User:Simons Mith/Ships and Sails

Ships and sails are popular objects to try to make in Minecraft, but their shapes make them difficult to do convincingly, except at quite large scales. This tutorial attempts to give some basic hull and sail shapes and guidelines on how to make them look effective.

(Hull design diagrams and pictures to follow)

The First Tip
Almost all boats are symmetrical. Along their centrelines, they have keels, rudders, prows, masts, figureheads and so on. For this reason, it is highly advisable to ensure your vessel is an odd number of blocks wide. This is probably the single most important boat-building tip in this article.

Raft
The stereotypical raft has logs - the newly-available horizontal logs are ideal - forming a rectangular base, perhaps a chest for supplies, and a probably a log mast with a square sail.

Barge
Flat-bottomed river boats of various kinds are probably the next easiest type of boat to make. A vessel like a military landing barge will typically have a flat front rather than a bow, making them easier still to model.

Canal boats
Canal boats should be very long and thin. Unfortunately, given the minimum wall thickness available in Minecraft, it's generally going to be necessary for a boat to be two blocks wide internally, which means four blocks wide externally, which in turn requires a canal containing such a boat to be at least six blocks wide.

Viking longship
The longship design is reasonably simple to model in Minecraft at small scales.

Cogs
A simple design from about the 12th century, a cog has a mostly traditional 'ship' shape, but with a flat bottom. This makes them easier to model than some later designs

Sails
Square Triangular Lateen Spinnaker

Masts
Single Miltiple