The world of Minecraft can be harsh. One moment you’re happily cooking a few pieces of bacon in your oven, then next; BAM! Where’d that creep come from? Now you’re back at the respawn point – you’d better know how to get back home from there!

Building a door is a good way to keep this from happening, but that only works if you stay underground or in a very tightly constructed fort. And those options, while doable, make large construction projects and proper farming much more difficult. Expanding outward is the quicker choice, but risky. Here are a few clever Minecraft home security tips to protect your land.

Build A Moat

http://youtu.be/SOFLXECiPEk

Moats were great ways to defend castles, and they’re also great ways to defend your home in Minecraft. In fact, they’re even better in real life, because moats work both as a barrier and a conveyor belt of death, yet are simple enough for any Minecraft newbie.

I've attached a good video above, but for those who want the short version, here’s the idea. In Minecraft, water always flows downwards from the point of origin. You can also pick up water with a bucket and place it anywhere, creating a new (and infinite) point of origin. This is the beginnings of your moat, which you then guide by digging into the ground or building a canal.

A moat about three blocks wide is a good barrier and great Minecraft home security, but you can make your moat better by using the water’s current to push trapped monsters towards an end point. Usually this will be a really deep pool, which ultimately drowns monsters (and the occasional pig and cow, too). Be sure to leave a small outlet at the bottom of the pool – if you do this, the items monsters leave when they die will filter out of the pool for you to pick up!

But remember moats won't help against every threat - particularly Endermen, who have a nasty habit of teleporting when provoked.

Create A Trap Door Or Drawbridge

http://youtu.be/ydQLkRQgjog

A moat is a great thing to have, but it also creates a problem. It’s a moat. You can’t get over it. You have two options. One is to build a tunnel, which can be a bit inconvenient. The other is to just build a bridge.

But a bridge is something monsters might use to cross into your territory, so you’ll need to figure out a way to protect it. That’s where a trap door comes in.

The video above provides an example of what a trapped base entrance might look like, but the idea can be adapted in thousands of different ways. You can put traps over bridges to make a drawbridge, you can put lava under the trap floor to make a kill trap, you can make the traps larger or smaller, and etc.

Whatever you decide to do, the basic idea is to use a redstone switch in conjunction with a redstone torch (to provide power) that is hooked via redstone wire to one or more trap doors. The switch could be a button, a pressure plate, a tripwire, or any other valid switch component – get creative!

Use A Piston Trap

http://youtu.be/B7qpu9DsN9E

Trap doors are great against monsters but they don’t work well against people, which is a problem if you’re playing on a Minecraft server. Piston traps are a better solution because you can use blocks that blend in to the surroundings. They’re also the trap of choice for people who don’t like the aesthetics of trap doors.

Like trap doors, pistons are connected to a switch via redstone. When the switch is activated, the pistons open, sending the poor monster or player plummeting to whatever fate you’ve devised for them. All the usual stuff works, but if you’re targeting players, you’ll probably want the trap to send the player on a deadly fall or into lava. The kill should be quick so the player doesn’t have a chance to escape.

The video above shows how to make a detailed sand trap as part of your Minecraft home security. What’s great about the trap in the video is that it’s connected to a piston door. This gives the illusion that the mechanism (pressure plates) are only meant to open the door. But after a brief delay the floor opens as well – and once that happens, there’s no escape.

Make An Explosive Trap

http://youtu.be/6i3aq3cRHxo

Sometimes you don’t want a trap to be subtle. You need it to send a message. The message being; boom! You’re dead!

There are a lot of ways to make explosive traps and some are incredibly elaborate, but you don’t have to go crazy to make the trap work. The video above, for example, shows nothing more than a TNT block that is placed under a wood or stone block with a pressure plate on top. Step on the pressure plate and its game over.

http://youtu.be/47SVsWoNlNo

You can also hook explosives using redstone and various switches, which is what the video above shows. This is where traps become more devious. You can use switches like pressure plated and trip wires to activate TNT via redstone wires. And if you’re really devious, you build circuits that delay the explosion, providing the illusion that nothing is amiss.

Remember, though, that TNT will destroy everything around it in most situations – so don’t place it underneath a house you want to keep!

Create An Arrow Trap

The last kind of trap I’m going to talk about is the arrow trap. This is a good trap to put in narrow areas like interior hallways and mines. It is often used online but can also be used against monsters who might be wandering through a mineshaft you want to keep clear or too close to a doorway.

Like the other traps, this one uses redstone wires to connect a switch to the trap itself, which in this case is a dispenser full of arrows. On a basic level you can just hook a pressure plate to the dispenser, but this generally will not be deadly, as just one arrow will be fired.

To create a lethal barrage of arrows you’ll need to make redstone circuit, which is where the video shown above comes in handy. As you’ll see, the circuit in the video causes the dispenser to fire numerous arrows once activated, which quickly proves lethal to players and monsters alike. And if the arrow trap isn't deadly enough for you, you can always try the flaming arrow variety!

Conclusion

These are not the only traps in Minecraft, though I think it’s fair to say they’re the most popular. Being creative with your traps has less to do with creating brand new traps and more to do with finding ways to adapt those that exist. The piston trap, for example, can be adapted to create a really cool drawbridge. Or you could combine a flaming arrow trap with a piston trap that dumps monsters or players into wool (which quickly burns when set alight).

When these traps are combined with walls and clever tricks, you’ll be able to put together a base that quickly kills intrudes – even when you’re not there’s to help defend it!

While you're thinking up your next trap, you might want to take inspiration from the six most amazing Minecraft creations.