Highlights

  • Minecraft lacks a feature that allows players to create and hang up their own art, unlike Animal Crossing: New Horizons' bulletin board art system.
  • Minecraft could potentially introduce a painting feature that uses ink sacs and a unique brush tool, or even incorporate tapestries made using the loom.
  • Implementing a grid system for drawing and placing blocks could not only maintain Minecraft's iconic art style but also allow for collaborative art, gameplay, and even the possibility of redstone integration.

Minecraft has a wide array of decorative features available to players looking to spruce up their builds. However, there's one thing Minecraft could borrow from another franchise to give interior design some extra oomph.

Minecraft has very little in the way of allowing the player to create their own art in-game—as in, art that can be hung up like a painting.

There are Minecraft's banners, but these all hold prescribed designs that can be mixed and matched into a limited pool of possible designs. The way many players create art is to build something facing the sky (such as pixel art made from blocks, built flat on the ground) and then fill in the terrain on a map. The map will then display the art when hung in an item frame. It's something of a cumbersome system that requires a little math, albeit it's a wonderfully creative solution.

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Animal Crossing's Bulletin Board Art Would Work Great In Minecraft

One mechanic Minecraft could draw inspiration from to make this all more convenient is Animal Crossing: New Horizons' bulletin board art. This simple system allows players to draw and display art, which can support a great deal of complexity if enough investment is put into it. Showing off bulletin board art is something many players take on, just as Minecraft fans might share their builds. There are several ways that this feature could easily be implemented into Minecraft.

How Drawing In Minecraft Could Work

Minecraft already has paintings as a feature, so it only makes sense that the player should be able to make their own. In addition, the aforementioned banner feature also gives way to some precedent. The only question, then, is how to suitably create this mechanic in a way that seems adequately Minecraft-like.

One way would be to make use of ink sacs, which could kill two birds with one stone by also expanding the use of glowing ink sacs to make some unique pieces. A unique brush tool and some colored ink sacs would be more than serviceable avenues for a painting feature. Alternatively, these drawings could take more the form of tapestries than paintings—still drawn by the player's own hand, but with an end product that's given more of a cloth texture. Minecraft's loom would be the perfect tool for this purpose, particularly because colored wool already exists and could easily serve as a resource.

Making Art Could Be Made Unique To Minecraft

One issue that could be inherent to any drawing system is the potential to conflict with Minecraft's iconic art style. New Horizons' brush wouldn't mesh particularly well with how Minecraft is expected to look. Of course, the brush could just be made square-shaped, but more creativity is possible. Whatever canvas would be used to paint these pieces, be it a menu on the loom or a new block, could be set on a grid. Each grid square could have a block placed into it (perhaps wool or inked via ink sacs), creating pixel art when viewed in totality. The drawing should then be able to be placed on paper and then hung up.

This would not only keep art Minecraft-adjacent in design but could be used for other purposes, such as collaborative art pieces, but it wouldn't even have to end there. Plotting objects on a graph could be used for play. Players could play battleships or chess if there's an eraser mechanic to remove placed blocks. In fact, players could even play Dungeons and Dragons in Minecraft. That's without getting into the possibility of redstone integration with comparators or crafter blocks, the latter of which could serve as a printing press to pump out duplicate pieces.