General Building Guide by PixelBiester

Found this great guide by PixelBiester, exposing general building mistakes in smaller builds. I see the same mistakes he lists very often on build, so I thought it'd be handy to share the video. He speaks German, but as a Builder I understand the main points he makes and thus I'll list them below to help understand the content of the video. Also remember — what looks good is a question of personal taste, so keep in mind the guide here is applying to the general taste of players.

1. Do not make terrain that has a vertical degree of ~90. It looks bad and is unrealistic.
2. When terraforming do not, and I mean do not, use World Edit percentages to randomly add texture to terrain. Same goes for randomly mixing blocks in terrain by hand. Doing this makes the terrain looks messy, hard to look at and unrealistic. Also try to use textures to highlight parts of the terrain by either using darker blocks to apply as shade or using brighter blocks for brighter spots.
3. Avoid making your decidious trees look like lolipops by having multiple branches, with leaves mixed with air, at different y-coordinates. This makes your tree look more natural; no tree has a cluster of leaves in a ball shape or branches on the same level veey close to eachother.
4. Make sure you are not overdetailing your build with small details such as heads, leaves or complicated textures. This makes your build messy and hard to look at. Details are meant to catch your eye and are not supposed to be spammed everywhere. Remember, keep it simple silly.
5. Do not make your buildings' other half identical to the other half or stack patterns. (My rule is three stacked patterns max.) To tackle this problem you can try having an unrectangular layout or using dormas, balconies, diagonal add-ons; different roofs, windows and walls — even a tower — in unsymmerical/complicated places. The possibilities are endles. Having an unsymmetric building shows you have put effort in your build, and gives your build a characteristic.
6. Similar to point 4, make sure your buildings are not overdetailed. Do not spam stairs and slabs in random patterns and hoping they pass through as "detail". Overdetailing & random details show you have no plan of what you are making and makes your build hard to look at. To fix this use a simple palet, not consisting of many blocks, and by using different blocks to distuingish different parts of the build; roof, details, etc.
7. Do not use the same block in your terrain in your build. This makes it harder to distuingish the building and defies logic.
8. Refrain from using glass as water, especially spamming different colors or glass and panes. This shows you are trying too hard (because it really makes no sense) and gives a messy look. Just use good ol' water. :^)
9. This point I did not really get (language barrier). I think he means make sure you have a plan/keep things realistic. Atleast the plots he showed were weird and messy.
10. Stay true to proportions. Do not build a huge flower near a house or build a small tree near a huge house. This makes things confusing and generally bad looking; is the house small or the plant big?

Now make sure to watch the video (no point in reading all of the above if you do not):

Just like in literature, remember: you can only break rules when you have learned them.

 

Was actually going to meantion that, but decided not to because it doesn't look good in small scale unless you do it really well.

 

you can only break rules when you have learned them, also gala isn't spamming glasss