How to Build an Airship with Create Aeronautics!

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]In today's video, I'll be showing you everything you need to know about how to build airships using the create aeronautics mod so that you can build your very own airships. And don't forget to stay to the end to see how you can get that giant airship that you saw in the thumbnail in your own world. And if you don't quite yet know the basics of the create aeronautics mod and you want to learn, then you can go ahead and check out the video in the description where I show you all about the new blocks that aeronautics adds as well as how to build your first land vehicle.

[00:00:36]So, let's get into it. And just to quickly show you what an airship might look like, this is a small one that I quickly threw together. And it has the ability to fly up, forwards, and backwards. can turn left and right.

[00:00:50]However, since this one is so small, it's really only good at carrying people and maybe some items and a couple of chests, but you aren't going to be able to put anything like a farm on here. And yes, you can actually put farms on airship if you make them big enough. But if I go ahead and go inside, we'll see that we have this engine here, which basically powers the forwards and backwards propellers, as well as this encased fan right here, which we can actually use to turn ourselves in the air. And then we also have our balloon on the inside here so that we actually have a space for the hot air to stay in.

[00:01:30]And this balloon does have to be completely enclosed or else all of the hot air will just fly out. And if you need a shaft to go through your balloon, what you can do is place down a shaft and then surround it with this item called the hot air envelope, which has this crafting recipe. And we can even dye them by right-clicking them with a piece of dye. And if you click on a hot air envelope with your dye, you'll see that it does the one that you clicked on changed into the color of the dye. But then if you click it again, it'll do the four around that. And then if you click it another time, it'll do a huge radius of turning everything into that one color. And if we were to do this in survival, it doesn't actually take up the dye. And then we have this item called the hot air burner here, which allows us to put air into our balloon.

[00:02:24]And I'll get in a little more detail on what this does in a second, but first I want to show you how an airship works.

[00:02:31]And you can see it kind of just floating up once it gets enough hot air in it.

[00:02:35]And then once you've gotten to a height that you want to be at, you can go ahead and take your linked controller and just start turning it or moving it forwards.

[00:02:44]And it's also crucial that you try and put your propellers as close to the center of mass as you can. And if you didn't know, you can actually use the creative physics staff to tell where a center of mass is just by locking it in place. And wherever this little lock symbol is is the center of mass.

[00:03:03]However, if you're not in creative and you want to learn where your center of mass is, then you can place down this item called the contraption diagram anywhere on your contraption. Right click it to open up to this kind of view here. And to see your center of mass, if you go ahead and click on this little button right here, it'll show exactly where that is. And if you're looking to see how much weight your vehicle has, you can hover over this little icon here and it'll tell you. And this is useful for knowing how much air you need to put into your balloon. And I'll show you exactly how much your balloon can lift in a moment. So, as you can see, I have my propeller about one and a half blocks above the center of mass, which is a pretty good place to have it, which means that if you try to go forward, it's not going to tilt it forward a ton.

[00:03:53]If I had the propeller somewhere like here, you would definitely be able to see that tilts a lot more and tries to actually go upward, which is probably not what you want. But that's pretty much how an airship works. And now I'm going to show you all of the specific blocks that you can use for it and how they work. And if you want to be able to quickly take the air out of your balloon, you can simply just break a block and that'll get rid of all the hot air. and it has a little animation for it as well. So, the first thing I want to show you is the ways that you can get hot air into your balloon. And we already know from what I just showed you there that this thing needs to be enclosed for it to actually hold hot air. And there's two ways to actually get your hot air. The first is going to be this item called the hot air burner, which is this recipe right here. And then you can see that on the side here it has this little menu that you can hold right click on and you can change the meters cubed that this actually will fill with hot air. And if you didn't know, 1 meter cubed is just one block.

[00:05:02]So you can pretty much just set whatever maximum cubic meters that you think you're going to need. And this can always be changed later if you're not getting enough or you're getting too much. And then if you go ahead and take some redstone power and how much signal strength it has actually does affect how much hot air goes out. So if we go ahead and give it one signal strength, you'll see that that gives it 115th of the total max volume that it's supposed to output. And this is because the signal strength can go up to 15. And if you put it at max, it's going to go to the max of whatever you set here. And if I turn off my shaders, you can see that there's an animation on all of these hot air envelopes, which is what tells you that there's actually hot air inside. And once I turn shaders on, this isn't really visible at all. And if we go ahead and look at this hot air burner with our goggles on, you'll see the gas output, which is whatever the percentage of your maximum that you have the analog strength set to. And keep in mind that you can only see this menu whenever your actual hot air burner is on. And then if we look at fill, that actually tells us how much signal strength you're getting and how much percentage it's going to fill of the total amount. However, this doesn't actually depend on the max output of the hot air burner. This line depends on the max volume of the balloon in total. And once you give it a certain amount of air, it's going to tell you the total lift that you get from that amount of air on the next line. So, as you can see, if I give this 100 m cubed of gas, it's going to be able to hold about 145.5 kPG worth of blocks. And this number obviously goes up the more air you have.

[00:06:58]And let's say you have this really big balloon and you don't want to be limited to the maximum of 500 blocks per hot air burner. Then what you need is the other way to get hot air. And that's actually by using the steam vent. And it's kind of in the name, but to build this, you do need a steam engine to run it. And each of these steam vents can give you a maximum of 5,000 blocks worth of hot air. And really all you need is to have your water inputting into some fluid tanks as well as some heat below it. And if we give this just a passive steam engine, which is just using a campfire or a blaze burner with no fuel below your steam engine, then you're only going to get an eighth of what you possibly could with the steam vent. As you can see, we have a maximum of 5,000 set, but it can only output 625 because this blaze burner is only passive. But if I give this some fuel, we'll be able to see that it does output the 5,000 max blocks of steam. And if you go ahead and split this amongst multiple steam vents, it's actually going to limit each one. So if you only have a level one steam engine, then you're only going to get 5,000 m cubed worth of steam, no matter how many of these vents you put on. As you can see, they're distributing equally amongst each other, which means that if you want more steam, you're going to need a higher level steam engine, but otherwise, these work exactly the same as hot air burners, all the same stats if you look at them and the same signal strength. And unlike steam engines that produce you power, steam vents cannot be placed on their side. As you can see, if I try to place it, it just won't work.

[00:08:59]It will only work if I try to place it above. But this should be just about everything you need to know about how a balloon works. And we can move on to something that's kind of optional, but still good to know since it is in the aeronautics section of the creative menu. And this next item is going to be levatite. Now, if we go over to the creative menu with some goggles, and we type in the word floating, a few things will pop up. The first is going to be endstone, which allows you to actually float items on a physics object. And if you look at the stats, you can see that each piece of endstone will float 2 kPG worth of blocks. But if we go ahead and look at levatite, we can see that it produces five times more floating power than a piece of endstone does. And to show you what this does, we can go ahead and grab some levatite and assemble this into a physics object. And if I go ahead and try and drop it from in the air, you'll see that it kind of just stays in place and it will keep up to 10 kPG worth of blocks floating. And if you go any higher than that, it is just going to start falling to the ground. However, if you're trying to put levatite on a moving vehicle, just be aware that levatite does have a certain force that keeps it from going forward as far. So, it's kind of like extra air friction.

[00:10:32]But the higher speeds that you're going at, the less that air resistance will have an effect on your vehicle. So, just keep that in mind for whenever you're trying to make something using levatite.

[00:10:43]But now you're probably wondering how you get levitate in the first place because if you go ahead and check its recipe in JI, you'll see that it's just a mysterious conversion and it doesn't really tell you exactly what to do. All it tells you is that it involves the liquid levitate blend bucket. And if we go ahead and look at the recipe, it costs water, zinc nuggets, and endstone powder, which is just crushed endstone.

[00:11:11]And we can actually see that there's two different versions. We have the pearlescent and regular levatites. And the only difference between them is that they look different. But if we go ahead and place down our levatype blend on the ground and we give it some kind of heat source and this can be something like a campfire or a flint and steel. If you go ahead and rightclick on it with that heat source, it'll eventually turn your levatite blend into levatite. However, if you want the pearlescent version, you'll need to use some kind of soul version of fire. So it can be a soul campfire or torch. Then you wait for that to turn into your levatite and you've got it right there. And a very important thing to know about levatite is that it can be broken with a pickaxe, but you will never be able to pick it up. Which means that once you cast it into a block, you will need to physics assemble it and bring it over to wherever your contraption is to then be able to use a slime ball to connect it to your contraption. Because if you try and break it, it'll just break permanently. Or if you don't want to have to bring it over to your contraption, you can just make it on your contraption instead. But if you try and make it on your vehicle, it'll allow the items to flow out. And you might not want to have to place a bunch of blocks around them, then have to break those blocks once you actually get it casted, which is where this next part of levatite comes in. And it's that if you place some clay around your levatite blend and then you go ahead and start turning it into levatite, you'll see that once it turns into levatite, it'll actually break all the clay around it as well as turn the levatite blends around that piece of levatite into more levatite blocks as well without having to click on each individual piece with a either soul or regular fire version of it. And as you can see, it just broke the clay block so that you don't have to manually break out your blocks once you've placed them out. And I haven't really found a use for the final thing using levatite, and that's the fact that you don't really sink or float when you're in levitate.

[00:13:36]You kind of just stay in the same position as long as at least half your body is in the levatite. Otherwise, it will try and push you down until you're halfway in. And you can kind of just stay suspended in here and you will start drowning if you're under levatite.

[00:13:52]So just be careful of that. But I think now we can go ahead and move on to our propellers, which pretty much just propel you forward. And an encase fan actually works the same as these propellers do. And propellers are pretty simple. Basically, you place it down and it has a shaft on the back side of it.

[00:14:15]And with that shaft, you can give it your power. And you can also rotate it using your wrench like this. But another cool thing is that if it's going the wrong direction.

[00:14:26]So say it's pushing air when it needs to pull air, you can just kind of right click with your wrench on this front part here, and it'll actually change the way that the blades are facing so that you can push or pull air without having to change the direction of your rotation. And we have these wooden and andesite versions of the propellers which have the exact same effects as each other. However, the only way to craft the wooden propellers by putting an andesite one into the table. But to craft the andesite propeller, you just need a propeller, a wooden slab, and a shaft. And for every RPM that you spread your propeller at, it will cost you four stress units. And if you go ahead and hover over with your goggles, you'll be able to see how much stressiness it cost, as well as how much thrust and air flow it has. And really, all you need to know is that if you give this a higher RPM, it makes the air flow and thrust higher, which makes you go faster. And if you're trying to make something like a helicopter, then what you'll need is this smart propeller, which does cost this item called a gyroscopic mechanism, which is this sequence to be able to craft it. But this actually will always try and point itself up. So, if you're making a helicopter, you can place a smart propeller down so that if your helicopter tries to flip in one direction, it'll try and correct that by moving the smart propeller automatically. And if I put this on a physics object, as soon as I start turning it, you can see that it's trying to correct the direction. However, you may notice that whenever you flip this thing to one side that it can only face upwards in two different directions. If you try and tilt it this way, it'll just kind of fall. But otherwise, this works exactly like the other propellers and that the more speed you give it, the more thrust that you get. But these propellers might not have enough thrust per propeller to be able to get your airship moving if it's big enough, which is where the propeller bearing comes in.

[00:16:44]And this literally allows you to pretty much just make a propeller as big as you want. And the way we do this is by placing down our propeller bearing. And this is what it costs. We give it some rotation from the back. And then we go ahead and place a block in front of it, as well as a bunch of sail like blocks connected to that block. And the sailike blocks count as the windmill sail frames, the windmill sails or wool.

[00:17:13]However, if you're using wool, you will need to superlue. But if you're using sails, they automatically connect to each other, so you should be good with that. And if we look at the propeller bearing, you can change which direction that it either pushes or pulls air. And the propeller bearing costs two stress units for each RPM that this spins at times the amount of sales that you have.

[00:17:39]So if I spin it at 24 RPM with this amount of sales, it's going to cost me 1,300 stress units. But if I do it at max speed, it will make you go a lot faster, but it's going to cost a lot more stress units. And I think there's quite literally no limit to how big this propeller can be. As long as you have enough sails, the more of them you put on this thing, the more thrust you're going to get and the faster you're going to go. And if you need the gyroscopic version of this, that is an option. And it just cost the gyroscopic mechanism.

[00:18:13]However, unlike the smart propeller, the gyroscopic propeller bearing does have all four directions that it can turn in just so you can make your helicopter work properly. And we can't forget the final thing in [music] the aeronautics section of create aeronautics's creative page, and that is going to be the mounted potato cannon. And this works exactly like creates potato cannon except for you can place it on a wall, give it some stress units, and it'll be automated. And depending on which kind of food you put in the potato cannon, it will have a different amount of attack damage, reload, and knockback. And once we give this some rotational power from the side to charge it up, we can hit a lever or a button or really just any form of redstone power and it will start shooting out your items just like that.

[00:19:05]And this can be automated by just giving us a constant redstone signal, constant power, and some shoots from above or funnels to input items automatically.

[00:19:16]And instead of just letting you go and build your own with this knowledge that you now have, I'm going to show you how to get a small air balloon as well as the one that you saw in the thumbnail.

[00:19:27]And we're going to start by building this small one. And pretty much what you need to do is start by assembling your physics object. Or if you wanted, you could wait till after to super glue and then assemble it. Either one is fine.

[00:19:41]But for this one, I pretty much just did a eight block long log for the middle as well as some stairs on the sides like this. And then some slabs to finish it off. And we can actually go ahead and grab this wand of symmetry just to make it symmetrical for the parts that do need to be symmetrical. And then I use some copycat walls with the log texture here, but you can use any kind of walls that you want. And we just go ahead and put those in the corners. Then for the actual balloon part, I place down four envelopes like this. Three here. Seven more above it like this.

[00:20:23]Four here. Or really eight here because it's symmetrical.

[00:20:29]Four more like this. And then I kind of did a little shape here with the envelopes like this. Then another four envelopes like that. And then we just make sure that we mirror this side over to this side as well. And then we can go ahead and place out our blocks on the top here. And then to finish it off, we'll place eight more on the top. And this should be your balloon finished. Or actually, we do need to place an case shaft here and here.

[00:21:05]And on these shafts, we're just going to place our propellers as well as some encase chain drives going down from these. And we're actually just going to bring this into the floor. And we'll do this for both sides. We'll connect these up using two gear boxes and two shafts.

[00:21:24]I put my engine right here, my seat beside it, and my hot air burner here with the throttle lever. And you want to make sure that your engine is facing this way. We'll need a gear box on the front of this engine because not only do we have to power these, but we also have to power an encased fan to actually be able to turn us left and right. And on the right side, I'll go ahead and place a shaft with our speed controller set to 128 RPM. Then we'll rotate this in case chain drive. Break out these two walls.

[00:22:00]Place two shafts and a gear box right on this shaft to connect these two up. And if we allow this some power, we can see that those propellers spin. And you want to make sure that one is pushing air while the other is pulling air.

[00:22:17]Otherwise, it's just going to stay stationary since the forces would counteract each other. And actually, instead of a shaft here, we'll need to place down our directional gear shift, which we can put some modulating linked receivers on. Give those a random frequency and make sure that they're both different frequencies from each other. Then we'll want to set these to our linked controller. And we'll make sure that these are going the correct direction. And if whenever you try to push forward, it pushes backward, then you can just take out your wrench and rotate the propeller's blades. And that should get it going the other direction.

[00:22:58]Then we'll break out this block. Place our directional gear shift. Put our modulating linked receiver above and below. Make sure that these have some random frequencies that you haven't used yet. Then bind these to either A or D.

[00:23:13]We'll bring an in case chain drive over to the back like this. And then we can either place our in case fan here. Or if you wanted, you could also place down a shaft in a propeller. Either one should work properly. And then we'll go ahead and make sure that these are spinning the correct direction. And it seems that this one isn't. So I'll flip this around. And just for fun, we can add some velocity and altitude sensors [music] just to see how fast we're going and how high we are. And it's actually going to be easier to place the throttle lever here, I'm now realizing, so that whenever you're sitting in your seat, you can just do this. And our balloon volume here is 83. So I'll set this to a maximum of 85. But now we can just use our controller to move our airship in any direction that you want. And if you needed some storage on this thing, you could even put some chests or barrels on this to be able to store some extra items while you're in the air. And now for a quick rundown of how this entire thing works. First of all, we can see that we have the balloon up here and the actual ship part down here. And we have two of these propellers on the sides.

[00:24:30]And this is what is going to allow us to turn. And we do have this rudder, but this isn't going to be big enough to actually allow it to turn on its own.

[00:24:39]So, [music] this is more here just for looks. And then we also have the propeller up here, which allows you to go forwards and backwards. [music] And first of all, we have this bottom floor here where it controls the steering. And not only does the steering wheel control the rudder, which is located just back here, [music] it will also turn this swivel bearing, which allows you to only turn when the steering wheel is turned. So, we have this laser sensor right here. And it's difficult to see, but it is making a laser. You can see if I turn off my shaders. There it is. And whenever this swivel bearing turns to the left, it is going to get out of the way of this laser. So, this sensor can be turned on to allow this analog transmission to be turned off. And as for this one right here, this will turn off this gear shift whenever it doesn't have power. And if it doesn't have power, that means it will spin the opposite direction. So, whenever you spin the wheel to the left, it'll allow the whole boat to spin to the left. But if you turn it right, it won't turn this off, which allows the gears to spin to the right. And then if we come up to this next floor, we have a huge area that you can use for something like storage. And this is actually the level that the propellers are on. And this right here is where your shaft comes down from the steering wheel. And I just encased it [music] with some brass casings. Then we also have some ladders here and here, so you can actually get up and down. Then if we come on to the deck, we see that to the front side we have this room and to the back side we have this room. This one is just another empty space that you can figure out whatever you want to do with whether it be storage, sleeping areas, or whatever it is you would like. Then on the back here, we have another area.

[00:26:38]And this one's much taller. Just make sure that this shaft in the middle stays because this is coming from the steering wheel down to where it actually needs to go. Then we've got some catwalk stairs on this side and this side so that you can walk up to where your steering is going to be. And as for the controls, we have the steering wheel which if you turn it right, it will make the ship turn right. If you turn it left, it'll make it turn left. Then we have this throttle lever here which determines the speed of the forwards and backwards rotation depending on how much signal strength you give it. We have this one here which controls how much air is put into the balloon to make it float. Then we have this one here which allows the propeller to turn on and off. And this one will make the propeller go backwards or forwards. And if we go ahead and turn on the propeller by flicking this lever, then we'll be able to use this throttle lever to change the speed. And it is good to note that if you put the signal strength up to 15, it will stop the propeller entirely. So to go max speed, you need to go to 14. And just be careful that whenever you're changing the speed on this thing, it might dip down a little bit. As you can see, if you put it straight to 14, it'll dip down a good amount, but then it should stabilize itself after that. So, just make sure that you're a little bit higher in the air than you would need to be whenever you're starting to make it go [music] fast. Then, we can obviously rotate the ship if you need just by using the steering [music] wheel. And that's about all I have for the controls for this thing. And we can now move on to the fact that this thing does have some more floors as we can see on this same layer with all of the controls. We have this little floor here which connects over to this one as well.

[00:28:38]However, we can also see here that we now have an elevator which you can go ahead and sit in the seat. And it's important that you sit in the seat because for some reason sometimes if you make this thing move while the airship is moving, it'll kind of just make you fly up. Although I guess it's not happening now, but this can take you through all of the floors. As you can see, we can go to the deck and the lower deck here. You can't go all the way down. For that, you need to use this ladder. And then we can also go up to this floor. This floor, which is just a bunch more empty space that you can put stuff on. And if you accidentally leave your elevator, I do have all of these contacts right here, which you can just press the button and it will bring the elevator up to you. And then if we go up to this fourth floor, it's kind of a maintenance area with all of the stuff that's under the main platform when we make power.

[00:29:42][music] And then if we make our way up to the final floor, we can see that we have a tree farm here, which is what powers these steam engines, as well as the steam vents [music] on this one, so that you can actually lift this whole balloon. And then since oak trees make apples, we also have this storage system which allows the apples to go down this belt and be put into these vaults. And if you ever need some extra food, you can come and grab some apples from up here. Probably the best way to start up this system is to break out this encase chain drive right here, [music] as well as this elevator shaft, although that's probably not the most important.

[00:30:22][music] Then you can use something like a portable engine on this in case chain drive to get these cog wheels to be able to spin and that'll allow for water to get in. Then once you start it up, you can connect everything back and we should be able to see that everything [music] works properly.

[00:30:42]So that's what happens sometimes whenever you don't sit in the seat when you're taking the elevator. I'm not exactly sure why that happens. Make sure that you're sitting in the seat whenever you do get in the elevator. [music] And if you want this ship in your world, I have left a schematic in the description so that you can build it. So that's all I have for today's video. And hopefully this helped you learn more about how to make a proper working airship so that you can move yourself and others around without having to run into any obstacles like you would on land. And don't forget to comment down below with what other kinds of vehicles or tutorials you'd like to see me make on this mod in my next videos. And while you're down there, I would really appreciate it if you considered subscribing, and hitting that like button, sharing this with your friends, and even becoming a member if you want to help support the channel even more. And at the time of the making of this video, there's only going to be about two videos in the playlist. But on screen now, you will be able to see a playlist with all of my Create Aeronautics videos that I'm done, just in case you're watching this after it comes out and there's more future videos that you wanted to check out. But for now, the only two I have in that playlist is going to be this video and one where I show you the basics of the aeronautics mod, as well as how to build your very first land vehicle. But anyways, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.