What is here
Round shapes are hard to build on a square grid. You can eyeball a small circle, but a tower 30 blocks wide or a dome over a village needs a plan. BlockShapes draws that plan. You enter a width and a height, and the tool shows the shape on a grid, one square per block.
Flat shapes, such as circles and ovals, come with a row by row guide: skip so many blocks, place so many. Solid shapes, such as spheres, domes, cylinders and rings, are drawn layer by layer. You move through the layers with a slider and see the faint outline of the layer below, so each new layer lines up with the old one.
Counting what you need
Every result shows the number of blocks, split into stacks of 64. A hollow sphere 21 blocks wide takes 1,082 blocks, which is 16 stacks and 58 blocks. A solid one takes 4,945. Knowing this before you start tells you whether to build in survival, gather first or switch to creative. The stack calculator turns any total into stacks, chests and shulker boxes.
Most shapes can be solid, hollow or hollow with a thick shell. The thin shell is the cheapest. The thick shell has no diagonal gaps, which matters for moats, sealed rooms and anything where mobs or water must not get through.
Sizes that people search for
Some sizes come up again and again, so they have pages of their own with counts, layer tables and notes: a 16 block circle (exactly one chunk), an 11 block circle for towers, a 21 block sphere and a 31 block sphere. The full lists are on the circle and sphere pages.
Pictures and stairs
The pixel art generator turns a picture into blocks and gives you a material list based on concrete, wool and terracotta colours. The spiral staircase generator gives a numbered plan for the steps around a pillar, in either direction.
Who it is for
Builders who want a round tower, an arena, a bubble house, a planet or a lighthouse and would rather plan than guess. Beginners get a guide they can follow with no maths. Experienced builders get exact counts and a quick way to compare sizes before they commit.
BlockShapes is an independent project and is not affiliated with Mojang or Microsoft. Minecraft is a trademark of its owner and is named only to say which game the tools are made for.