The architect's desk: design your own prefabs

What is the architect's desk?

It is a machine you craft and place. Right-click it to open a screen with two tabs: Design, where you draw your prefabs, and Assemble, where the desk makes blueprints and copies. No mod, no fire and no power needed: it runs on its own. The full story is in the guide to saving your designs as blueprints.

• 4 × 4 × 4voxels in a design
• 8material slots
• 48designs in your list
• 8copies per run

How do I make my own prefab?

1. 1

   Craft the desk and bring paper

   Desk: paper, charcoal (the pencil), paper on top; three planks in the middle; a stick in each bottom corner. A blueprint is drawn on a sheet of paper: three reeds in a row make three.

2. 2

   Start a design

   In the Design tab, press New (or Copy to start from another design) and give it a name of up to 24 characters: your copies will carry it.

3. 3

   Choose the materials of the slots

   Each of the 8 slots takes a building material you carry (planks, stone, glass, metal…). Ores, leaves and light sources are not accepted.

4. 4

   Draw

   Add puts a voxel against the face you click, Paint gives a voxel the chosen slot, Erase removes it, Pick chooses the slot of a voxel, Fill repaints a joined area. Also: Mirror, Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Y), Clear, and Layers to hide the upper layers and draw inside. Right-drag turns the 3D view, the wheel zooms.

5. 5

   Save and draw the blueprint

   Save adds it to your list. Press Use on the desk, go to Assemble, put a sheet of paper in the paper slot and the materials of one copy in the material slots. 3 seconds later, a blueprint comes out.

6. 6

   Build copies

   Put the blueprint in that slot (it stays) and, in each slot, the material you want this time. The desk builds as many copies as the materials allow, up to 8, and shows the result in 3D.

Does a blueprint cost materials?

How do I place a copy?

Like any prefab: right-click against the face you aim at, on the 1 m grid, turned to face you. You can turn it in four directions; it cannot be flipped or mirrored. It is placed as real voxels of each of its materials. Standing, you break it whole: it comes back as the copy if every voxel is still there in its own material, otherwise as raw matter. Crouched (Shift), it comes apart voxel by voxel.

Can I change or share a design?

Edit and save freely as long as no blueprint exists. Once a design has a blueprint it is frozen, so the copies out there stay true to it: saving then makes a new design. Archive removes a design from your list while its blueprints and copies keep working. A blueprint is an item like any other, so you can put it in a chest or give it to a friend, who builds copies at their own desk in their own materials. Your designs are kept by the server you play on.

Updated 2026-10-22