This Minecraft mod makes building complex structures so much easier

Building anything in Minecraft is an intensive task, and it's frustrating how few tools the game gives you to play with. Thankfully, modder Requios is here to save the day with their Effortless Building mod that comes packed with some incredibly useful tools so you don't have to assemble buildings one block at a time.

Using Effortless Building, players have access to a special menu screen full of options to speed up building by automating the process of placing blocks. The simplest tool is mirroring, which allows you to place multiple blocks at once but in mirrored positions. It's a bit complicated to explain, but watch the video above to see the mod in action. Essentially, if you're building a symmetrical structure (like a house), mirroring requires you to only build one quadrant of the house manually, with the rest being filled in automatically. It's very handy.

The other core feature is arrays, which is similar to mirroring but it "copies your build in a certain direction a certain number of times." If you were laying fence posts, for example, you could use the arrays option to have it automatically duplicate your posts with just a single click. The video below shows it in action.

There's several other handy features too. Radial mirrors lets you—you guessed it—instantly place blocks in a circle around a certain point, while the Randomizer Bag makes it easy to add a little variety to features like a cobblestone pathway by randomly placing specifically chosen blocks. You can also use Quick Replace to easily swap out blocks (no more digging up earth to lay down some wood flooring) too. And, what's great is that this mod works in Survival Mode and will automatically use the appropriate number of harvested blocks when placing them using any of these tools.

If you're big into building in Minecraft, Effortless Building seems like a must-have mod to help speed up the process. You can download Effortless Building here, and Requios recommends checking out this YouTube walkthrough to get started.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.