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.

X-raying will usually reveal hidden bases, unless countermeasures are used on the server, but X-ray is usually a bannable offense anyway.

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

Simple Door
This is the most simple hidden door to make, as it does not have to involve any items or tools (unless built into a stone wall). Not only that, but it could be classified as the most hidden door. Firstly, you need a location. Anywhere will do, as long as it is not somewhere that someone will likely decide to mine. After you have chosen a location, you break a hole in the ground or a cliff side, and build your house hidden in the ground. Then when you leave, patch up the entrance and remember the location (take a screenshot with coordinates if you want (press to show coordinates)) then when you want to enter, break the blocks concealing the entrance and walk in, but don't forget to patch it up again once you get inside. You can leave through the same way.

Pros
 * Possibly the most hidden door there is, it is not in anyway detectable unless you leave the 'door' open or somebody sees your name tag floating around inside a hill (but this problem can be solved by sneaking)
 * Very cost friendly, and recommended for starting out on a PVP server, or any server you don't want to be robbed of your valuables early game.

Cons
 * Slow to get in or out, so there is plenty of time for mobs (or players) you are running from to kill you or thieves to spot your secret and steal your stuff.
 * Easy to forget to 'shut' your 'door', let things in, and get robbed of your valuables.
 * Easy to forget the location and lose not only your stuff, but your house (this can be solved by taking a screenshot, but it is tedious to go back and forth between files to find where your home is).
 * If someone does happen to find it, (maybe your judgement of where people mine was slightly off) they won't think of you as a particularly experienced player.
 * You have to wait for the dirt to turn into grass. However, this can be avoided with a Silk Touch shovel.

Time-Based Hidden Door
The daylight sensor can come in handy for the creation of a door that opens based on the time. The easiest model of this door would attaching a daylight sensor to half a Jeb door. Now that the daylight sensor can be toggled, players can use it to conceal a door that will either open during the night or day. Its easy to build and difficult to spot.

Pros
 * Does not require a lot of resources.
 * Does not require large spaces and is easy to build.
 * Activates automatically according to the time, players need not execute any actions.

Cons
 * Entrance will open for quite a while, allowing trespassers to enter.
 * Door will only open at certain timings.

Automatic Arrow-Wooden Pressure Plate Door (1 Minute Timer)
Based on the concept of a hidden Jeb door, this door is activated by the firing of an arrow. The arrow must be fired onto a wooden pressure plate (which should be hidden). If fired accurately and correctly, a secret passageway will open. The hidden Jeb door will be open as long as the arrow does not despawn. As arrows despawn after 1 minute, the secret doorway will close after a minute has elapsed. This is because the arrow used to activate the redstone circuit has despawned.

Pros
 * The secret passageway will automatically close itself after a minute.
 * Relatively easy to understand and build.
 * Takes up a relatively small space.

Cons
 * The grace period of one minute may expose your secret passageway to other players.
 * It is difficult to find a good way to conceal the wooden pressure plate.

Fishing in lava door
First off, you need a lava pool. This can be either natural or artificial. If you can, make it look natural. Put a WOODEN pressure plate somewhere at the bottom of the lava pool. Remember where it is (a screenshot may be useful). After this, you must dig under the lava pool, and put redstone wiring beneath the pressure plate, connecting it to a piston secret door. When you wish to enter your base, fish at the wood pressure plate (make sure you don't take too long, or you could get spotted). Alternatively you can use a garbage lava bin instead of a pool which will provide an apparent reason for the lava being where it is. If the fishing bobber hits, the plate will activate a redstone current, opening the door. To close the door after entering, retract the bobber. A button can be used to get out. People may ask why you're fishing in lava if they catch you. (Try to have an excuse, something like "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.")

Pros
 * Hard to find, if someone is looking for a secret base, they tend not to have a fishing rod equipped.
 * Once you get good at it, you can get in and out rather quickly
 * It is hard to find your base by accident as most people don't waste their fishing rod's durability by fishing in lava.
 * The wiring is relatively simple, and if you find the pool yourself, it is rather low cost compared to some others.

Cons
 * The lava must be perfectly flat and even.
 * If you do not have a fishing rod with you, it is much harder to get in, and you risk revealing your base if the door was made of smooth stone, as when you mine up the door and replace it, you need to smelt the cobblestone to avoid making it obvious that someone has patched up something
 * Easy to forget where the pressure plate is, and spend huge amounts of time fishing around for it.
 * If someone decides to take out the lava and use it, then they may find the pressure plate and find your base.

Secret Painting Door
Start by making a 1x2 gap where you want your doorway to be. Be sure that the wall area around the secret doorway is big enough for the size of painting you want. For example, for a 2x3 painting, you will need 2 blocks on both sides of the secret doorway, because the doorway counts as 2 blocks. The painting will not stay on the wall unless you follow the next directions carefully: First, place a solid block in the bottom of your doorway, and in the top section place a sign.

To put up the painting in the right spot, look at the lower left-hand corner block of where you want the painting and right-click on that block (hint: you may need to replace the painting a few times to get the right size).

A way to make the doorway easy to enter is by making a 2x2 hole and putting four signs on the side, then use the sides of the signs to put up a 2x2 painting, allowing a bigger hole to walk through.

There is a second method to this as well. Simply place a regular door into the wall, they can be single or double doors. Open them and then place a painting as you would regularly do. The doors register as full blocks, so the painting will go over the door seamlessly. The important part is having the doors be open, because there is no way to open them through the painting. The doors can be powered by redstone to form a solid wall upon first inspection, then open up to reveal a hidden room with the push of a lever, pressure plate, or button. There is a method to set this up by placing the painting directly on the door which can be done by holding shift as you right click on the door with the painting. This method allows you to place a 1 by 2 painting to exactly cover the door and nothing else.

If you would like to make a higher security version of this door, it is basically like the above method. Instead of having a lever or button out in the open that anyone could find and open the door with, you can dig out a block next to the door but still behind the painting and place a wooden pressure plate in the opening. It must be wooden. Remember where the plate is and when you want to open the door, throw an item through the painting and onto the plate. The door will open, you will walk through the painting and door, and it will close behind you after you pick up the item on the pressure plate. It is good idea to use iron doors if you are near a village because villagers opening the door through the painting (which they can do) would give it away.

Light blue carpet represents the painting

PROS:
 * Easily set up

CONS:
 * Many know about this and tend to tear down any painting they find (If they don't care about you knowing they were there)
 * Can take forever to get the right painting
 * Paintings are prone to being knocked down if you are not careful around them

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

Pro: They are generally invisible when set up properly, and fairly light on the resources. Con: The noise may give you away to nearby players, and they can be hard to trigger from outside without a visible mechanism.

Underwater Hidden Door
Doors and entrances can actually be hidden underwater. This is accomplished via the use of water blocking objects such as trapdoors, ladders, signs etc. Many players prefer to hide these underwater entrances in man-made fountains, bodies of water or behind/in waterfalls. When creating an entrance in the base of a body of water dig a small hole,as of update aquatic, a 1 block hole is best(you can swim through a 1 block crevice). Then place a ladder at the entrance of the hole, you should see that this will block out the water, leaving an air pocket. You can now continue this ladder shaft down into your base. Be careful when placing torches or light sources to not make this hole easily noticeable.

This secret door can be coupled with a piston and a wooden pressure plate to make your base hidden even better. The player tosses an item into a hole a short distance away from the door. This hole can either have the pressure plate in it, or can have a water stream to move the item, and be either above or below water. When the item lands on the pressure plate, a redstone signal retracts the piston, opening the door. After entering, the player can collect the dropped item to close the door. A button can be used to open the door for enough time to swim out.

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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