One of the most common pieces of advice for adding more detail to flat walls in builds is to vary the materials in the wall. However, using the wrong materials can easily affect the attractiveness of the build by making textures and color hues incohesive. Learning what blocks go well without standing out can be very important and useful in creating walls that are visually interesting, but not overly busy. Through my experience building numerous stone buildings, such as castles and churches, I have created several easy to use palettes that are useful in creating a diverse range of cohesive stone textures.
Palette 1: Stone Brick Walls
An easy mistake to make in mixing other materials into stone brick walls would be to mix stone with stone brick. This makes sense on a surface level, as stone bricks are crafted from stone and have a similar hue. However, stone is an incredibly smooth block, and when viewed from a significant distance, stands out sharply against the darker lines of the stone bricks. Another block that one might be mistaken to mix with stone bricks is polished andesite. While visually similar, both having clearly defined bricks (though the andesite “brick” is the full block), this similarity is actually more of a detriment than an advantage. The distinct lines around each individual polished andesite block create a obvious separation between the two block types, which is further enhanced by the smooth interior and slight blue tint, allowing the blocks to be easily separated at a distance.
Even at a significant distance, stone bricks, stone, and polished andesite do not blend well.
So what blocks do blend well with stone bricks? These may take you by surprise. Firstly, cobblestone. Why cobble, but not regular stone? Isn’t cobble too random to blend well with stone bricks? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cobble shares a similarity with stone bricks in that it is made of separated sections of lighter stone, divided by darker lines. This means that it doesn’t have the smoothness that makes regular stone stand out. The small, broken shapes of cobble also allows it to blend better than the strong geometric shape of polished andesite. Another block you may be surprised to find blends with stone bricks is gravel. Like cobble, the texture is rough enough to blend in, and not intense enough to stand out. However, the hue of gravel is slightly redder than stone bricks, and must be used sparingly.
Palette 2: Cobblestone Walls
The number of plain cobblestone walls I have seen probably numbers in the thousands, and quite frankly, they’re amazingly unattractive. Luckily, we can use the same palette as with stone bricks, but increase the percentage of blocks that are cobblestone while decreasing the percentage of stone bricks. My stone brick palette and cobblestone palette are entirely interchangeable, and you can adjust the concentration of different blocks in them to create the exact textures you need.
Palette 3: Smooth Stone Walls
In creating stone buildings, it is often useful to have certain areas more simple and smooth, such that they do not catch the eye as much as stone bricks or cobble does. The obvious answer here is using stone or andesite. However, too much stone tends to make a build look natural rather than man made, as we are so used to seeing stone in caves. Andesite, on the other hand, has a clearly repetitive texture which can distract from a build. The answer is surprisingly simple: just blend them. Gravel can also be added as it appears as a decent intermediary texture, as the color is closer to stone, but the texture is more similar to andesite. If at this point you feel the wall is still too bland, cobblestone can be mixed in sparingly.
Bonus Palette: “Coralstone” Walls
That’s right, you can use dead coral as an alternative stone texture. Coral has a slight reddish tint that is useful in creating an incredibly unique stone wall. There are 5 types of dead corals, of these horn coral and fire coral look best as stone equivalents, while brain coral looks by far the worst. As mentioned before, gravel also has a slight reddish tint, and as such, blends expectedly well with dead coral. Cobblestone, despite lacking this tint, can also be blended in if added in small quantities. Though potential difficult to create (due to the rarity of coral reefs) “coralstone” is an interesting and novel texture to build with, and, if you’re on a server, a good way to flex your exploration skills to your friends.
Here’s the same palettes at a further distance, like you might see them in an actual build.
Hopefully these palettes come in useful! Feel free to ask me any questions you have about them. If you enjoyed, I highly appreciate reblogs, and feel free to follow for more similar content in the future.
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