When playing Minecraft online we have all had our chances of encountering not-so friendly players. Whether it be our own friends coming after us to just mess around or genuine griefers and thieves wanting our Loot.
So what can you do when you have something valuable you wish to keep hidden? Do you need to hide the entirety of your base?
Luckily, there’s a way to hide all your precious treasure using secret doors in Minecraft. From hidden automatic doors to simple concealed doors you can have within your base. There’s many options to throw off those pesky looters!
How to Build a Concealed Door
The easiest kind of secret door is one that doesn’t utilize actual Minecraft Doors or any of the more complicated Redstone Mechanics. This type of secret door is perfect for hiding rooms in plain view inside your base.
All that you will need is a hole in the wall, 2 Signs, and a Painting.
Dig out the entrance into the room you wish to hide. Keep it as a regular 1×2 opening. On one of the sides of the opening place down your two Signs. Make sure that the overall size of the wall you’re using is big enough for a large Painting.
Too small of a Painting won’t hide the door efficiently. I found that the perfect height for the wall is 3 blocks tall. That way the large Painting fits perfectly.
Paintings can only be placed on solid blocks and Signs.
Once you have your doorway ready all you have to do is place the Painting on the wall. The Painting will cover the opening completely, but you can still pass through the Painting and into the room behind it.
Simple Redstone Hidden Door
Like with anything Redstone related, there’s endless options and possibilities. Same goes when making hidden doors.
You can make a simple hidden door or an entire mechanism that hides a whole cave. For this article I will stick to a more simple version of a hidden door.
For this you will need 12 Sticky Pistons, 4 Redstone Repeater, and some Redstone Dust. This will be a door that is 2 blocks wide.
You start off by making 2 L-shapes with the Sticky Pistons as shown in the image below, with your door blocks inside the corners. I am using Stone because I want to imagine this door being hidden within a mountain side.
You will need “roof” above the Pistons. If you’re doing this in a mountain or any terrain you’ll need a 1 block tall gap above it to place all your Redstone components.
Place your Redstone Repeaters and Redstone Dust in the following pattern on the “roof” or gap. The Redstone Repeaters you want to put on one tick each. Simply right-click them once.
That is basically all there is to your secret door. Simply place a Lever or Button where the Redstone Dust extends to the front. With this you can activate the system.
To keep it hidden you can simply take your Button or Lever with you.
Secret Staircases
Similarly to the secret door, we can use Redstone to hide a whole staircase. It can be used to hide a whole floor within your base or to make the real entrance to your base completely out of reach. It works particularly well when paired with the previous design for a hidden door.
Depending on how far up the entrance will be, you might need quite a few Sticky Pistons. One for each block of Stairs.
Start by lining up placing down your Sticky Pistons, two blocks inside the wall. Make sure to have a free solid block behind your Pistons, because this is where your Redstone wiring will run.
Once all your Pistons are placed put down a Stair block on the side of each of them. Under the Stairs put down your regular blocks you will have for this wall.
Now, to hide the Stairs we will simply place more Stairs to the side, so that the Stairs curve in a way to look like they’re part of the wall. It is the same curving mechanics you use when building spiral staircases.
All that is left is putting down the Redstone Dust on top of each block behind the Sticky Pistons and putting down your Lever or Button.
Additionally, to make it more hidden you can use a Redstone Comparator and an Item Frame as a key or by utilizing Sculk Sensors.
Upon activating it the Pistons will push out the Stair blocks for you to be able to climb them. Removing the Lever or Button will make the Stairs become hidden again. The looters will be non-the-wiser.