PaperCubes

Without a doubt, Minecraft is a sandbox game that makes infinite room for creativity as far as block-based structures are concerned. Thanks to WorldEdit, the Minecraft world editor, users have full control over the world they want to live in the realm.

If you want to take Minecraft a step further and bring it into the real world, you can either buy numerous blocks of Lego and start construction projects, or take a cheaper approach and print paper with Minecraft-like texture, which can be further used for origami or other kind of decoration, like covering cardboard boxes with the printed paper.

In the second scenario, you can use PaperCubes, a free and open-source tool designed to combine Minecraft schematics (version 1.9 or newer) and texture packs to create printable blocks (blueprints) having the exact dimensions you specify.

First things first: to get your hands on Minecraft schematics files, you can either install Minecraft and the WorldEdit mod to build something, or download Minecraft schematics from the web, thanks to the fact that the game's fanbase is enormous and filled with talented artists. Secondly, you can create or download Minecraft texture packs.

Returning to PaperCubes, the concept behind the tool is as simple as it gets: load the schematics files and texture pack, then let the app take care of the rest. As far as customization goes, you can set the page width and height of the paper you want to print the new texture on, along with the tile size and line width.

The colors for the tab and stroke can be changed too. Based on the specified parameters, PaperCubes generates and reveals the new look of each side of the cube, which can be saved to file. If you're not pleased, you can just dismiss it and start fresh.

Unfortunately, PaperCubes is still in the works and has some obvious issues that we've encountered during evaluation. For example, the color spectrum opened when attempting to change the default tab and stroke colors cannot be closed.

Also, PaperCubes displayed several errors when trying to create blueprints out of different schematics and texture files. We're sure this has to do with the way the schematics and texture files are created but instructions on how to avoid these problems are not yet available. Nevertheless, PaperCubes proves to be a fun and incredibly easy-to-use blueprint creator for Minecraft.