Tutorials/Secret door

On most multiplayer servers, protecting your house is a must. One way to protect your house is to prevent people from knowing where your house is. To accomplish this, one should use a hidden door. Ranging from a hole in the ground to an elaborate piston contraption, building a secret door can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Some hidden doors are more reliable than others, but it is up to you to decide which door to make. Extra security measures can be added to any of them, and several hidden doors can be combined, but most of these doors have some sort of drawback. Note that you may always be seen while exiting if players happen to be near, and that may give your base away regardless, but you can use sound to detect moving players and watch for names, and sneak yourself to hide until the players leave.

This article will aim to cover the basics of a few types of hidden doors.

You may forget the location. Take a screenshot with coordinates, press to show coordinates. Somebody sees your name tag floating around inside. This problem can be solved by sneaking or using a invisibility potion.

Hole in the wall
This is among the simplest hidden doors as it does not require any special items or tools. Additionally, it can be completely hidden as it has a manual opening mechanism. To make the door, first find a location that is not a likely mining spot. Next, break a hole in the ground or a cliff side. This hole is the entrance, the broken blocks the door. Remember to 'close' or patch the hole or else others may see it.

A few tips:
 * Take extra care that no one is around when entering as it can be slow to open and close.
 * Remember to close the door; make a habit of closing it as soon as you enter.
 * Silk Touch may be wanted if the entrance is made of stone or grass.

Painting door
The painting door is one of the most well known secret doors in Minecraft. As such, players are likely to check for secret passages even if they are not trying to invade or thieve. To crate the door, start by digging a hole in a wall. Next, replace the removed blocks with ones that can hold a painting but can also be walked through. Some commonly used ones are: Signs, Fence gates, Doors, and Trapdoors. Next, cover the entrance with a painting. To do this, look at the lower left-hand corner block of the area you want covered and place. Note that you may need to crouch place if placing on a door or fence gate. If the painting turns out to be the wrong size, break it and try again. In some cases you may need more than one painting to cover everything up.

If you use a door or other block which can be powered by redstone, you can 'lock' the painting with a lever, button, or other opening mechanism. One opening mechanism unique to paintings is the use of a wooden pressure plate. Since items can be thrown through 1 block holes behind paintings, the wooden pressure plate can be used to trigger a door.

Hidden piston door
For secret doors involving pistons, see the Piston Uses tutorial or the step-by-step guide.

Underwater hidden door
Since the player's visibility is limited underwater, an underwater entrance is easier to conceal. In fact, most players will not notice a 1 block hole underwater unless they are looking for something like that. Simply dig a 1 block hole from your hidden location to the water. For extra security, it can be coupled with a piston and a opening mechanism. One simple mechanism for underwater is to use water stream to push an item onto a wooden pressure plate. It is better to have a seperate entrances for the player and item so that the player cannot press the pressure plate themself.

Opening mechanisms
Every good secret door has a equally secret opening mechanism. Some doors, such as the painting door, do not require an opening mechanism. Some however, such as the classic Jeb door, need a redstone trigger to open.

Daylight trigger
The daylight sensor can be used to open a door only at a certain time. This works well with piston doors such as a half Jeb door. Since it is unlikely you want the door to open at bad times, this may be best combined with other mechanisms to use the daylight sensor as a lock. For example, the daylight sensor could be used to open a door behind a painting. It still restricts when the player can open the door, would cause problems with frequently used areas.

Arrow plate trigger
Using a hidden wooden pressure plate, an arrow can be fired at a predetermined location activating a door. As arrows despawn after 1 minute, the secret doorway can close automatically. If this 1 minute period is too long, pressure plates can be added inside the door to close it prematurely. It can be difficult to hide a pressure plate. Some ideas include: Behind a waterfall, under a lava pool, or in a fake minefield.

Lava fishing trigger
Similar to the above, this opening mechanism uses a fishing rod and a lava pool instead of a bow and arrows. To create it, place a wooden pressure plate under a lava pool and connect it with redstone dust to a secret door. To open the door, fish onto the pressure plate and try to not look conspicuous. If the fishing bobber hits the plate, the plate should trigger the redstone, opening the door. The advantage of this over using arrows is that the door closes when you retract the bobber. Once you get good at it, the door can be opened and closed rather quickly. Additionally, other players are unlikely to waste their fishing rod's durability by fishing in lava. If someone asks why you are fishing in lava, you could use an excuse such as "I wanted to see if fishing rods burn if you fish in lava" or "I wanted to see if I could catch fish in lava."

Vertical Hidden Door
This is one of the simplest hidden door designs out there. Simply dig a pillar straight down and fill it with ladders. At the bottom is your house, buried deep underground. Mine the first ladder in the column and replace it with whatever the ground outside is made of, for this example, dirt. When you go into your base, simply mine the dirt. Go onto the ladders, sneak so you don't move, then place it where it was. You can also make more blocks of dirt at the top of your pillar, but to exit, you would have to mine both blocks, stand on top of the ladder and block-jump up, putting them back in place. The block must be the same as the rest of the surface, or else it would be obvious.

PROS:
 * Is very easily set up
 * To enter, raiding players would have to dig into the surface, and it would take a long time for a player to find the entrance because they would have to mine every single surface block.
 * The block on top can be a block affected by gravity, such as sand and gravel, because the ladder would block it.

CONS:
 * If the block on top drops something different than itself (Grass drops dirt, stone drops cobble, etc), you would either have to use silk touch, or smelt a lot of cobble back into stone, or place the dirt back. It would grow back into grass, but it takes time and is obvious until then.
 * It can take a while to go up and down the ladders. This can be helped by creating two shafts, an "up" shaft and a "down" shaft. The up would be with ladders, and the down would be a straight drop, with water at the bottom so you don't die from fall damage.

The red wool represents the "entrance" block you would mine every time, and the light blue wool represents the entrance to your base. Note that the ground on top does not have to be grass.

Lava Minecart Door
Minecarts can be used to teleport through lava, and your player will instantly be inside the minecart without actually having to go through the lava. This can be used to your advantage. First, make your doorway (at least 3 layers) of blocks as the door frame. Then place one minecart rail on the floor outside the doorway directly in front of it, and another inside, directly behind your doorway. On each of these rails, place a minecart. Optionally, half steps may be placed around the rails to keep the minecart from being pushed. Remove one block from the top middle layer of the door way, and remove one directly below this hole on the floor as well. Then get a bucket of lava, and place the lava into the top gap inside the doorway, being careful to move out of the way immediately to avoid getting a faceful of lava. You can now use your Lava Door by clicking through the lava to the minecart on the other side.

Optional:

On the side of the doorway that is open to the rest of the world (aka the people you're trying to keep out), remove the previously mentioned half slabs and build a convincing minecart track off of where the minecart sits. this ensures people won't wonder why a random minecart is sitting next to a lava flow, as they will probably assume that it is a minecart incinerator rather than a secret entrance. one problem with this is that the minecart may be accidentally pushed into the lava by another player while you are inside your base, thus trapping you inside. a way to fix this is to set up a redstone torch to turn on while a cart is sitting on a detector rail in front of the entrance so you know if it's safe to attempt teleporting through to the outside. to throw off even the smartest people who would question why you have a detector rail in front of your supposed minecart incinerator, you should also wire up the detector to a mechanism that looks important to the automation of the system, which, once again, is supposed to be a minecart incinerator. please note that it may be more convenient to build your secret entry way into an actual minecart incinerator than to build a fake minecart incinerator around your pre-existing secret entry way as this optional step describes.

You can also simply set up a different exit mechanism, such as a one way piston door. Then people will just see the lava flow, and not be suspicious.

Other Lava Doors:

You can use Fire Resistance to evade the damage of lava for a short duration. If you build your base under a lava pit, you can use a Potion of Fire Resistance (or /effect) to enter unscathed. NOTE: You will move slowly in the lava still, so make sure you have lots of time on your Fire Resistance!

Lava and Water Entrance
This entrance is extremely dangerous, as the player is required to go into lava briefly. In addition, it is impossible to exit, unless the player uses a fire resistance potion. However, an inefficient exit may be formed by making a 1-way portal to a very high platform, and then jumping into water below the platform. Dig a 1x1x5 hole in the ground. Place a sign inside the hole, 1 block below the opening and 3 blocks above the bottom of the hole. Place another sign one block above the bottom of the hole. Fill the lower 1x1x1 gap fully with water, and fill the top with lava. The signs hold the water and lava in position. When you enter, you fall through the lava into water, then into a 1x1x2 hole. You can use this to continue building a passageway.

Optional: You can make a derelict, beat up house and put lava on the whole floor. A single bucket of lava should be fine, as it would look like someone griefed it. A solid pool would look deliberate. Cobblestone would be the best, looking like a cheap house someone abandoned. The entrance should be under the lava on the floor. You could also put some empty chests in it, so it would look like it was looted. This would work best on factions servers, or something similar.

WARNING: Make sure to wear armor, or use a potion of fire resistance! If you do not, the lava will kill you and your inventory will fall in the lava unless the gamerule keepInventory is true.

Corner Door Entrance
If you're just hiding part of a house, this works well.

In the corner of your house, place a door with a sign above it.

Put behind the door whatever the sign says.

Inside, close the door, and mine the corner.

Put the room behind it.

(Top left is secret room, bottom right is normal room.)

Best built in a cave.

Jukebox Activated Secret Door
Jukebox Secret Door | Minecraft Redstone Tutorial

This door remains completely hidden until a player selects and inserts the correct disc into the jukebox. The basis of this design uses a hidden piston door that is activated by a redstone circuit being detected from the jukebox by a comparator. Each disc creates a different redstone signal strength (see "Redstone Component" for exact data values) that is used to unlock and open the door. This method essentially acts as a key or password, since one must use the correct disc to access the door. In addition, a jukebox is not typically seen as a redstone contraption but instead as decoration, leading to a better hidden secret door.

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