UNDERWATER BUILDING TECHNIQUES
There are a variety of techniques you can use for underwater building. Your top enemies in building underwater are breathing, breaking blocks quickly, and getting rid of water to make air spaces.
Build from a Door
You can start very simply underwater by placing a door that allows you to breathe in its space. Place solid blocks for walls and roofs, and use sand or sponges to soak up water source blocks.
Build from a Tunnel
Dig down at a coastline, and either at the sea floor or above it, build (or dig) a tunnel out to where you want your base to be. At your tunnel exit, create a roof extending out from the exit. Remove air blocks beneath the roof with sand to create an air pocket.
With a sand-mold strategy, build a mold of the internal air space of your building on top of a dirt platform, using sand. Make sure the ocean floor below is flat.
Excavation Site
You can clear out an entire section of ocean by dropping sand (or gravel) into the area you are building. Essentially, you are replacing an entire chunk of ocean from the sea floor to the surface with blocks. The lower you are building, the longer this takes. Once this is done, dig out the interior of your sand chunk and construct your building in this new empty space. Once you’re finished building, you’ll have to replace any exterior air blocks on the sides and above your building with water blocks, so the more water needed above your build, the more tedious this is.
Sand Molds
You can build a mold of your structure on blocks right above the area where you want your underwater building. You’ll want to build above a flat area, because the sand mold will change shape according to the sea levels below. Use easy-to-break blocks as a base. When you finish your mold, break the base blocks so that the sand falls, making the same shape on the sea floor as it had above the ocean surface. Then you can place building blocks around the underwater mold to create its walls and ceiling. Leave a space to enter the mold and then remove the sand.
Break the dirt platform so the sand mold will fall to the ocean floor.
The sand mold below will be exactly the same as above.
Build the walls and ceilings around the sand mold.
Finally, you can remove all the sand inside the mold, leaving breathable air blocks.
BUILDING ON WATER
If you are far from shore, the lily pad is your building friend: it’s one of the few blocks you can place on water to get you started with placing blocks. You can also place blocks above a tall kelp plant.
See also: Underwater Survival.
UNDERWATER BUILDING TYPES
Minecraft starts you out with a hint of what’s possible for underwater buildings with the underwater ruins you can find in all oceans. These look like small homes, temples, and remnants of tiny communities. Besides houses, there are dozens of underwater structures, real and fantasy, that you can build, including aquariums, dolphin habitats and resorts, cities, mermaid habitats, monuments, marine research stations, restaurants, hotels, spas, ravine cliff houses, ravine dwellings, resource farms and factories, secret bases (military, UFO, resistance, superhero), submarines, sunken ships, survival habitats, temples and religious buildings, and turtle rescue and research centers.
UNDERWATER CAVES
Underwater caves are caves found below sea level that are filled with water rather than air. You’ll have to explore them while swimming, with good underwater breathing aids. Some underwater caves may have openings directly into the ocean waters or branch out from underwater ravines. Others are simply water-filled caves beneath the ocean floor. If an underwater cave is low enough for its floor to reach y=11, it may feature the same patches of magma block and obsidian that are found in deep underwater ravines.
UNDERWATER RAVINES
Underwater ravines generate in both regular and Deep Ocean biomes. Like their land counterparts, they can be thirty or more blocks deep and a hundred or more blocks long. Unlike them, they are filled with water. Underwater ravines that reach down to y=11 may have sections of their narrow floors turned to obsidian and magma, as if the ocean water here had met lava flowing up from the Earth’s crust. The magma blocks create bubble columns that reach to the surface and can pull down mobs that are caught in them, low enough to be damaged or killed by the magma block that is their source.
UNDERWATER RUINS
In oceans with sandy floors, underwater ruins are constructed from sandstone.
Underwater ruins are relatively small structures that are generated on the ocean floor. If the ocean floor is shallow enough, portions of the ruins may extend above sea level, and some ruins may generate on beaches. These ruins look to be the remnants of small houses or temples. In warm oceans (warm to lukewarm), the ruins are constructed from mostly sandstone and sandstone variations. In colder oceans (normal to frozen), the ruins are made from mostly stone brick and stone brick variations. Other blocks you’ll find at ruins include prismarine, gravel, sand, polished granite, bricks, planks, and, more rarely, polished diorite, purple-glazed terra-cotta, or light blue terra-cotta.
Not all underwater ruins are underwater—you can find some on or close to a beach.
The ruins often include sea lanterns, magma blocks, and a loot chest that is usually buried beneath a block of sand. If you are looking for these ruins, keep an eye out for squared shapes and lights underwater. Be wary, however, because underwater ruins are spawning locations for the drowned, so you will have some company on your treasure hunts.
The loot you can get from underwater ruins includes buried treasure maps, coal, emeralds, enchanted books, enchanted fishing rods, gold nuggets, gold helmets, golden apples, leather armor, rotten flesh, stone axes, and wheat.
UNDERWATER SURVIVAL
To survive underwater, you need the same things as you do aboveground to survive, plus two important extras: oxygen and normal mining speed.
Food: You can start with drying kelp and punching fish! Once you have a furnace and coal, you won’t lack for cooked cod and salmon.
Shelter: You’ll need to find an under-the-ocean cave that is not waterlogged, clear out the water from a shipwreck, or build a shelter from scratch.
Sleep: You’ll need to find some spiders or mineshafts in caves underwater to get enough string to make wool for a bed.
Armor, weapons, and tools: You can find some armor and weapons in loot chests, but you’ll need to start a mine and prevent it from filling with water.
Oxygen: Your ultimate goal will be a series of activated conduits; in the meantime, you can place a door for emergency breathing.
Mining speed: Your mining will be hampered until you can get a helmet enchanted with Aqua Affinity or activate a conduit.
See also: Breathing, Resource Cheat Sheet, Underwater Building Techniques, Project: Make a Water World.
PROJECT: MAKE A WATER WORLD
A water world is a world without land, just ocean. Without any land, you’re going to have a tough time getting resources to live on. Your priorities will include building an above-water surface area to live on, and securing food and shelter. You can build up from a structure, like a shipwreck or even kelp, close to the water surface. You also want to find wood (a shipwreck will have plenty) to create a boat and tools. For food, raw fish will have to do to start with, and sitting in a boat will keep your hunger levels from falling.
If you’re ready for the real challenge of surviving in a Water World, you have some options. First, you can download a premade map from sharing sites like Project Minecraft. Within Minecraft, there are a few ways to make a Water World.
Use a Built-In Preset World
A preset world is a type of Superflat world where you specify how many flat layers of blocks, and which blocks, make up the Overworld. The default Superflat world has just four layers: one bottom layer of bedrock, two layers of dirt, and a top layer of grass. You can use or configure predefined combinations, called presets, to have more layers of different types of blocks. You could make a Superflat world of diamond block, for example.
1. Start Minecraft. On your launcher start screen, select Singleplayer.
2. On the Select World screen, click Create New World.
3. On the Create New World screen, type in the name for your world and click More World Options.
4. On the Create New World: More World Options screen, click the World Type button to change this to Superflat.
5. Below the World Type: Superflat button, click the Customize button.
6. On the Superflat Customization screen, click the Presets button.
7. The Presets screen lists a number of different preconfigured Superflat options. Select Water World and click the Use Preset button.
8. Back on the Superflat Customization screen, you can see the layers that will be created for the world: ninety layers of water on top of sand, dirt, stone, and finally one layer of bedrock.
9. Ninety layers of water will make it next to impossible to survive, but you can adjust this. Click the Preset button again, and notice the text box at the top of the screen. This shows the code for specifying the layers of the world. It reads: minecraft:bedrock,5*minecraft:stone,5*minecraft:
dirt,5*minecraft:sand,90*minecraft:water;
minecraft:deep_ocean;oceanmonument,biome_1. You can change this code, but you must be very careful not to add spaces or new characters by accident.2 Use the left and right arrow keys to move in the text box.
10. Make the following changes:
Change 5*minecraft:stone to 45*minecraft:stone.
Change 90*minecraft:water to 15*minecraftwater. This will allow shipwrecks to be reachable from the surface.
Change deep_ocean to lukewarm_ocean. This will prevent ocean monuments from generating.
Change biome_1 to biome_1,decoration with no spaces. This will allow decorative blocks like kelp to generate with the biome.
Your new code should now read:
minecraft:bedrock,45*minecraft:stone,5*
minecraft:dirt,5*minecraft:sand,15*minecraft:
water;minecraft:lukewarm_ocean;oceanmonument,
biome_1,decoration (again, with no spaces). Click Use Preset.
11. On the Superflat Customization, you should see your change reflected in the list of layers. Click Done.
12. On the Create New World: More Options screen, click Create New World.
Use a Buffet World
A buffet world is a world that has just one biome, and you can select whichever biome you want from the “buffet” of biomes Minecraft has, from Badlands to Wooded Mountains. You can also choose between three types of world generation: Surface, which is the normal world type with sky above land; Caves, which is a world made entirely of caves; and Floating Islands, which is made entirely of islands floating above the Void. First, follow steps 1 to 3 above to launch Minecraft and select Create a New World and open the More World Options screen.
1. On the More World Options screen, click the World Type button several times to change this to Buffet. Then click the Customize button.
2. On the Buffet world customization screen, select an ocean biome. You may want to avoid Warm Oceans and Frozen Oceans, as these biomes don’t have kelp, which can be a good food source. Click Done.
3. On the Create New World screen, click Create New World to launch your new Water World.
