Minecraft spelunking!

[Wolfram23]

Hi guys and gals. So I'm curious what sort of experience you've had with spelunking in Minecraft (cave exploring, fyi). My first world had a few caverns, my 2nd world had none. I just started a new one a couple days ago. Started me on a small sandy island. I spotted a neat tower thing with a waterfall so I headed there to make a home. Digging down, it didn't take me long to find a cave which turned into another and another and another. This has become a seriously massive cave system. I have yet to find diamond, unfortunately. No idea what depths I'm at so it's tough to say if I'm deep enough although I have found a couple veins of LL (btw, they now drop several chunks instead of 1!).

So anyway it's been fun. I have more than a full stack of iron now, and recently I cleaned out a spider dungeon (CREEPY!!!) and got some saddles lol. I've been spending so much time exploring the caves I haven't really built anything.

Oh yeah and all around where I started building are surface caves too. At least 4 in very close vicinity. I've never seen something like that.

So, if you want to share some spelunking story have at it!

 

[L3m0n_L1m3]

There was one cave I found that I literally just went through tunnels and tunnels for an hour. It was a god damn maze. Got lost, freaked out, killed my character and flooded the cave.

Then buried the remains.

[sub] scary shit, man. [/sub]

 

[Kpt._Rob]

I've been slowly clearing out a cavern for quite a while. I had dug down to the bottom of the map, and I was slowly clearing out little contained areas (I like to contain different areas behind doors just to make sure that if there's a monster attack of some sort I can safely make it out), I stumbled across a massive cavern, and I have been slowly organizing the cavern, going through it, trying to find all the resources, making the walls straight and creating usable paths and stairs. I always end up digging up anything I can move with a shovel because it's an easy way to find resources, and when I do that I almost always end up stumbling upon more and more caverns, so I have a pretty massive system going, large enough that even though I've organized a lot of it it's still an easy maze to get lost in. I'm thinking pretty soon I'll probably make a bunch of signs to help me find my way to the exit.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well when I started out I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, after digging for hours collected all sorts of materials tons of coal and iron and some diamond, then I hit the bottom of the world, and boom I die and loose everything and I can only watch it as it all floats away... the horror.

And then after that I simply went too far into a cave, and when one ended I dug until I found another, and went on for hours, no clue how to find my way back... killed myself and left all of the stuff down there somewhere, my precious stuff!

 

[Grabbin Keelz]

My brother did this thing where he took a stack of dynamite, dug a hole straight down, stacked the TNT back up to the top, and blew a hole into the center of the earth. It was so awesome.

As for me, I made a sky colony.

 

[Grimsinger]

Always spelunk with with a compass. At least that way you can dig back up, and find your spawn point. I try to build close to it, or leave a trail or torches to my house, just in case I end up having to do that.

 

[SturmDolch]

I found a massive cave system in the Escapecraft temporary test server. I just started exploring, logged off, and then the next day, they had the good old server back up again.

I'm mostly playing single player now, though. The game I started spawned me right beside a cave system, which is pretty cool. But it was filled with skellingtons before I punched them in the face. I'm also slowly flattening out the caves.

 

[silver wolf009]

I started in an almost perfect world, (everything but sugar cane) and I found a cave that I decided to explore. The landscape is still littered with single patches of cobblestone from where I got lost and had to chilian-miner my way directly up. Good times.

As of right now I am making my own cavern out of a 16 by 16 stip mine i'm making with TNT.

 

[John Stalvern]

I played on a newly generated world with a friend a while back.
It was a sick place. For one, we spawned in the dead of night, on a beach featuring, of all things, lava pools. We almost immediately lost track of each other thanks to the skeletons and creepers that were swarming us, and the piles of trees in our way.
Our new home must have been part of a used future, because the earth beneath our feet was already heavily hollowed out. Open shafts sent me tumbling down into cavern sections several times.
While my friend scrambled and died once, I managed to dig a small hovel and seal myself in. We managed to regroup in the morning.
After we'd managed to establish something of a base we dug down. I'm convinced every cave in the game is connected in some way. It's an absolute labyrinth and infested with monsters.
But to answer OP's question, I'm much more proficient at towercrafting, and while my friends were slaving away for the smallest morsel of coal, I constructed a citadel that sunk down and connected to our underground hub and reached up to the cloud line. (resources were in VERY short supply, the only place we'd found them in abundance was in a zombie filled cave across a valley. It's only entrance was at the peak of a small mountain and we had to dig stairs on account of the sheer drop that was the opening passage).
My tower's foundation is scarred with creeper blasts to the point that I had to install a ladder because you couldn't reach the door from the craters around it, and every night spiders and skeletons emerge from the dark pit in the cliff face far below it to harass anyone near the entrance to the tower.

tl;dr IMO building up is more fulfilling than digging down.

 

[Wolfram23]

Good stuff guys!

In my last world I didn't find any caves. I know, right. So I ended up strip mining. I actually don't mind it, it's very safe... but cave exploring is quite fun.

Remember to always mark the way back! I like to stick 2 torches on top of eachother so I know which way to go at a junction