Can you completely live underground?

Like actually live underground. Tree farm underground. Wheat underground. Maybe farm animals underground? What are the problems with that? Or do you have to go up every once in a while to kill animals or chop wood?

3 Answers

Defining the terms

What counts as "living" in Minecraft is very relative. Can you survive for an arbitrary time period? Sure, just put a beacon on the surface, set it to regeneration and wall yourself in closeby. No further action required. But is that fun? Would you consider that "playing a game"? I don't think so.

It's also a matter of definition what you consider "underground":

• Can you mine surface blocks as long as you yourself always have blocks above you? Then you could just walk under a manual flying machine.
• Can you go into the Nether? Probably, but what about the End? You could spawn underground, then only dig around and beat the dragon that way, then constantly switch between two tunnels to the surface to build a roof above the other one, then go into the portal. Technically still underground.

This can continue, "underground" is a pretty relative term and the only really clear definition would be "blocks above you". And I've played a Skyblock-like map recently while always having blocks above me, I wouldn't consider that "underground".

The (im)possibility of doing things underground

But let's still try to consider what is possible and what not. Let's define underground for this case as: "living in caves, generated or dug, with a considerable distance from the surface". Then it would be impossible to acquire:

• Things that only generate on the surface and can't be farmed underground. This includes dead bushes, totems and, because phantoms only spawn while you are on the surface, phantom membrane and slow falling potions, …
• Things that only generate in or around surface water and can't be farmed: hearts of the sea (and therefore conduits), sponges, prismarine, …
• Things from the End: End stone and products, dragon egg, shulker shells and boxes, elytra, dragon's breath, lingering potions, …

Of course some things could possibly be acquired, but it would be really difficult, like getting villagers (heal zombie), getting items from loot chests (only heart of the sea appears exclusively in treasure chests close to the surface and even they are usually buried) and so on.

Some more things depend on how strict or loose you define the rules. Also, many things depend on how long you are on the surface before you go down forever. If you create the world and instantly run into a cave, you're going to have a hard time at first. But if you first e.g. punch a few leaves and some grass, then it's much easier.

A lot of things are possible though, probably surprisingly:

• Growing trees, grass, etc. just requires light, not necessarily sky light.
• Chickens can spawn with zombie riders. But getting them to multiply is hard, because they behave differently than normal chickens.
• Fishing can give you many things, like saddles, name tags, leather, tripwire hooks, bamboo, lily pads, …

Well, I'll just suppose that living underground for you means living more or less under Y 64 (tell me if I'm wrong). I'm sure you could manage, as long as you take one trip aboveground then theoretically hibernate. Then there is the other alternative of completely living underground... Your biggest problems would be food and wood. The first one could be solved by visiting mineshafts, which contains minecart chests with golden apples (both kinds) and melon, beetroot, and pumpkin seeds.

The pumpkin seeds would be kind of useless though since you won't have sugar or eggs to make pumpkin pie. Wood can easily be solved by breaking mineshafts. Here are some other problems with solutions:

• wool can be made with string
• dyes might be hard to get, but if you just need everything to be the same color use white dye made from bonemeal, which is made from bones.

That's all I can think of for now. Hope this answers your question.

Yeah, definitely possible. I'm doing a run like that right now. Started a world where I destroyed one tree then I dug straight down to bedrock. I capped off my exit, made a huge room for trees to grow. Found diamonds and went to the nether and have been surviving off of mushroom stew. So far I have been trying not to die and have succeeded so far but everything is tedious when you are so limited in supplies. I probably haven't even gone 50 blocks from my spawn. I have been desperately trying to find any type of structure but so far I've only found a lava cave. It's very fun but not for the inexperienced, I'm playing on hard but if you're nervous easier difficulties completely eliminate starvation.