Underground garden

For some reason, I'd always assumed that in Minecraft, plants need sunlight to grow. Turns out that's not true: according to the indispensable wiki, all, say, a tree needs is light and space. You know what that means? An underground forest.

Not only is the idea of an underground forest incredibly sweet, but a supply of lumber would mean I could skip the trips to the surface to get more wood for tools.

Here we go!

My first ever underground tree!

While it's growing, I'll get back to the mining. My current plan is to dig an underground tunnel from my home base to Twin Tower. But since I've already dug a simple tunnel from my base to my first tower, I want to do something rather more interesting.

The tutorials at the Minecraft Wiki recommend building a quarry to gather rock and minerals. I should do something like that to get my hands on all the goodies like gold, diamonds, redstone and whatnot, but my problem is that a quarry is just so... ugly.

So my solution is an underground quarry.

And after some hard mining, I pop back to my garden, and hey presto!

A tree! And here's me making planks out of a tree I grew underground!

I never have to go up on the surface again. Take that, death cactus!

**

Meanwhile, Phase 1 of my great underground project is pretty much finished. Not only are the underground trees growing, but my chasm is looking pretty good:

And here's the first section of underground hall. The door on the right leads to my first underground base.

I fully realize that it's obvious both from the context and the pictures themselves that all this is, in fact, underground, but I like to say underground base.

My next project is turning this rockface into a great underground hall that leads all the way to Twin Tower.

I'll go do that now.