Building is something very characteristic of Minecraft, it develops creativity and allows players to create spectacular buildings, so it’s not uncommon to see huge and impressive structures with their own style and theme in multiple of the big servers available. As it happens with other activities, the building can easily become a burden and involve having to repeat tasks, placing block by block, which in the end translates to at least dozens of thousands of blocks in total and taking quite a lot of time in the process, making it completely bad for buildings at a high scale. Thankfully, in response to these problems the community came up with a solution, and that was the creation of plugins to ease this process, being one of these and perhaps the most known: WorldEdit.
What’s WorldEdit?
WorldEdit is a Minecraft Plugin and an essential tool for building that adds a lot of commands to ease and automatize a big part of the process of construction, leaving you to take care of the details and final touch. There are multiple versions of WorldEdit available, each one of them with its own features such as light resource usage or a graphic representation of the area selected, but in essence, they all accomplish the same goal.
With WorldEdit you’ll be able to build high walls that could easily reach thousands of blocks, geometric figures, mathematical formulas, drain water or lava in a radius of your choice, replace a block in a specific area or even copy and paste structures. It’s also used in other plugins such as WorldGuard to select and protect zones, or apply special rules on them, such as disabling PvP or mob spawning.
Installation
- Go to the official site
- Download the version corresponding to your Minecraft server version
Once downloaded, you’ll need to upload the file to your server, this can be achieved by doing the following:
- Access your game panel and stop your server
- Go to the Files tab and click on the Plugins folder
- If this folder doesn’t exist, you can create it
- Locate the file previously downloaded on your computer, drag and drop it into this folder
- You can use Filezilla to access your server files through SFTP, learn how to use SFTP with our guide
- Start your server
The plugin is now installed on your server, you’ll notice that a folder called WorldEdit has been created, this will contain the configuration files for the plugin
Start using World Edit
WorldEdit uses the Minecraft wooden axe as the tool to define zones on which you will apply the commands, you can get one by typing //wand in the chat
Most of the world edit commands will start with // instead of /How to select a zone
You can select a zone using the wooden axe alongside the right and left clicks.
With the axe in hand, the left click will select position 1 and the right click position 2, which in this case have been represented as an iron block and a gold block respectively as you can see in the examples below:
This has selected a region of 5×5, corresponding to a total of 25 blocks
How to change the blocks from a selected area
You can do so by using the //set <minecraft block id> command, for example, if we want to change the blocks from the area selected to diamond blocks we would use:
//set diamond_block
You’ll get a message indicating the number of blocks changed, make sure to select only the area on which you want to perform the changes or you might experience lag while the operation is performed
How to expand the selected area
You can use the //expand <amount> <direction> command for that, for example:
//expand 10 north – Will expand the area of selection by 10 blocks to the north, meaning that the 5×5 selection will now cover 5×10
Additionally, you can cover the entire area vertically, this is especially useful to cover a total area with WorldGuard
//expand vert
How to drain water or lava from a certain radius
WorldEdit allows you to drain a specific area, for this, you can use the //drain <radius> command
//drain 50
How to copy, cut, and paste a building
With WorldEdit you can copy a selection of blocks and paste them into a different location.
- Select the area you want to copy, in this example, we want to copy a building from a village
- Type //copy in the chat
- Once copied, go to the place where you want to place the building and type //paste
Alternatively, if you want to move a building to a different place you can use //cut, this will remove the building from the first place and ‘save it’ on your clipboard, so you can paste it onto the new location
How to undo or redo any change
Let’s say you placed the building in a place you didn’t intend to or put a wrong minecraft id while using //set, this can be easily fixed by using the //undo command. For example:
We’ve set this 5×5 area to stone by accident. You can fix this by typing //undo
And you can use //redo at any moment to revert it
There are a few other commands of World Edit not covered in this guide, but you can always read the official documentation to learn how to use many of them
Permissions
With a Permissions plugin like LuckPerms you can limit the users or ranks with access to world edit, this is useful if you only want to create a Builders group and not give them the same permissions as an admin. Some of the permissions for the commands covered in this guide are:
| Command | Permission |
| //wand | worldedit.wand |
| //undo | worldedit.history.undo | worldedit.history.undo.self |
| //redo | worldedit.history.redo | worldedit.history.redo.self |
| //copy | worldedit.clipboard.copy |
| //cut | worldedit.clipboard.cut |
| //paste | worldedit.clipboard.paste |
| //set | worldedit.region.set |
| //expand | worldedit.selection.expand |
| //drain | worldedit.drain |
Configuration
You can locate the config.yml file in the WorldEdit folder, here you can change some options to your liking.
Make sure to save the changes after you’re done and restart the server
Replace the wand item
If you want to use a different item rather than the wooden axe you can change it by modifying the wand-item variable and putting a different minecraft id, for example, we’ve changed it to a stick (Minecraft:stick)
Keep a log of the world edit commands used
If you want to keep a log of the times WorldEdit is being used, you can do so by setting the log-commands variable from false to true
Enable WorldEdit to any non-op users
WorldEdit is enabled only to operators by default, but if you want to enable it for everyone you can change the no-op-permissions variable from false to true.
Alternatively, you could just add the world edit permissions to the default group by using a permissions plugin like LuckPerms
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