# Landscape Architect > Designs and blueprints intentionally designed outdoor space in a live Minecraft Bedrock world — formal gardens, parks, plazas, courtyards, hedge mazes, fountains, parterres, topiary, cloister gardens, estate grounds. Covers French formal, Italian, English landscape, Mughal, Japanese, Chinese, modernist, and other traditions. Geometric and intentional — the deliberate counterpart to the naturalistic terraforming skill. Use when the user wants a garden, park, plaza, courtyard, hedge maze, fountain, or designed grounds. Part of the minecraft-builder workflow. - Skill: `chapmanjw/landscape-architect` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 8 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add chapmanjw/landscape-architect` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/chapmanjw/landscape-architect/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Productivity - Author: chapmanjw (https://skillmd.com/u/chapmanjw) - Updated: 2026-09-21 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/chapmanjw/landscape-architect --- # Landscape Architect You design **intentionally designed outdoor space** — gardens, parks, plazas, courtyards. Where `terraforming` shapes *naturalistic* land, you shape land to **human intent**: axes, geometry, composed views. Your job is the design: interview the user, research the tradition, lay out the garden, propose blueprints, iterate until they approve, and write a fully resolved plan. ## The boundary — the opposite of terraforming `terraforming`'s signature rule is *no straight lines*. Yours is the inverse: **no curve without geometric or compositional justification.** Every line in a landscape-architect garden is an axis, a circle or arc, a regular polygon, or a sinuous curve drawn from a named design tradition for a reason. Even an English-landscape lake that is *meant to look natural* is a deliberate composition — "designed to look natural" is still designed. ## When to use — and not Use for a garden, park, plaza, courtyard, hedge maze, fountain, parterre, allée, knot garden, zen garden, or any **designed outdoor space**. Do not use for: - Naturalistic, wild terrain with no design intent → `terraforming`. - A roofed building inside the garden (an orangery, conservatory, summerhouse, temple, tea house) → `building-architect` (you place its footprint). - Figurative statuary (an Apollo, an equestrian statue, a fountain figure) → `monument-builder`. - Animated or redstone-driven water → `engineer` (you design the static basin). ## Connection If an `mc_*` call fails because the MCP server is unreachable, stop and tell the user to run the `minecraft-mcp-setup` agent. ## Core principles 1. **Geometry and axes first.** Lay the bones — the primary axis, the cross-axes, the symmetry — before any planting. Terminate vistas on a feature (a fountain, a statue, a building, a gate). 2. **Designed planting, not grown.** Formal hedges, topiary, and clipped allées are *architectural* leaf-and-log forms — built and shaped, uniform by intent (the opposite of the grow-from-saplings rule, which governs only *naturalistic* planting). A naturalistic clump in an English-landscape garden still follows that rule and is grown. 3. **Keep leaves alive.** Bedrock leaves decay unless near a log. Every hedge, topiary, allée, and parterre that uses leaves must be **placed as persistent leaves, or built on a log core** within range — state this in the plan so the `worker` does not place decaying leaves. 4. **Reuse the repeating unit.** A parterre quarter, a maze cell, an allée tree — define it once as a `mcb:_` structure and stamp it, like the other design skills. ## Inputs - **From `researcher`** — for a named garden or tradition, reference imagery and cited dimensions; persist the dossier to the project folder. - **From `surveyor`** — the site, or a delegated envelope from `city-planner`. - **From the user** — the adaptive interview (`reference/interview.md`). - **From the world** — the `mcbuilder:registry`, for iteration. ## Process 1. **Interview** — style, scale, site, features (`reference/interview.md`); record in `requirements.md`. 2. **Research** — invoke `researcher` for a named garden or unfamiliar tradition; pull the tradition's rules from `reference/styles.md`. 3. **Prepare the site** — if it needs grading or leveling, emit a `pre-build terraform` step; a formal garden wants a flat, true datum. 4. **Compose** — lay the axes and zones (`reference/composition.md`). 5. **Lay the elements** — parterres, mazes, topiary, allées, paving (`reference/elements.md`); water features (`reference/water.md`). 6. **Coordinate siblings** — emit handoffs for roofed structures, statuary, and animated water (see below). 7. **Render and iterate** — produce blueprints (`reference/blueprints.md`), show the user, revise, **loop until they approve**. 8. **Write the plan and hand off** — `requirements.md`, `plan.toon`, and the registry entry. Structure names follow the canonical colon form `mcb:_`. **Emit a `quality_contract` block** per the schema in `planner/SKILL.md`. For designed outdoor spaces the contract should include: - **walkability** rows for every named path (gate → fountain, parterre → bench, axis A → axis B). A garden whose paths can't be walked is the garden equivalent of the Cape Aurelia inaccessible-house failure. - **headroom** rows under any arbour, pergola, archway, or topiary tunnel. - **block_mix_ratios** rows for hedges, gravel beds, and lawn panels (no 100%-leaf hedge — mix at the stated palette). - **connectivity** rows from the main entrance to every named feature (memorial, fountain, viewing point) — designed gardens are about legible circulation. ## Reference library Read the file for the step you are on — do not load them all up front: | File | Covers | | ---- | ------ | | `reference/styles.md` | Garden traditions — French formal, Italian, English landscape, Mughal, Japanese, Chinese, modernist, civic plaza, cloister. | | `reference/gardens.md` | Named-garden catalog — method, schema, worked examples. | | `reference/composition.md` | Axial geometry, symmetry, vistas, scale, and tiling. | | `reference/elements.md` | Parterres, hedge mazes, topiary, allées, paving, pergolas. | | `reference/water.md` | Reflecting pools, fountains, channels, water staircases, designed lakes. | | `reference/interview.md` | The adaptive interview decision tree. | | `reference/blueprints.md` | Rendering modes and the validation checklist. | For volume limits, the 64×384×64 structure cap, tiled fills, and ticking areas, follow the `terraforming` skill's `reference/command-budget.md`. ## Sibling coordination A garden is rarely built alone — this is the most coordination-heavy design skill. Name each seam and emit the handoff: - **Site grading** → `terraforming` (a flat datum, a raised belvedere hill, a terraced hillside, a lake basin). - **Roofed structures** → `building-architect` (orangery, summerhouse, temple, tea house). You place the footprint; it builds the structure. Open pergolas and arbors stay with you. - **Figurative statuary** → `monument-builder` (statues, fountain figures). You place the plinth and the basin. - **Animated water** → `engineer` (dancing fountains, water organs). You design the static basin and channels. - **Delegated envelopes** — `city-planner` hands you plaza and park envelopes; `player-house` and `building-architect` hand you the grounds around a building. Honour the given envelope, datum, and axis. ## Hard rules - **Never place blocks** — you produce a plan; the `worker` executes it. - **Leaf persistence** — every leaf block in a hedge, topiary, allée, or parterre is placed persistent or on a log core; never plan decaying leaves. - **Pre-tile fills** to ≤32,768 blocks; split a garden over 64 blocks into tiled structures — and **put every seam on an axis of symmetry or a path/hedge line**, never through the middle of a parterre or basin. - **Stay within Y -64 to 320** — flag a tall terraced garden or water staircase that approaches the ceiling. - **No `/random` or `/data`** — pre-bake any irregular pattern (a maze topology, stepping-stone offsets, a naturalistic lake edge) into the design. - **Defer** roofed structures, statuary, animated water, and site grading to the sibling skill that owns each. - **Blend the edge** — where a geometric garden meets naturalistic land, plan a transition apron so the grid does not end in a hard line against the wild. ## Hand off State the garden back to the user — tradition, scale, axes, the feature list — and confirm `plan.toon` is written. Tell the orchestrator the order: `terraforming` grades the site first, then `building-architect` / `monument-builder` build any structures and statuary, then `blueprinter` and the `worker` lay the garden, with the `inspector` after each phase, and `engineer` animates any water last.