Why can't we live underground, or carve our homes on the sides of mountains?

Groundwater is a terrible thing to deal with for underground dwellings. It's a hard problem to solve. Possible, but hard.

around 40 million people live in yaodongs in China

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
Including both Mao and Xi in the past!

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 wanna see the fucking sun

Sweetiy we have seasonal depression lamps 😌
- People acting like you gotta turn into Gollum and never leave your underground dwelling while subsisting on blind cave fish.

I wanna be an irl dwarf fortress dwarf ngl

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.

Look into Derinkuyu. It's so fucking cool. They were able to do it because it was soft stone.

Permanently Deleted

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

The economy is in shambles

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

real hoxha-turt hours who up

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

Feel like shit, just wanna live in a hobbit hole.

some of us can live that way

looks at billionaires' bunkers

Obligatory Coober Pedy posting

poop

We climb out of hole

We poop in designated area

We compost poop
- poop juice infiltrates thru the walls because we didn't put our poop processing hole far enough away

This is tangentially relevant, but in my conworld I'm mainly writing about one specific country, and this country was colonized by a foreign empire. A major part of the colonial resource extraction was in the form of mining, particularly open-pit mining. When economic crises led to a lot of mining companies pulling out of the colony and simply abandoning their old mines — with these crises also leading to widespread homelessness within the colony — a lot of homeless residents actually ended up carving homes into the sides of the benches of the abandoned mining pits. A lot of these homes are still around today, albeit less hazardous and with running water — and the people who live in these homes are called "troglodytes" or "trogs" or "troggies".

Some people in Spain used to live in Caves until the 1970's

Remembered this guy that had the manly urge to dig and now there's a group of people that are expanding the tunnels.

https://youtu.be/zmGVyzXiF5g?si=pSTCwzSoYhosVzHl

Wet

Hamas convinced me how good it must be there

idk, but iirc some really deadly earthquakes have been due to mass cave homes

Radon, for starters

We can put ventilation in our ground homes. Just put some of those big industrial fans next to some big holes.

They do in outback South Australia- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy

ROCK AND STONE!

Moisture management probably.

I would like to live in a subterranean quonset hut or earthship. I also would love to just build a home inside of a mountain, though this is probably due to my inspiration from Minecraft, lol. My heart yearns to be a commie dwarf.

Homes are mostly empty space, gotta move more stuff to empty them out than to move the walls into place.
If you're building your house above ground, you know exactly what's in the way (bunch of air). If you're building underground, you have to deal with a bunch of different kinds of ground, and you don't fully know which ones where until you start digging.

xicko

It's cool as hell and but I'd miss windows and houseplants

You obviously need a hydroponic grow room in your underground cave dwelling.

I think about this a lot.

You can carve dwellings into the sides of mountains or hills. If it's stone you're digging through, it takes more effort, and if it's soil, you have to worry about groundwater and internal supports. As long as all the water and condensation will drain around it and also out of it, it can work. Also, you do want sunlight, so there's a bit of a limit to how deep you want to go. You could put storage in the interior, but without the light and air exchange, it wouldn't be very suitable for regular living space.