Minecraft Tips and Tricks: Build the Perfect Home

This little article shows how to best build your house in Minecraft. This will probably come in short spurts, as I build my perfect home.

In any case, how to build the best house ever:

1: Concealment
Concealment is essential mostly if you plan on doing an SMP server, and you don't want your house ransacked. However, it is always a good idea to at least have a way of stopping monsters, and it really just makes sense. My favorites are digging into mountains, or bending caves to your will. I found a small overhang with a pond in it, and I sealed it with dirt to create an interesting enterance. But don't stop there. When it comes to blocking the enterance to your Real house, use sticky pistons and hide them. It makes it look like a dead end and protects you from prying eyes. Finally, make a door into the outside, but block it from plain view too. I find iron doors with hidden devices to open it are brilliant.
UPDATE: Another excellent way to have hidden entrances is plants. Plant some vines and have an even better hiding spot. Also, there is now a big reason to have iron doors. In the Anvil update, zombies can break through wooden doors on hard, but iron doors appear to be indestructible.

2: Protection
The last thing you want is a stray creeper to blast all your hard work away, and if your house hollowed out of dirt, that's just what will happen. So don't let it. There are a few excellent ways to protect your house from TNT, creepers, or any explosive threat that may come your way.
1: Deep Shield: Encase your house in a cheap material, like dirt, to absorb an explosion. If you decided to build a real house, this may be one of the most horrible crimes you can do to it, but fear not, there are more ways.
2: Strong Shield: Encase your house in a stronger material, like stone, stone brick, etc. If you have gotten to the End, then End Stone is also a good choice. This isn't much better than before, but it's a bit better.
3: OBSIDIAN: Line your house with the most powerful explosion resistor available to you (Besides bedrock). 'Nuff said.
4: Water Shield: Water, surprisingly, has an insane explosion resistance, so it is a more economical choice instead of obsidian. But MAKE SURE all important spots are covered by water.

3: Crafting
Your crafting room is probably your first, so protect it as necessary. The best thing to do is have one crafting table, a pair of furnaces, and some chests full of common crafting materials. If you are on an SMP server, you might consider putting some semi-rare items like iron ingots and tools to perhaps avoid a thorough search of your house. If you can make a diamond block as bait, all the better.

4: Smelting
Your Furnace room does not necessarily have to come immediately. After all, you should have to furnaces in your crafting room anyway. But that's irrelevant. A furnace room should be near your crafting room, for obvious reasons. The best thing to do is have furnaces lining two walls, then have two chests, one full of fuel (I recommend lava, but coal or blaze rods are also good), the other of materials to smelt. Finally, though this is not necessarily a must, make an incinerator for all the waste products you don't want.

5: Storage
This is for all the materials you get while mining: dirt, cobblestone, netherrack, end stone, and other common materials that accumulate. But that's not the end. You know what I said about "lure" materials that can be quickly found? That's to deter investigation for your WELL-HIDDEN and, if you're the trap type, well-defended rare material storage. Put all the materials that you don't want stolen in here for best effect. Guaranteed.

6: Bedroom
This is a must simply because it's helpful to change your spawn point and skip night altogether. It's also fun to make the room look happy, so go crazy with decoration. Fireplaces, tables, bookshelves, and so on all add to the homeyness. Also, put a chest in it with some food and weapons, just in case you get woken up by a zombie at your door (Which should be highly unlikely, considering all those important defenses you have).

7: Armory: This should be as well hidden as your rare items storage, as you are keeping your best weapons, armor, and tools here, because you don't want to die with them on you. Keep some raw materials here too, in case of emergency.

8: Bunker, a.k.a "Cry Room"
This is not the most important part of your home, but it's most likely to save your life. Make this out of durable material, and stock it with food, armor, and tools. Most importantly, make it hard to  find and even harder to enter into without knowing how. That way, you can rest assured that if you end up cornered by a group of raiders in SMP, or by a group of mobs (However they got in) otherwise.

9: Portal Room
This is a dedicated room to got to the Nether. Equip it with everything you might need- weapons, armor, buckets, and so on. Also, have some chests to deposit goods you have found in the Nether.

10: Defenses!
Sure, it's great to be well-hidden, but you can only do that for so long. Eventually, you'll want to strengthen your foothold. Build high walls, watch towers, beacons, and whatever else you can think of. Then protect it. Snow golems are best for this. Put them in spaces just small enough to contain them, and leave it open so they can shoot out, but can't get out. With enough of these guardians, getting into your home may be an unnecessary bother.
Update: Even better, now with the Anvil update, get ourself some iron golems and let them wander around your base. Sure they're expensive, but they have massive hit points and a nasty damage attack.


I hope you enjoyed Part I of "Building the Perfect Home", and keep mining!

Kaires, who hasn't made all the stuff he has detailed.

Oh, the irony

I feel highly amused right now. I said in my last post that Away from the Sun took my time up for writing, and I'm writing right now on Pandemic Chronicles.

Fail.

Anyway, I feel the urge to elaborate on Away from the Sun, a project on which I shoved upon you and didn't have ther courtesy of even explaining WHAT IT IS.

In short, humanity is banished to he far reaches of he universe. The Allied Terran Navy is the only semblance of order in the refugees that have fled the long-gone earth hundreds of years ago. Until now, they were unchallenged. But that has changed.

That's all I'm going to say. You can't expect me to satisfy your curiosity right now and lose a potential buyer for the book later!

Kaires, who doesn't have anything funny to say here.

I must have caught fire or something

I honestly don't know why I let this poor blog die again.

It really wasn't that mean to me.

Anyhow, I was looking at this thing and though how sad it looks. Latest post in, like, 2011.

2011!

2011!!!!

So I though I'd post something, anything.

So here you go.

*BOOM*
Actually, that pretty much sums up my life. That creeper, I mean. Minecraft has shown me the coolest game ever.

IN OTHER NEWS:
Writing Update:
I haven't written much, but my project "Away from the Sun" has replaced my Pandemic Chronicles in the short term.
Gaming Update:
MINECRAFT.
Also, Darkspore, the RPG equivalent of the hit Spore.
Also, Halo Reach, which I recently started playing on the XBox, which I got for Christmas.

In short, welcome back to the un-un-undead blog.

Kaires, who hopes the lapse did not cause too much mental trauma.