When I first started playing Minecraft, there was one thing that drove me absolutely crazy.
It was a ridiculous thing to be annoyed about, too; it was that the glass blocks looked like actual squares when you placed them.
I mean. How could I really be annoyed about a game known for being entirely block-based having blocks?
Nevertheless, I was. And when I discovered that I could make resource packs for my PC version of Minecraft, I dedicated way too much time to figuring out how to build a pack that would erase the gridlines in a window.
That was something I always missed in the console versions, but I dealt with it because there was no way around it, and at least the city pack made the lines less noticeable.
It wasn’t until I started building my aquarium and subsequently took to Reddit to see how I could build it better that I learned there may be another option: the barrier block.
What’s a barrier block?
A barrier block is a mystical block that doesn’t show up in the creative menu at all, and can’t be crafted. It essentially creates an invisible space that can’t be walked through and can’t be destroyed in an actual game, a lot like bedrock.
For all intents and purposes, it acts as a solid block, although it’s completely transparent (most of the time.)
How do you get a barrier block?
I’d never heard of a barrier block before this past weekend, so I had to do a lot of research into how to get them.
The trick to getting them is that you need to make sure cheats are enabled in your game. If you’re playing on Xbox One, like I was, then you should be able to toggle it in the Gameplay settings of your game.
From there, you have to go into the chat (which is the right-side button on the D-pad) and type:
/give @s barrier 1 0This will tell the game to give your character one barrier block, which in Creative mode is all you’ll ever need!
You can get the block on other platforms, too; you can find more about that on DigMinecraft!
Wait, what’s this symbol?
When you’re holding a barrier block, and when you’re placing them, they will show up as an otherwise-blank space with a big red NO symbol in the middle.
As soon as you toggle off of the barrier block in your HUD, though, all those symbols disappear, leaving a perfectly transparent and clear yet impenetrable barrier behind!
It’s not quite like glass, because it doesn’t have any edges or anything, but I really like how it looks so far!
