A big tree in Minecraft is mostly leaves, and the leaves are a shape you can count before you place one. A round canopy is a sphere, an umbrella canopy is a dome, and the question that decides your survival trip is how many leaves that shape takes.
TL;DR: A round tree canopy 13 blocks wide is 1,189 leaves as a solid sphere, or 450 as a hollow shell. A 9-wide canopy is 389 solid or 210 hollow. An umbrella canopy 15 wide is 984 leaves solid or 321 hollow. A round trunk starts at 5 wide, 21 logs per layer; a 3-wide trunk is a square.
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How many leaves a canopy takes
The counts come from the sphere generator and the dome generator, one width at a time, in Solid and in Hollow. MC Shapes is a free, browser-based set of Minecraft shape generators (circle, oval, sphere and dome) that outputs block-by-block blueprints with exact block counts; it does not export schematic files.
| Canopy | Width | Height | Solid (leaves) | Hollow (leaves) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Round (sphere) | 9 | 9 | 389 | 210 |
| Round (sphere) | 11 | 11 | 739 | 350 |
| Round (sphere) | 13 | 13 | 1,189 | 450 |
| Round (sphere) | 15 | 15 | 1,791 | 602 |
| Umbrella (dome) | 15 | 8 | 984 | 321 |
| Umbrella (dome) | 21 | 11 | 2,647 | 653 |
A 13-wide round canopy is 1,189 leaves solid, 18 stacks and 37, or 450 hollow. The 9-wide one is a third of that solid, 389, and 210 as a shell, while a 15-wide umbrella, being half a sphere, takes 984 solid and 321 hollow. Between 9 and 15 wide, a round canopy grows from 389 to 1,791 leaves solid: almost five times the leaves for not quite twice the width.
Solid or hollow leaves
A hollow canopy saves most of the leaves: 450 instead of 1,189 at 13 wide. It also has a catch. With Fancy graphics, leaves are see-through, so up close a hollow canopy shows its empty middle, and from underneath you can see the sky through it.
The fix is a hollow shell with branches running into it. Logs from the trunk reaching out toward the shell fill the view through the leaves and cost a few dozen blocks, far less than filling the sphere. For a tree you only see from a distance, the plain hollow shell is enough.
Placed leaves stay put. Answers that warn a canopy will vanish if it is more than a few blocks from the trunk are describing leaves the game grew; leaves a player places are marked as persistent and never decay, however far they are from a log (Minecraft’s leaves rule, as summarised from the Minecraft Wiki by Craftdex, read 14 October 2026). So a canopy can sit on a thin trunk, or no trunk at all, without disappearing.
The trunk
Trunks are where a round tree usually goes square. A circle 3 wide is a full 3 × 3 square, 9 blocks, because there are no corners to leave out at that size. The first trunk that looks round is 5 wide: 21 logs per layer, a 5 × 5 square with its corners cut.
A 20-layer trunk at 5 wide is 420 logs. A 2 × 2 trunk is what the game grows for its own big trees, dark oak and giant spruce among them, and it reads well under a canopy up to about 11 wide.
Three tree shapes from three settings
A round oak. One 13-wide sphere on a 5-wide trunk 12 tall: 450 leaves hollow and 252 logs. Lower the sphere so its bottom third hangs below where the trunk meets it, and the tree stops looking like a ball on a stick.
A giant oak. Three canopies instead of one: an 11-wide sphere at the top and two 9-wide spheres lower down on either side, each on a branch from a 5-wide trunk. As hollow shells that is 350 + 210 + 210 leaves, 770 before the overlaps, and fewer once they overlap. Uneven heights matter more than sizes: no two canopies at the same level.
An umbrella tree. A 15-wide dome canopy, flat underneath, on a tall, thin trunk: 321 leaves hollow. This is the shape of a savanna or a fantasy tree, and the flat underside is what makes it read as an umbrella.
Making it look grown, not drawn
A perfect sphere of leaves looks placed. After the shape is down, break a few leaves out of the outer layer and add a few beyond it, mostly on the top and the sunny side. Mix two kinds of leaves, oak with a little azalea or birch, so the colour is not flat.
The generators give the full shape and its count; the roughing up, the branches and the roots spreading out at the base are hand work, and they change the totals by a few dozen blocks either way.
What the generators don’t do
There is no tree mode. A canopy is a sphere or a dome read off layer by layer, a trunk is a circle repeated up its height, and the branches are yours to place. Everything is full blocks.
A 13-wide round canopy is 1,189 leaves solid or 450 hollow, and any other width is one setting away: the sphere generator for round canopies, the dome generator for umbrella ones, with the leaf count in the Materials panel. For counting the logs and leaves in stacks before a survival trip, the sphere block count guide has the method.