underground. With it on, a drag finds the cave floor beneath the cursor and the ceiling above it and grows stalagmites and stalactites there, varying their height across the brush and occasionally letting a pair meet in the middle as a full column. Pick the Material (pointed dripstone, sulfur spikes or amethyst) and a Spike height. Spike base patch, on by default, replaces a little natural stone around each root with matching dripstone, sulfur or budding amethyst so the spike reads as growing out of the rock — it's the only Nature control that rewrites existing terrain, so turn it off if you want the ground left exactly as it was.
  • Erase — drag to remove painted nature only: plants, shrubs and ground detail (and leaves/logs when the Trees layer is on, or stalactites, stalagmites and crystals when Spikes is), leaving terrain and structures untouched. The stone patch around a spike root stays behind, since it's ordinary terrain.
  • Leaves placed by Nature are persistent — they won't decay when the world is opened in Minecraft.
• Extrude — click a block face to push it out by one layer, following the whole flat face you clicked; Ctrl+click pushes it in. Good for thickening walls, raising platforms, or carving recesses.
• Flood fill — a 3D paint bucket: click to fill a connected run of the same block with the active block; Ctrl+click drains it to air.
• Inspect — open the dock's Inspect section (its tab on the right, or I) and click a block to read its name, position, block states, and render info. It also offers one-click variants: recolour a dyed block to any of the 16 colours, or switch a material between its forms (stairs / slab / wall / fence / …). Clicking a variant makes it your active block, ready to build with.
• Eyedropper — click any block to load it into the selected hotbar slot (the same as Alt-clicking with any tool). Reach it from the pipette button on the block chip (bottom-left), or just Alt-click any block with any tool — that shortcut is always live. It captures the block's full state — pick an east-facing stair or a top slab and you get exactly that, ready to build with, not its default form.

The build plane

Every building tool works by pointing at a block: you click a face, and the new block goes against it. In an Empty world there are no faces to click, so nothing happens — which is where the build plane comes in.

The build plane is a virtual floor drawn as a grid. It isn't part of your world and never exports; it just gives the cursor something to hit, so Build, Fill, Line, Shape, Brush, Select and the rest behave exactly as they would on solid ground. Blocks land on the plane itself, at the height it sits at.

• It turns on automatically for a world with no blocks in it, so an Empty world is buildable from the first click.
• Toggle it any time from View & Rendering → Build plane, or the command palette (Toggle build plane).
• Set Plane height to choose the Y level it sits at, or nudge it with Shift+[ and Shift+]. Raising it is a quick way to start a floating platform or a new storey in mid-air.

Real blocks always take priority: as soon as the cursor is over something solid, you're clicking that, not the plane. So switching it on in an existing world only affects clicks that would otherwise have hit nothing.

Tools that need a block to act on — Erase, Inspect, Eyedropper — ignore the plane, since there's nothing there to remove or read.

Block state & direction

Blocks that have an orientation or variant can be set up before you place them. When the active block supports states, a ⚙ button appears on the block chip (bottom-left); click it — or right-click a hotbar slot — to open the state picker. Choose, in Bedrock terms:

• Facing — which way stairs, doors, trapdoors, fence gates, buttons, ladders, levers, chests, furnaces, lecterns and the like point (plain N/E/S/W labels).
• Half — a slab's top or bottom, a trapdoor's top/bottom.
• Axis — how a log, pillar or chain lies (Y upright, X, or Z).
• Open / hinge — doors and trapdoors open or closed, door hinge left or right.
• Mount & toggles — a lantern standing or hanging, a campfire lit or out, bell/grindstone attachment, candle count, and more.

Your choice sticks to that hotbar slot (shown with a small dot) and is remembered between sessions. Changes apply instantly to the active block, so you can close the picker and keep building. Reset to default clears it back to the plain block.

To re-orient a block already in the world, use the Inspect tool: click the block, then ⚙ Edit state & direction in the Inspect section opens the same picker bound to that block — change its facing/half/axis in place, as a normal undoable edit, without rebuilding it.