How to make trees like the halflings did back in Willow Hollow

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

This is my modern take on an old LOTC build tactic for fast, cheap, and easy custom trees.

 

Pictured below are trees in the old halfling village of Willow Hollow on Vailor:

Every single one of these trees (as far as I can tell) is a modified vanilla minecraft tree. Fancy oak trees (the large oak trees with multiple branches) were grown all around the village with extra logs, mushrooms, leaves, pumpkins, etc put around their trunks to make them look unique.

So, let's try doing that in a more modern minecraft version with extra blocks to use and new post-1.14 textures to play around with!

 

This is how you can guarantee that a sapling will grow into a fancy oak tree. There are other ways to modify the tree with blocks put around a sapling, however.

 

If the ring is moved down a block, you get a weird balloon-like tree, and if you put two blocks on top of each other next to a sapling, it's very likely that the tree will turn into a big ol' fancy oak as well (although this has failed on me before and just grown a slightly taller normal oak tree instead).

 

This is just my personal preference, but I like to change the visible oak log blocks into oak wood so that only bark is showing anywhere on the tree or its branches.

 

Add some roots near the base of the tree while also beefing up the main trunk a bit from the top. This should give the tree an interesting look, almost as if the trunk is slightly bent.

 

Add natural things such as mushrooms, flowers, or leaves near the base of the trunk while beefing out any areas that look to thin with planks of your choice (I prefer spruce but dark oak or regular oak can work as well). In this tree, I also added some bee hives and a red mushroom growing off of the trunk to really get those druid-y nature vibes.

Usually adding some mushrooms, flowers, leaves, or pumpkins is plenty to make the tree visually interesting, but if you really want to add tons of nature around your tree, feel free to do so!

If you don't want the tree to look like a vanilla fancy oak tree as much, you can mess around with the leaves up top a bit, breaking up anything that looks too blocky and adding leaves where the leaf cover looks too thin. This adds a lot more effort to the tree building process so it's not necessary unless you expect the tree to be looked at from above or far away. If the tree is only going to be looked at from below, dressing up the tree trunk is usually plenty to provide the illusion of a fully custom tree.

 

Make the tree somewhat useful! Might as well age your booze up in the tree if it's going to be there anyways! You can add a ladder going up to a treehouse, benches or chairs, a picnic area, a small herb garden, or anything else you want on top of and near the trunk! The more useful things you add to the tree, the more memorable it will be!

 

Vines are also cool. Add vines if you want. I also threw in a pumpkin 'cuz why not. That's all I did for this tree.

 

Hopefully this guide helps you build good trees without spending loads of time gathering leaves and painfully shaping the entire tree from scratch! If saplings can create decent large oak trees, might as well use them as a base to elaborate upon!

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

This is an example of a much lower effort custom tree using these tactics. I only spent some 3-4 minutes on this, with most of the time spent messing with leaves and turning oak logs into oak wood so that there's only bark showing. In survival mode I don't think this would take much longer than 10 minutes, likely under 5 minutes if you don't mess with the leaves or try to hide/replace log textures.