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Effortless Building

BedrockAdd-onSurvival

by ExterLeo

Effortless Building screenshot 1 of 12

About this add-on

Effortless Building brings Java's favourite multi-block placement mod to Bedrock! Place walls, floors, spheres, cylinders & more in seconds.

Read the author’s full description (2,440 words)

Written by ExterLeo for the MCPEDL post, shown as published.

Effortless Building

Achievements Friendly & Survival Friendly
Lightweight Performance - Full Custom Block Support - 13 LanguagesBuild smarter, not harder.

Effortless Building is a Bedrock addon inspired by the iconic Java mod of the same name by Requioss. Instead of placing blocks one at a time, you pick a build mode, click two or three times, and entire structures appear: lines, walls, floors, spheres, cones, diagonal ramps, and more, all while consuming the correct blocks from your survival inventory. A live Coach teaches you the addon step by step, a Tutorial Book opens right in your world, and all of it speaks 13 languages.

TUTORIAL

PC Gameplay (By Eckosoldier)

Mobile Gameplay (Android/IOS)

✦ New in v5

  • Floating Menus: the menu, settings, palette, modifiers, clipboard and help now hang in the air in front of you. Look at a button and click it.
  • Quick Switch Wheel: hold right-click with the Building Book, aim at a shape on the wheel and let go. Your shape changes without opening a menu.
  • Customize Wheel: choose which shapes sit on the wheel, slot by slot, or go back to the automatic layout.
  • Live Coach: 15 short lessons that teach the addon while you play. A card beside you shows one step at a time and waits until you have actually done it.
  • Tutorial Book: hold it and it opens in front of you as a real book with pictures of every shape, modifier and tool. Right-click turns the page.
  • 13 Languages: English, Español, Deutsch, Português, Nederlands, Bahasa Indonesia, Shqip, Русский, 日本語, 한국어, हिन्दी, తెలుగు and اردو, for the menus, the coach, the tutorial book and every message.
  • Hold to repeat: hold the click on a number in any menu and it keeps counting, faster the longer you hold.
  • Comfort settings: menu size, which side the coach card hangs on, menu sound volume, and an optional aiming cursor for touch screens.
  • Your choice of menus: prefer the game's standard menus? Set Menu Style to Plain. Admins can switch everyone to plain menus at once.

✦ 14 Build Modes 

Every mode works in both Survival and Creative. 2-step modes take two right-clicks (anchor then build). 3-step modes take three (anchor, XZ footprint, then height build). Each mode has its own options on the right of the menu.

2-Step Modes

  • Line - Straight or Bezier curve
  • Wall - Filled or Hollow
  • Floor - Filled or Hollow
  • Circle - Filled/Hollow, Even or Uneven (ellipse)
  • Sphere - Filled or Hollow
  • Semicircle - Horizontal, Arch, or Dome orientation; Filled or Hollow
  • Diagonal Line - Straight or Bezier curve

3-Step Modes

  • Cube - Filled, Hollow, or Skeleton
  • Cylinder - Filled/Hollow, Even or Uneven (ellipse)
  • Cone - Filled or Hollow; set the axis to Diagonal to lean the tip any way you like
  • Diagonal Wall - Filled or Hollow
  • Slope Floor - Filled or Hollow
  • Copy / Paste - 3-click region selection

Special

  • Air Build - Single right-click to place one block in midair, no surface needed

Bezier curves (Line & Diagonal Line): right-click to add waypoints one by one, sneak click to confirm; the addon traces a smooth 3D Catmull-Rom spline through all your points.

Starter Shapes: new players can start with just Line, Wall, Floor and Cube, and open the full list with More Modes whenever they are ready.

Air Building

Cube Shape

Line Mode

Circle Shape

Destroy Mode

Custom Blocks Support

✦ The Building Book

Everything starts from the Building Book. Hold it and the action bar shows its controls.

  • Right-click: open the menu
  • Hold right-click: Quick Switch Wheel
  • Left-click: Block Palette
  • Sneak Right-click: Settings
  • Sneak Left-click: Build Modifiers
  • Sneak twice: turn your build mode off and back on

Prefer the palette on right-click? Turn on Swap Book Clicks in Settings > Controls.

✦ The Menu

Open with right-click on the Building Book or /menu.

  • Shapes on the left, with the active one lit in gold. Pin a shape to keep it near the top.
  • Options for the chosen shape on the right (Filled/Hollow, Even/Uneven, Bezier and so on), applied instantly.
  • Tools along the bottom: Palette, Modifiers, Clipboard, Undo, Redo, Settings and Help.
  • Customize Wheel to choose the shapes on your Quick Switch Wheel.
  • A hint line along the bottom explains whatever you are looking at.

✦ Coach & Tutorial Book (new in v5)

The Coach is a live tutorial: 15 lessons, from your first line to copy and paste and the Quick Switch Wheel. Its card floats beside you and moves on only once you have done the step. Put it away with its X and bring it back where you left off with /guide or the Help button. Pick any lesson again from the lesson list.

The Tutorial Book explains everything with pictures. Hold it and it opens in front of you; right-click for the next page, hit the book to go back, sneak to jump a chapter. Lost it? Get it again from Help or with /tutorial.

Both, and all the floating menus, follow your Book Language, which you can change any time in Settings or with /language.

✦ Performance

Deferred Shape Calculation: working out a large shape means running the geometry, the modifier pipeline, and a block check for every single position, and that result is thrown away the instant your aim moves one block. With Defer on, all of it is skipped while you are aiming; you get an instant bounding box instead, and the real shape is solved once you hold still, and always when you place. What gets built is identical either way. On by default.

Preview quality is honoured exactly. At Minimal the preview redraws once per second rather than every tick, and the particle lifetime is matched to that interval so nothing stacks up on screen. Bigger selections automatically draw less often, so a 200,000-block cube stays light.

Live tick rate: the action bar shows the server's current TPS while you select, colour coded green to red, to two decimals. If it reads a steady 20.00 while the preview updates slowly, the world is fine and it is just your quality setting doing its job.

Cursor previews (Air Build, and any mode before your first click) always run at full speed regardless of quality, so aiming never feels laggy.

✦ Quick Setup

On first join the addon asks what you are playing on - Low-end, Mid-end, or High-end - and applies a matching preset across preview style, preview quality, flick preview, deferred shape calculation, and max blocks per operation. Everything it sets is a normal setting you can change afterwards. Press Skip if you would rather configure it yourself. Run it again any time from Settings > Quick Setup or with /setup.

✦ 3 Build Modifiers

Modifiers multiply every placement across symmetry patterns. They stack with each other and work on top of any build mode. Open them with Sneak Left-click (swing) on the Building Book, from the menu, or via /menu.

  • Mirror: Reflect across the X, Y, and/or Z axis around a configurable center point. Set a radius so blocks beyond it are left untouched. Toggle "odd" alignment for center-block symmetry.
  • Array: Repeat the shape N times in any direction. Set a custom X/Y/Z offset and count to stamp rows, columns, arches, or staircases.
  • Radial: Rotate the shape around a center point into any number of evenly spaced slices. Enable alternate mode to mirror every other slice for kaleidoscope patterns.
  • Center here puts the center where you stand in one click, and every number can be stepped, held to count quickly, or typed.
  • Bonus: All three modifiers also apply to vanilla block placing and breaking, so no need to be in a shape mode.

✦ Block Palette System

Instead of always building with the block you right-clicked, you can source blocks from your hotbar, your full inventory, or both, and paint them across your placement using one of 24 distribution patterns:

  • Dissolve - Dithered noise-blended gradient (Best One)
  • Dissolve X / Y / Z - The same scattered fade along one axis
  • Random - Randomly distributed by block weight
  • Spread - Evenly repeating sequence
  • Gradient X / Y / Z - Smooth color transition along an axis
  • Radial Gradient - Transitions from center outward
  • Diagonal Gradient - Transitions along a diagonal
  • Concentric Rings - Block A core, Block B ring, Block C outer, and so on
  • Checker - Alternating 3D checkerboard
  • Horizontal Stripes - Rows by Y level
  • Vertical Stripes - Columns along the dominant axis
  • Diagonal Stripes - Slanted column bands
  • Brick - Offset column stripes like real masonry
  • Herringbone - Alternating 45° zigzag
  • Value Noise - Smooth organic blobs
  • Cell Noise - Voronoi / stone-cell organic patches
  • Marble - Sine-warped streaks through noise
  • Border - Depth-based rings from outer edge inward
  • Wave - Sine wave across the shape
  • Spiral - Angle distance spiral from center

Weight can be calculated by item count, slot count, or unique block (equal weight regardless of quantity). Open the palette with Left-click on the Building Book or /palette.

✦ Copy, Cut & Paste

Select a region with 3 clicks (XZ corner 1, XZ corner 2, then height). Works on blocks or in the air. Sneaking on click targets the block itself rather than its face, giving precise control in tight spaces. Once the region is marked, choose Copy or Cut.

  • Copy leaves the blocks where they are and saves them to your clipboard.
  • Cut removes the blocks instantly with no drops and no tool required, and you carry them with you. In Survival, pasting a cut region is one-time use; the clipboard clears after the paste.
  • Paste by right-clicking anywhere. The structure automatically rotates to match your facing direction (N/E/S/W), including proper rotation of stairs, logs, doors, trapdoors, signs, and more.
  • Ghost Preview: hold your cursor still for 0.5 s and a countdown appears in the action bar (●●● → ●●○ → ●○○). At 3 s a transparent ghost of the copied structure appears at the target position; right-click while it's visible to confirm the paste.
  • Sneak right-click clears the clipboard at any point.
  • In Survival, paste consumes blocks from your inventory.

✦ Clipboard Manager

Never lose a copied build again. Your newest copy always waits in Last Copy, and you can keep up to 19 more in named save slots that persist across sessions and world reloads.

  • Every copy and cut lands in Last Copy automatically
  • Save a Copy moves it into a free slot, where future copies will never overwrite it
  • Click any slot to make it active, then paste it in Copy/Paste mode
  • See each copy's size and block count at a glance
  • Rename any slot (up to 32 characters) or delete it
  • Open with /clipboard or the Clipboard button in the menu

✦ Destroy Mode

Hold a pickaxe, axe, or shovel and right-click to set a destroy anchor, then right-click again to destroy every block in the shape. Works with any active build mode.

  • Tool-aware: the correct tool is required per block type in Survival (a stone pickaxe can't mine iron ore, etc.)
  • Enchantment support: Fortune, Silk Touch, and Unbreaking are all respected and behave correctly
  • Durability tracking: the addon counts each block against your tool's durability and automatically switches to a spare tool of the same type when the active one breaks
  • XP drops: ore types correctly award XP on destruction
  • Survival drops: for large operations, drops are collected in bulk and spawned near your feet with a magnet pull effect
  • Admins can restrict Destroy Mode to Creative only, or disable it entirely per server/world

✦ Live Preview & Selection Zoom

While an anchor is set, the addon renders a real-time preview of exactly what will be placed before you confirm. Four preview styles to choose from:

  • Outline - full rendered block outline of the shape
  • Corner Outline - lightweight outline showing only the bounding box corners
  • Particles - particle cloud approximating the shape
  • Disabled - no preview for best performance

Destroy Mode has its own separate preview style setting.

Preview refresh rate is adjustable across 7 levels from Smooth (every tick) to Minimal (every 20 ticks), tunable per player in Settings > Preview or via /config.

Selection Zoom: while your anchor is placed, the camera smoothly zooms in as your selection grows so you can see exactly where you're building. Zoom start distance (1-50 blocks) and max zoom level (1-200) are configurable per player. The camera resets automatically when you confirm, cancel, or rejoin.

✦ Undo & Redo

Made a mistake? In Creative mode, the Undo and Redo buttons in the menu (or /undo and /redo) step back up to 10 operations and forward again.

  • Operations under your undo threshold (default: 200 blocks) are saved to player data and survive rejoins and world reloads
  • Operations over the threshold are kept in memory only for the current session
  • Threshold is configurable per player: Disabled, 200, 500, or 1,000 blocks

✦ Per-Player Settings

All settings are saved per player and persist across sessions. Open with /settings or Sneak Right-click the Building Book. They are grouped into Quick Setup, Building, Preview and Controls; tap a setting to change it and the line at the bottom explains it.

Building

  • Starter Shapes Only: on/off
  • Build speed: Instant, Fast, Normal, or Slow
  • Max blocks per operation (default 50,000, up to the admin-set ceiling)
  • Replace existing blocks: on/off
  • Infinite reach: toggle on/off and set custom distance
  • Air Build reach: 1 to 64 blocks
  • Destroy drops items: on/off
  • Undo threshold: Disabled, 200, 500, or 1,000 blocks

Preview

  • Build preview: Particles, Outline, Corner Outline, or Disabled
  • Break preview: Outline, Corner Outline, or Disabled
  • Preview quality: 7 levels from Smooth (1 tick) to Minimal (20 ticks)
  • Defer Shape Calculation and Flick Preview: on/off

Controls (new in v5)

  • Swap Book Clicks: menu and palette trade places
  • Selection Zoom: on/off, zoom start distance, and max zoom level
  • Hints: one-line tips the first time you open a menu or pick a mode
  • Menu Style: Floating or Plain
  • Cursor, Menu Size, Coach Card Side and Menu Sounds
  • Book Language

✦ Admin & Server Controls

(Visible only to operators and players with the eb:admin tag)

The first player who joins a new world is automatically granted admin. On servers, run /tag @s add eb:admin once to access the admin section.

  • Tag restriction: require a specific tag before players can use the addon
  • Custom required tag name (default: admin)
  • Allow or disable Destroy Mode server-wide
  • Restrict Destroy Mode to Creative only
  • Allow or disable Infinite Reach server-wide
  • Set a server-wide reach distance cap
  • Set a global max blocks cap (up to 300,000)
  • Give the Building Book and Tutorial Book to new players on join
  • Choose the shape list for everyone: let players pick, or force the starter or full list
  • Lock preview quality for all players
  • Plain Menus For All: give every player the game's standard menus

✦ Commands

  • /menu - Open the menu
  • /settings - Open player settings
  • /palette - Open the block palette
  • /clipboard - Open the Clipboard Manager
  • /config - Open personal config (preview quality)
  • /setup - Run Quick Setup again
  • /guide - Start or stop the Coach
  • /tutorial - Get the Tutorial Book
  • /language - Choose the language of the book, the coach and the menus
  • /undo

What’s new in the latest update

The author’s notes for the file uploaded .

Improved most of the stuff!
New features are mentioned in Description

Video

The video the creator embedded in this add-on's MCPEDL post. ExterLeo on YouTube

How to install

  1. Download the file below. On iOS or Android, open it from your Downloads with Minecraft; on Windows, double-click it.
  2. Minecraft imports the pack automatically. Enable it in your world’s settings under Behavior Packs or Resource Packs; an add-on usually needs both.
  3. Playing on a Realm or server? Everyone needs the same packs, and the host has to enable them.
  4. Starting a new world? Choose its seed first: the Seed Map shows villages, structures and biomes near spawn for any Bedrock seed.