When I played Minecraft for the first time, I only understood the barest basics: dig, gather resources, build things, don't die. Several deaths later, I realized the "don't die" part was contingent upon having a safe, monster-free place to wait out the night. This meant I needed two things: shelter and light.

That's where the box house comes in. I think everyone who's played Minecraft has made one of these. This is the Minecraft house. This is what you make when you don't know how to make anything else; a delightfully utilitarian design fueled by pure survival instinct. It's rugged. It's simple. It's a wooden box with torches stuck all over it.

I'll admit I got a little fancy with this one. When you're building one of these for real with the limited time and resources the game affords you, you're going to end up with a 5 x 5 x 4 wooden cube with a grass floor and no windows. But I took some liberties because that wouldn't make for good screenshots now would it?

The underrated aspect of this type of house is its growth potential. In the beginning it's not good, and that's OK. You didn't make it to be good. You made it to be a place where you can sit for 5 minutes and organize your inventory without getting ganked by skeletons. But sooner or later you're going to find yourself in a position to build something better, and then you're going to realize you've grown attached to your little box. Or, if nothing else, you've grown accustomed to the spot that it's in.

So you expand. You take the roof up a little, build the walls out a couple more tiles. Relocate the crafting table. Throw in an extra chest, a bed. As you encounter new mechanics and materials, you integrate them into the house. You learn how to make glass and carve out some windows. You build new utility blocks and you line them up one by one along the interior walls. You find a new type of wood and replace the floor tiles with it. You scrounge together enough obsidian to make a Nether portal, and hey, what better place to put it than the basement? On that note, the house needs a basement. You dig one out and connect it to the ground floor with the ladders and trapdoors you just worked out how to make. On the way down you hear that there's a cave nearby, so you tunnel over to that too, and now you have a veritable home base with a path directly into the cave system.

The end result is a hodgepodge of stuff, but it's home, and it embodies your progression through the game in a visual way.

I don't actually make houses like this in Minecraft much nowadays. If you value aesthetics as much as utility, you'll find yourself experimenting with different house designs before too long, and all it takes is a few structural adjustments before what you've made isn't a box house any more. At that point, the box house becomes a sort of transitional element; it's no longer a house so much as a foundation to build out from until you've created something bigger, with stronger visual aspirations. The distinction is in whether the fundamental wooden box structure is retained or not. If your house doesn't look like you could slap a label on it and mail it to Zimbabwe, it's not a box house.

I built this one based on how I used to make them. It has windows on every wall because ideally you don't want to feel like you're trapped in solitary confinement every time you walk in. The wooden pillars on each outer corner might be pushing the envelope for how much you can pretty one of these things up before it becomes something else, but they go a long way to help break up the monotony of the exterior. The four torches on top serve the same purpose as when you're building a sandcastle and you plant a stick on top like it's a flag. In other words, they don't do anything but putting them there was psychologically necessary for me.

Inside we've got a bed, a work table, a chest, a furnace, and some flowers by the window for a little visual flair. Aside from the flowers, it's pure early game utility in here.

The stairwell in the corner is a mainstay of my earliest Minecraft houses, and one you'll probably be seeing again. I used to like having stairs run directly down into the caves. No doors, just stairs all the way down. It isn't the smartest choice in terms of potential monster exposure—the ambient danger is one of the main reasons I stopped doing it, in fact—but there's something so enticing about making your tiny, unassuming house into the gateway to the underworld.

There isn't much else to say about this one. I know it might sound like I'm coming down hard on the box house, and it is true that my design sensibilities have leaned away from it in recent years, but make no mistake, I am still incredibly fond of it. There is comfort in simplicity and charm in objects that exist almost purely for their utility. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every house I'm going to write about hereafter owes itself to this.