What's stopping us? Not all of us have to, obviously, but at least some of us can live that way.
If our antiquated predecessors could sometimes manage it, I'm sure we can too. Maybe even better.
Groundwater is a terrible thing to deal with for underground dwellings. It's a hard problem to solve. Possible, but hard.
The Pueblo also made very good use of features like mesas and canyons.
similar to shaanbei yaodong are the cave houses in the sierra nevada in andalucia. especially the sacromonte caves in granada, traditionally inhabited by roma who were not allowed to live inside city limits
Digging out a ton of rock and earth is a lot more complicated IRL than it is in games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft. Real life geology is pretty complicated, you gotta deal with shit like ground water, unstable types of earth, blasting. It's all pretty expensive and dangerous. Meanwhile humans have gotten pretty good at erecting shit above ground, we can throw up sheds and huts like nobodies business.
Edit: Also plumbing, electrical, HVAC, means of egress and sewage become problems with subterranean development. Digging a room underground, doable, but then you're gonna have to dig out additional shit to get all the water pipes and air ducts in there. Also, people like having windows, and windows are good for fire safety, but it's kind of hard to put enough windows in if only one side of a dwelling is facing the open land.
more complicated IRL than it is in Minecraft
true true
Dwarf Fortress
woah slow down
As much as I like DF, even dwarfs couldn't mine out giant granite chambers that fucking quick with just pickaxes, come on.
I promise you I was only joking when I implied that Dwarf Fortress is literally more complicated than real life
spoiler
or was IOne thing DF just handwaves that I'm not a fan of is overburden. It would actually make minecarts mandatory if you needed to haul large quantities of waste stone out of all of your build sites, and the place where you dump it should be a significant decision (ie don't dump it near the river or you'll poison people downstream).
People acting like you gotta turn into Gollum and never leave your underground dwelling while subsisting on blind cave fish.
Leave those blind cave fish alone, they're just vibing and eating algae.
it's a dangerous world to live in. just the other day i built a well over an underground lake in a cavern layer. every now and then a giant bat would fly up the well and into the room, flap around a bit, and then leave back down the well. but then one time one of the children was in the room and in a panic running away from the giant bat ended up falling down the well and drowning.
o shid o fuk a giant bat aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa splash halphalp i'm drowning blubbrbrbbllblbl
This is why you make an automated swimming pool in your temple.
i've now placed cage traps all around the well. any chance i can train the giant bats to be mounts?
To my knowledge mounts are currently only available to the player in Adventure Mode. I could be wrong though. As far as I understand it mounts aren't working in Fortress mode for the player but do work for enemies who enter the map riding them.
They should be trainable though. Also those things are massive, like several times the size of an adult dwarf so the child falling down the well in fear shouldn't be too surprising. Max giant bat size is 200k cm^3 while max dwarf size is 60k cm^3. Max size figures are pretty good for getting a general idea of the size of these things lol.
Hunting with giant bats seems a bit unfair. Everything that gets hunted is like a fifth of their size.
well the cavern is full of hostile ant people and they've been killing everything that comes near including a series of forgotten beasts, i need the help
Look into Derinkuyu. It's so fucking cool. They were able to do it because it was soft stone.
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Keeping the water out winds up being a huge problem. Either its percolating down from outside water sources and working down through the cracks in the rocks until its inside your house or its condensation buildup from the living things inside the cave house.
Personally, I'd love to live in an underground bunker because I'm a weirdo, but i would be pretty cool with some small single story house with a reinforced shed style roof with a few feet of soil and let the crass grow.
earth-covered homes have a great climate control advantage, I'm for it in environments where it's feasible
let's do it
I'll start digging while you gather up some rugs and pillows
It's generally much more economical to build upward into empty air than to clear large amounts of earth before you can even get started building
Subnautica style underwater living facility, but we live in a shallow area.
It can be done, damnit, I know it can
It would be so cool to have a stairway with glass in one side so you can walk up or down the stairs and see the change between above and below the waterline
Feel your ears pop as you descend. See the fauna change
Even better! I was just imagining a two story next to a lake deal or something.
some of us can live that way
looks at billionaires' bunkers
hours who up