Tutorials/Underground Home

This tutorial will explain how to make an Underground Base. The finished result of your building will be a base with an entrance in the side of a mountain that has stairs going downwards, several rooms, and a mine.

Advantages of Underground Homes
Building an Underground Base has several advantages, especially on SMP.
 * Underground homes with no visible entrances are hard to find on SMP without knowing the exact coordinates of the place to remove the stone or dirt blocking entrance to your home. This is useful for preventing players from stealing your items on SMP servers.
 * Underground bases do not require much building material, just a pickaxe.
 * While building an underground base, you are likely to come across iron and coal ores, caves, and maybe even dungeons.
 * Underground base owners don't often have to worry about creepers on the surface.
 * Building a mine from an underground base doesn't take nearly as much digging as it would if you were building one from the surface.
 * Simple underground bases are very easy to build, and making them more complex isn't hard at all. You'll never have to move because of your home being too small or simple.
 * While building an underground base, you don't have to worry about monsters pouring in through openings in your unfinished base.
 * Underground farming is easier, no animals will come, no fences are needed.

Disadvantages of Underground Homes

 * When building a mine from an underground base, you will be constantly attacked by aggressive mobs, unless you're frequently placing torches..
 * Accidentally hitting a lava lake whilst building an underground base can wreak havoc upon you, especially if you are using a diamond pickaxe. This will not be a problem on a freestanding home.
 * Many griefers target underground homes, especially as they are padded with weak materials. This will leave you susceptible to primed TNT explosions when you enter or exit your house.
 * Building an underground home is seriously harder work than a freestanding home, as the player must remove blocks stopping it's path to make more houses.

Optimum Solution

 * Building a freestanding home with an underground base connection is a very good idea.

Preparation
Building an underground home requires little preparation on your part, and can be easily done on ones first or second night. If you've just began a new map, collect lots of wood, maybe fifteen to twenty logs. Once the sun is about half way in the sky, craft a wooden pickaxe. Carve out some stone, and make a stone pickaxe and stone sword as soon as possible. Now, find a good location for your new home. This location should be at the base of a mountain that is at least five block high, preferably more. The mountain should be made of stone, not dirt. Dirt has very low explosion resistance, and your home may be prone to creeper explosions, however rare they may be underground. And definitely don't build with sand or gravel, as it will fall into your home. As soon as you have a spot picked out, write down the coordinates (F3 or Fn+F3, depending on your computer).

Building the Main Hall and Kitchen
As soon as you have the coordinates written down, use your pickaxe to make a hole in the side of the mountain. Then, cover it up with a door, dirt, cobblestone, stone, or something else. Now make a hallway that is two blocks wide, and three to six blocks tall. The hallway should go on for four or five blocks at the same level it did before. Now, make the hallway go downwards in a stair-like fashion — dig a block down, carve out the next space, dig another block down, and so on. The roof should also slope downwards at the same rate as the floor. Once you've gotten to a good location (anywhere from ten to twenty blocks below where you started the sloping floor), stop going downwards. Continue on with the same hallway, but stay at the same level for four of five blocks. Now, stop digging your underground base and carve a 2x1 hallway that branches off the main one. This hallway should go on for only one or two blocks, then open up to a larger room, maybe 10 wide and 5 long, that has a higher celling. In this room, place a workbench, one or more furnaces, and a chest. This room will server as your kitchen/storage area. Put a bed in this room, too. Soon, you'll have more rooms to put your bed in, but the storage room will do for now. With your workbench, carve some cobblestone stairs. Place the stairs to that you can walk up to the top of your base without having to jump for every step up. Now that you have plenty of cobblestone form all the carving, and hopefully have some wood, it's time to deal with your entrance, if you haven't already. If you're on an SMP server, and are afraid of people stealing your things, heat up some cobblestone in the furnace, and go back up the stairs. Otherwise, bring up a wooden door. Replace your entrance with the door or stone. If you want, you can use double doors. If you used stone, every time you enter/exit the base, you're going to have to replace the stone you remove to do so with more stone. This way, only you will be able to easily find the entrance to your base (with coordinates). You now have an Underground Base!

Bedroom and Mine
Now that you've built the kitchen and started on the main hall, it's time to make yourself a bedroom. Continue the main hall with stairs ten to twenty blocks down, then have a level area about five long like we did before. This time, hollow out two blocks on the side of this level part of the Main Hall, so you get a room that's six feet wide. This will be your main room, and will have all the halls that branch off to other places. At the end of the hall/room, use your pickaxe to make a mine. The mine should be only one block wide, and should go down to Level 15 or so. I don't care how you get down there, wether it be spiral or via a straight line. If you see any caves, put a door or something else marking them to come back to later, and then change the path of your mine or build a safe area in the cave to run your mine through. Once you hit somewhere below level 19 and level 13, use any mining skill of your choice to try to get yourself precious iron and diamonds. Since your mine probably isn't too far from your main room, make cobblestone stairs for easy access. Pressing F3 lets you see monsters, and therefore caves. If you think you've found a cave, make a separate mine (with a door!) leading to it. Caves make it easy to find diamond or iron without much work. Not to mention dungeons, which can be used for minster spawner traps, and have a nice collection of loot. If you have a lot of cave systems, making a standard mine might not be necessary until you've explored them all. Now, it's time to make yourself a bedroom. From the main room, make a one-block-wide hallway about five blocks long. Do the same on the other side. Now, you can make rooms that branch of your hallway, including a bedroom. Make sure your rooms don't run into the mine. If you'd like, you can also just build rooms directly off the main room. Now, make a bedroom for yourself. It should have adequate lighting, a bed, a chest, a workbench, and a furnace. You can make additions to the bedroom and decorate it before making your next rooms.

Additions
You now have a basic underground house. It can always use a lot of additions — be creative! Here are some ideas.

Guest Bedrooms are an excellent addition to an underground home if you are on an SMP server and allow others into your home. If not, you can still make more bedrooms on different floors of your house. This way, you don't have to walk all the way down just to access a bed. And if you have wolves, you can make them their own bedrooms (or kennels) to stay in.
 * Make Additional Bedroom(s)

If you feel like your running out of room underground, or you just want some sunlight, you can make an aboveground home that connects to your underground place. I don't recommend this if you're on SMP and don't want others to find your base.
 * Make an Aboveground Base

Craft as many furnaces as you want, and make a room full of them.
 * Make a Furnace Room

If you want a little bit of aboveground underground, make a themed room with materials from aboveground. Ideas: Nether Room (complete with portal!), Desert Room, Frost Room (inventory hack for ice), Forest Room, Void Room (the floor is made of the void except for one block), Bomb Room and Cake Room. Make wheat, sugar cane, tree or cactus farms. You can make a multi-level farm by placing alternating rows of dirt and water on top, then having the water fall down into another row below.
 * Make a Themed Room
 * Make a Farm

A panic room and/or an escape hatch is especially useful if you are on SMP or have multiple homes that you might want to escape to without walking aboveground. Make a thick room out of explosion-resistant material, with a hidden entrance that will take you to another base. The disadvantage of this in SMP is that people might find either one of your escape passageway entrances, and then have access to both of your bases.
 * Make a Panic Room and Escape Hatch