[Building Guide] Waterfalls

[Wrynn 1347]

Where to find them, how to build them.

Waterfalls makes cliff-faces look just so pretty, and with this guide you'll learn easily how to make them! Just follow the steps and you'll be able to get one of your own in no time (with the added effort of actually building it of course.)

 

It's vital that you place your waterfall correctly, doing so in the wrong place will make it seem out of place and look unnatural. You will always need to start with a large incline, whether that's a cliff face or a very steep hill - it needs to be a large incline! Otherwise, the water isn't falling, it's just slowly rolling. You can either let water run from a pond off of the cliff, or a river; I've decided to go with a small pond that I built.

 

To start your waterfall, you simply need to dig a path for the water to run off of the cliff. For mine I simple made a small trail along the edge of the cliff that allows the water to trail from the cliff. It's pretty simple and isn't the hardest of steps.

 

The waterfall as it looks now isn't very impressive and doesn't look like it's really supposed to be there. To fix that we need to make the bottom of the waterfall blend more into the surroundings. To start simply block off the water that runs down with a few blocks so that you don't have any water running from your cliff face. You'll then want to tamper with the bottom to try and make the flow more interesting and perhaps segment the water. After you've made a few changes let the water flow back down and see how it works; if you don't like it, you can keep going back and changing the design - here's how I started;

I wasn't happy atall with how the water flowed down onto the rocks, so I continued to tamper with the design, and kept blocking the water off so that it wasn't in the way whist I was trying to build.

 

I started tampering with the water flow a bit more, and decided that I would let the water flow into two streams. I simply used stone to divide how the water fell - it doesn't look great the the minute however it does get cleaned up. Still not fully happy I continued to change about the blocks;

 

It was at this point that I decided I was happy with how the stream looked, and began to move onto the next stage. Although it may not look great so far - you simply just have to get your waterflow correct in this stage to advance.

This step comes up a lot, however it's perhaps one of the most important steps if you want the waterfall to blend in to the other stone. Simply start knocking out stone blocks and begin replacing them with similar blocks such as cobblestone and andesite. You can use whichever blocks you like to texture as long as they are similar to the main block. This adds not only detail to your build however gives people more to look at rather than one solid colour.

 

This last step helps blend the waterfall even further into the surroundings, and makes it look real. Firstly you can start by using half slabs to smooth out the stone and make it look more rounded. There may also be leaves around the waterfall you can add, or perhaps even add small shrubs that are growing in-between the waterfall, or even flowers to bring more colour. Whatever you add try to make sure it fits with the theme, so don't go adding bookshelves; here is what I did with mine.

 

I added sand around the bottom, and also added leaves around the waterfall and other foliage. It simply makes the waterfall look more integrated into it's surroundings and less standing out. You could even add some cobwebs at the bottom of the waterfall to represent the foam/spray that congregates at the bottom of waterfalls. Nevertheless I hope you have fun building your own waterfall.