Minecraft: Here’s How To Spawn Blocks Using Commands

With the use of commands, we can make our lives a bit easier in Minecraft, and even the thrill of Minecraft tends to disappear once you’ve used commands for long enough; using commands can make it feel as if you’ve got a quality of life update to Minecraft once you learn how to use them. One of the first commands that you might think of using would be to spawn blocks that you can’t necessarily find easily, but is it even possible? How do you spawn blocks using commands in Minecraft?

The history of block spawning using commands

With each update, Minecraft commands become easier to understand and execute, at least when it comes to the easier commands and not whole chains of commands you have to type out and come up with if you, let’s say, want to delete the whole world, leaving nothing but the void in your path. Let’s look at how the /summon command evolved through the years; it was one of the first commands that allowed players to spawn blocks in their world using commands.

Approximately ten years ago, the /summon command was introduced, allowing players to spawn whichever entity was available back then. This also included blocks. One such command for spawning falling sand looked like this: /summon FallingSand ~0 ~5 ~0 {TileID:54,TileEntityData:{Items:[{Slot:0,id:322,Damage:1,Count:1},{Slot:1,id:264,Count:1}]},Time:1}. The command is long. It would take a genius to figure out what every bit of the command means and does, so let’s explain it section by section.

The ‘/summon‘ determines what will happen when you input the command. The FallingSand bit determines what will be summoned once you’ve completed the command input. The ‘0 5 0‘ are coordinates and determine where the falling sand will spawn. If you’re using a command block to summon the block, it will spawn in correlation to the command block since the command block is then the 0, 0 spawn point.

The ‘{TileID:54, TileEntityData:{}, Time:1}+ bit determines that a chest will also spawn since 54 TileID is the ID of a chest. The tile entity data will describe the items within that chest, and the time bit is used to determine how fast the falling sand will spawn/drop since it is falling sand, after all. This bit ‘{Items:[ {Slot:0, id:322, Damage:1, Count:1},{Slot:1, id:264, Count:1} ]}‘describes the items within the chest. In this case, the items that would spawn would be a golden apple and a diamond tool.

In the end, this command seems to be more complicated than it needs to be because you’re spawning falling sand and because you’re spawning more items in a chest, but my point still stands. Let’s look at other commands you can use to spawn blocks in Minecraft.

Command: /fill

The /fill command will allow you to spawn blocks in a large area, up to a cap when there will be too many blocks to spawn at once for the command to work. I managed to spawn upwards of 3000 blocks with one command, so it would be false to say that the command is limiting. One fill command might look like this:.’/fill 123 33 456 197 33 490 minecraft:stone_bricks‘.

Explaining the command

The easiest way to explain how the command works is to use a visual representation, but I’ll use both to explain it. The command will fill an area you determined with the type of block you’ve also determined. You’ll need the starting and end point coordinates to determine the area. I recommend your endpoint coordinates be vertical to your starting point coordinates, allowing you to cover a bigger area if that’s what you need.

The Y in the coordinates will usually be the same if you want to fill a line of height equal to one block. If you want to fill more than one block line of height, you’ll keep everything vertical but input the endpoint Y coordinate lower or higher, depending on how many blocks you want to add to the height and whether you want them to go down or up.

Command: /give

The /give command doesn’t spawn blocks in your world but does spawn them in your inventory. The /give command is one of the easiest to execute since it doesn’t require you to think about coordinates. One /give command will look like this: /give (player name without brackets) minecraft:ancient_debris

Explaining the command even without the explanation, the command is pretty self-explanatory, but what would you do if you wanted to give yourself or another player a full stack of ancient debris? You would input a number after determining the block type you want to give the player, so in the end, the command would look something like this if you wanted to give a full stack. /give (player name without brackets) minecraft:ancient_debris 64.

Creative VS survival mode

Although the /give command makes sense both in creative and survival mode, in some instances, like when you’re trying to spawn blocks, it doesn’t since you can easily access the creative inventory and give yourself an infinite amount of whatever block you choose. The cases where the /give command makes sense are beyond the scope of this article but you’d make use of it if you wanted to give yourself a diamond sword or a tool with enchantments. It skips the whole part of actually having to enchant the item in the anvil.

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