Underground?

Can I build below ground? I have yet to see any caves or "underground" shelters. I wish to be a hurmit and live under ground.

you can dig a pit and put a roof on. Or you can make your own prim hill. go check out numbakulla sim as it has lots of underground and you should check it out anyway

The mysterious SL underground...muahhh ... I think it has something to do with MATH.

The ground in SL is strictly a 2 dimensional surface laid out on a 256x256 grid. Each point of the grid can go up or down, but not side to side, so it can't fold over on itself or form caves unfortunately.

For underground builds, you need the ability to terraform the land. This means you have to own the land, or be part of a group that owns the land, and have the aid of a group officer to do the terraforming.

You would dig a pit or a series of connected pits and trenches, as stated above. This would all be open-topped. Once the pit is dug, you can place structures within it, and can cover it with one or more prims that are textured to match the ground, and/or with plants or a river or something else to disguise it, or cover the opening with a building.

Some sims have much wider ranges over which the land can be terraformed than others. You would probably want to be in one that has a wide range, so you can raise a tall hill and dig down deeply.

If you dig below the 'water table' for your sim, that is, below the level of 'the sea', you will encounter a layer of Linden water. I have a lovely spa in my home that takes advantage of this, projecting below the water level so we have 'real water' in the pool.

Many underground builds use teleporters to get in and out of them, or else you ride a prim to get in and out. Just like skyboxes.

An alternative thought? If you can't terraform, build it in the sky, and make a fake 'cave mouth' that teleports you to the sky build. You could texture the outside to look like a cloud, and the inside to look like you were underground. There used to be a build in The Forest that seemed to be a twisty maze of underground passages. But it was all in a sky island.

This is a great technique and one that I plan on using in the new incarnation of Liferain Park that I'm building. There will be large caverns kind of in the style of the jungle build that's in my signature.

Building a cave in the sky keeps the clutter off the ground and allows you to focus on the inside which is the focal point of this type of build. Also, the framerate is much better in the sky and things like particles work better.

Check out Chip Midnight's cave, it is in Freelon back behind his store there. I think Jopsy Pendragon has one too, but more in a Hobbit House style.

Wait until we get Havok 2... or Havok 3... then we'll still be aboveground only with more efficiency.

I like the idea someone came up with of a "hole" prim. Antiprims. An antiprim annihilates that part of normal prims it comes in contact with, and cuts holes in the ground to allow underground building. Impractical, but cool.

I think LL is wasting the potential of negative space. I think they should let people build stuff down there that you can only get to through a scripted portal on the parcel above. Like skyboxes, but with real privacy.

Either that, or somewhere down beyond the camera limit the secret horrors of SL live, beings with strange, eldritch, tortured geometry, uncannily flexible prims, shapes unknown to normal avatars. Cyclopean architecture of rounded cubes, rugose composed textures. They'd melt your brain and GPU just to look at them, so LL keeps them safe in the space where we can not go.