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Viking Building Style in Minecraft

The Viking building style allows for some very dramatic-looking villages, especially when they’re built on mountains or other high places in snow biomes.

The most stereotypical part about Viking houses are the roofs. They’re tall, slightly curved, and usually have some form of decoration at the ends of the top. The houses themselves are often made out of wood and tend to look quite dark and a little depressing. This dark exterior contrasts the interior of the houses, which are often quite cozy and mainly designed to be practical.

Viking ships are also very distinct looking, with curved ends and a red and white sail. I’ve built two different ships for this guide, a large one, which I use as trading and battleships, and a smaller ship, which I use as either fishing boats or Viking funeral services (they burn the dead on small sailboats). Note that I cover the large ship in more detail in a separate guide, which you can find here.

Viking Houses

As you can see in the image below, I’ve built the roofs of the normal Viking houses as quite steep, pointed roofs. I used normal planks partially because minecraft doesn’t have dark wooden slabs and stairs yet, but mainly because these wooden plank roofs allow us to place snow on it (or let it fall on top), which makes it look a lot better.

The reason we need slabs and stairs is the decoration pieces on the roof itself. I mainly used stairs (and upside down stairs) to create them and they look great. The slabs are used to make the roof curve slightly inwards at the top, which doesn’t look very good if you use stairs or normal blocks.

The decoration piece is made with an upside down stairs at the edge of the roof, which has a slab on top of it and 2 upside down stairs on the sides of that slab. Slabs are also added at the back side (roof side) to make it flow gradually into the curved roof.

Unlike most of my other guides I’ve also decorated the inside of the houses, which turned out quite well. Instead of 2 separate floors, I’ve chosen for half an upper floor, which makes it part of the ground floor and the whole house. This also allowed me to add a fire with a cauldron as a center piece of the house, which is where the vikings will sit for warmth and food. Besides this fire I’ve also built a kitchen, which looks quite cozy under the top floor.

The top floor is used as a sleeping area, which is heated by the warmth of the fire (and kitchen) on the bottom floor. I found this works great, as it makes the house look very cozy and warm, which contrasts perfectly with the cold winter landscape outside.

Viking Townhall

The townhall is the biggest building in the village and built on the highest part of the island, which is also roughly the middle of the island. I’ve built the townhall is a place where all the vikings will meet, celebrate and enjoy some food and drinks.

The town hall has 2 large rows of tables, which is where the common viking will sit with their family and friends. The large table at the end of this row is used by the viking heroes, only (the best) warriors and fighters will sit here. The smaller table at the end is for the chief and his wife will sit, which is also why this part of the building is elevated to allow them to overlook the whole building.

At the entrance and in the 2 side sections of the building are some cauldrons on a fire, which is where all the food of for the vikings is cooked. I’ve played around with different blocks, as I wanted something different than just cauldrons on the fire, but the only block that came close to looking good was netherrack, which looks a little like meat, but not enough. Pumpkins and melons just looked weird.

I’ve only placed windows above the entrance and behind the viking chief’s table. This lets in just enough daylight, without making everything look to open and bright. I wanted to make everything look warm and cozy, just like the houses, which adds to the contrast between the warm fires inside and the cold, snowy landscapes outside. The fires from the cauldrons provide some decent lighting, but not enough to light the whole town hall, so I’ve added a few torches and a chandelier to light up the roof.

The roof of the town hall is a bit different from the houses, but shouldn’t be too difficult to build. The decoration piece will be the hardest, but it’s simply a slightly bigger version of the one who got on the houses. Like the house piece, this piece has 2 upside down stairs attached to the side of a slab, which is placed on top of another upside down stairs placed against the edge of the roof. A normal stairs block is placed under it, which makes it stand out more and that’s exactly what we want from out main building. The back of the declaration piece is made with a stairs block first and then a slab.

The roof is also curved more, as we have more space to work with. I go down half a block about every 2-3 blocks, whichever looks better. If you copy my roof, the exact measurements after the stairs and slab of the decoration piece are: 2 blocks, 2 slabs, 3 blocks, 4 slabs and then you build up towards the middle again in with 3 blocks, 2 slabs and then 2 blocks.

The roofs of the side parts are almost the same as the roofs of our normal houses, with the exception that they start with just a 1 block increase in height, instead of 2. This means the roofs will overlap where they meet each other, which looks a lot better.

Other Buildings

Of course, a village isn’t very good if you only have a town hall and the same looking houses. A town needs farms, windmills, blacksmiths and many other job specific houses. Most of these buildings will look similar to the normal houses, but just bigger or with side sections, similar to our townhall. But blacksmiths, windmills, animal barns and other buildings will look a little different.

A blacksmith needs to have either a chimney or an outdoor furnace to make sure the heat can go out. I decided to use both, though the outdoor furnace looks best in my opinion. Like most buildings, the blacksmith has the signature roof, but the windows are a little different and the bottom half of the building is made out of stone. You can read how to build the complete blacksmith in our blacksmith building guide.

My viking village has been built with darker looking blocks, so our windmill also has to look darker than the one in our windmill building guide, it also needs to be a bit bigger to fit in with the large viking houses. The general shape is still the same, but I’ve expanded the width and height to make sure the overal shape doesn’t look odd. The windmill is not in use in the cold winter months, so I’ve added ice formations to make the village look even colder.

Viking Boat

The small boat is fairly easy to make, but this scale doesn’t allow us to add many details. One main characteristic of viking ships is the curved ends, which I’ve tried to recreate with upside-down stairs.

The stern and bow (back and front) of the ship are the same, except for the decoration piece. I would normally use the same piece on both sides, but both pieces work just as good together, so you’ll have to decide for yourself which one you like best.

The hull of the boat can be seen in the image above, you simply extend it to as long as you like. The sail is made in the same way I make the large sails, which is part experimenting and part using a program like Paint to draw out some general shapes of sails and see which one looks best.

Viking Ship

Building a large viking ship allows us to add more details, which is perfect for the curved decoration pieces at each end. For this ship I’ve chosen to use the same piece on each side, which works quite well.

As with our smaller viking boat, this viking ship is pretty much symmetrical, so both the stern and bow are the same. The only thing that’ll make one side look like the front is our sail, which is the same sail as the one I used in our normal ship tutorial.