🏗️ Expanded Building
Plan your build in Creative. Pay for it in Survival. Let a builder put it up for you.
Expanded Building gives you a protected Creative planning mode inside a marked-off site. Design freely, finish the plan, and the world snaps back exactly as it was – your design stays behind as a ghost blueprint. Hand the required materials to a Builder NPC, and he puts your building up block by block, in real Survival, using real resources.
No creative items leak out. No duplication. Nothing is built for free.
🆕 New in 1.1.0: import Litematica and WorldEdit schematics straight into a project, feed the builder from a material chest, and plan chests, furnaces and signs.
✨ How it works
- 🪄 Left-click a block with the Builder’s Wand to set corner one, right-click for corner two.
- 📐 The site is marked on the ground and spans the full world height – cellars and towers included.
- 🎨 Your inventory and game mode are safely stored away and you switch to protected Creative. Build whatever you like inside the site.
- ⛏️ Clear terrain while you plan. Level a hill, dig out a cellar, remove the grass that is in your way.
- 🚪 Doors, trapdoors and fence gates still open while you plan – right-click opens whatever is in hand, crouch + right-click places a block against it instead. Put up a wall and you can still get back behind it.
- ✅ Finish the plan at the builder. The site is restored to the exact state it was in, and your real inventory comes back.
- 👻 Your design stays visible as a ghost: blue for blocks to place, red for ground to clear.
- 📦 Hand over the materials the blueprint needs, plus the builder’s wage – or point the wand at a chest and let him fetch them himself.
- 🧰 If the plan clears any ground, the builder needs tools. Put them in his chest – he wears them down as he digs, and stops when there is nothing usable left.
- 🔨 Start the build and watch it go up. He walks to every block, turns to it and swings, with the sound of a block placed by hand and the debris of one broken by hand.
📐 Save, share and place blueprints
A finished plan does not have to stay where you drew it.
- 💾 Save a blueprint to a file, and share it – someone else drops it in their folder and builds the same thing.
- 👀 Load it and walk it into place. The blueprint appears as a live preview around you and follows you as you move. It is green while it fits, red when it would hang over the edge.
- 🖱️ Right-click to confirm, sneak + right-click to cancel. Nothing is written until you click, so aiming costs nothing.
- 🔄 Rotate it in 90° steps – stairs, doors, fences and beds turn with it – and shift it up or down for cellars.
- ⛰️ Pasting onto a slope just works: the blueprint clears its own footprint, so terrain never pokes up through your floor.
📥 Litematica and WorldEdit files – new in 1.1.0
Somebody else’s build becomes a project without rebuilding it by hand.
- 📁 Two folders are created on first start:
config/expanded_building/litematic and config/expanded_building/schem. Drop the file in – no renaming needed, case does not matter, and tab completion fills the name in for you.
- ⌨️
/eb litematic load <name> and /eb schem load <name> hand the file to the same preview a native blueprint gets: walk it into place, rotate it, confirm. Nothing is written to the world until you do.
- ✅ Reads
.litematic versions 1–6 with any number of regions, and Sponge .schem versions 2 and 3, gzipped or raw. save writes them back out, so a plan drawn here opens in Litematica too.
- 💨 Air is not imported as a demolition order. Every empty position in a schematic is a real palette entry – taken literally, a 50×50×50 file would be 125,000 clearing instructions that wall the building in.
- ❓ Blocks from mods you do not have are skipped and reported with a count and an id, never silently turned into air.
- 🚫 The old MCEdit
.schematic is refused rather than misread – its numeric block ids stopped meaning anything back in 1.13.
📦 Getting material to the builder
- 🤝 Hand it over at the dashboard, piece by piece, or with
/eb deposit <id> in one go.
- 📥 Or set a material chest: crouch + right-click a chest with the planning wand. The builder draws what the project is still short of four times a second and leaves the chest empty again – so its size never limits anything, and a hopper can keep it filled.
- 🔐 It stays your chest. The mod never places it, never removes it, never protects it, and takes only what is on the requirement list – a chest in your base loses nothing else.
- ✅ Once the requirement is covered, the project moves to Ready on its own. You do not have to walk back.
- 📋 What is still missing sorts to the top of the material list, finished lines to the bottom.
✏️ Change your mind later
Reopen a finished plan at any time – even in the middle of a build. The builder pauses, your design comes back as editable blocks, and you carry on where you left off.
- Blocks already standing are never charged twice.
- Add to the plan and only the difference has to be paid before the build resumes.
- Remove from it and the overpayment comes straight back.
⚡ Build speed
A large project would otherwise run for hours, so the builder can be hurried along – for a price. Switch the pace any time, even mid-build.
| Speed |
Building |
Clearing |
5000 blocks |
Wage |
| 1x |
1 block/s |
2 blocks/s |
~83 min |
base fee |
| 4x |
4 blocks/s |
10 blocks/s |
~21 min |
2× base fee |
| 20x |
20 blocks/s |
20 blocks/s |
~4 min |
5× base fee |
The surcharge grows with the square root of the pace, not linearly. Drop back to a slower pace and the difference is refunded immediately – paying for a fast builder up front is never a one-way street.
🔒 What is protected
A build site is not a no-go zone. Only what the builder still needs is locked:
| While… |
What is locked |
| a plan is open (including editing a finished one) |
the whole site, for everyone |
| a build is running or waiting |
exactly the positions he still has to place or clear, plus his tool chest |
Everything else inside the site behaves like normal world. Doors, chests, furnaces, buttons and levers work, and you can place and break in Survival as usual – you can carry on building the house while the builder digs out the cellar underneath it. What he has finished is yours again: decorate it, rebuild it, tear it down.
Protection sits at a single choke point over every block change in the world, which means the open plan is safe from all of this at once:
- 💥 Explosions, creepers, TNT and withers
- 🔥 Fire spread
- 💧 Water and lava flowing in
- 🧨 Pistons pushing blocks in or out
- 🐑 Mob griefing and falling blocks
- 👥 Other players – they cannot place, break or open anything the builder still needs
Want a site untouchable from the first click to the last? Set protectEntireSite: true.
👥 Build together
- ➕
/eb add <player> <id> lets someone else plan, deliver material, start the build and change the pace.
- 👑 Cancelling and managing members stays with the owner – a cancellation refunds whoever triggers it, and that would otherwise be a route to somebody else’s material.
- 👀 The site is visible to everyone nearby, ground marking and ghost, even while the owner is offline. Seeing and touching are deliberately two different things.
🛟 It survives things going wrong
- 💀 Die during planning? Your real inventory comes back, and no creative items drop.
- 🔌 Disconnect? The site is restored and your inventory is waiting on your next login.
- 🚶 Wander off? Planning ends on its own and your plan is saved, not lost – walk back to the builder and carry on.
- 💣 Server crash mid-build? Material is journaled to disk before the world is touched, so nothing is duplicated and nothing is lost.
- 🧙 Builder gone? He is replaced automatically once you are nearby, and
/eb recovernpc <id> forces it.
🌍 Languages
Ships in English, German, Spanish and Turkish. Any other language falls back to English.
🪄 Getting the wand
The Builder’s Wand is crafted from one emerald and two sticks, and the recipe is known from the very start – no unlock, no grinding. You will also find it in the Tools & Utilities creative tab.
E E = Emerald
S S = Stick
S
⚙️ Configuration
Everything below lives in config/expanded_building.json:
- 📏 Site size – unlimited by default, and each axis can be capped on its own
- 🔢 Projects per player – 3 by default
- 🧮 Blueprint block limit – 100,000 by default
- ⏱️ Build and clearing pace, plus the maximum speed players may pick
- 💎 Emerald wage – rate, minimum, maximum and a hard ceiling
- 🚶 How far you may wander before planning mode ends
- 🪑 Block entities – chests, furnaces and signs in a blueprint, on by default since 1.1.0. They always arrive empty: a blueprint holds a block state and never NBT
- 🚰 Fluids – off by default
- 🛡️
protectEntireSite – off by default. On, a running project locks its whole footprint over the full world height, for everyone
- 🗺️
keepSiteLoaded – off by default. On, exactly one chunk is held loaded – the one the builder is standing in – so a build carries on with nobody nearby
📋 Commands
/expandedbuilding – or just /eb or /bp.
/eb give – hand out the wand (admins)/eb projects – list your own active projects/eb menu <id> – open a project without the NPC/eb add|remove <player> <id> – let someone build with you, or take it back (owner)/eb members <id> – who is on the project/eb finish|deposit|start|cancel <id> – the dashboard buttons, as commands/eb recheck <id> – carry on after refilling tools or clearing a conflict/eb recovernpc <id> – re-place a lost builder/eb recover – resolve a stuck planning session or refund/eb blueprint|litematic|schem save <name> <id> – save a plan to a file/eb blueprint|litematic|schem list – show what you have saved/eb blueprint|litematic|schem load <name> – start placing one/eb blueprint rotate [degrees] / shift <dy> – aim it/eb blueprint confirm / cancel / undo – place it, drop it, take it back
Project ids can be typed as the short form shown in the lists.
📦 Requirements
- Minecraft 26.2 or 26.1.2
- Fabric Loader 0.19.3 or newer, plus Fabric API
- Java 25
On a server where players do not have the mod installed, everything still works: the dashboard falls back to a chat menu. The ghost preview is drawn by the client, so that one needs the mod on both sides.
💬 Information and Support
Found a bug, got an idea, or want to hear about updates first? Come and say hello on Discord – it is by far the fastest way to reach me:
👉 https://discord.gg/NvfR6FNXys
