MC Edit Minecraft World Editor Tool Quick Guide
MC Edit is the ultimate Minecraft hack to end all Minecraft hacks. What does it do? It enables you to edit your world outside the game in a purpose built interface designed to make everything easier. Want to build something that requires a large expanse of flat land, but can't be bothered destroying 10,000 blocks by hand? MC Edit can remove large swathes of terrain with little more than a click, a drag and another click.
MC Edit will take a little getting used to. The controls are fairly simple however. W,A,S,D control the usual forward back, left and right. Q raises the view, Z lowers it. Once you get used to using these commands, you'll be zipping through a virtual representation of your, uh, virtual world in no time at all.
There are suprisingly few tools available in MC Edit, but what is there is very powerful indeed. The select tool allows you to select areas of terrain that you wish to edit, the brush tool is fairly self explanatory, clone allows you to replicate existing terrain over and over again to your heart's content, and fill and replace is probably my most favorite tool because it can take a plain of sand and turn it into a plain of lava, or a plain of grass with just a couple of simple commands. The filter tool allows you to take selected terrain and filter it according to your desires. The import tool allows you to import schematics from other worlds and finally (after a couple of player and spawn moving options) comes the ability to edit entire chunks.
Remember: Back up your save files before editing any Minecraft world you even halfway care about, and make sure Minecraft is closed properly before editing any world in MC Edit. Simply saving and returning to the main menu is not enough and you may find that your save file is corrupted if you try to edit the world whilst Minecraft is still running.
MC Edit can be laggy at times, but that is largely because it is rendering millions of blocks. Even Minecraft doesn't have to do that whilst you play it, it only renders the nearby chunks. For the most part, MC Edit is impressively smooth. It's definitely a tool you'll need to play with yourself to get a feel for. At first the controls can seem awkward, but I guarantee you if you spend half an hour or so tinkering with it on a throwaway world, you'll pick up the general gist of the tool very quickly.
MC Edit is seen by many Minecrafters as being a cheat's way of doing things, but when it comes to creating super structures and custom worlds, you'd be mad to mine millions of blocks by hand when you can shape the basic structures within just a few minutes using this world building tool.