I did some data gathering and calculations, plus 40 widely-spaced test pits in creative to check the accuracy of my results, and it looks like if you dig straight down in survival you have about an 85% chance of reaching bedrock safely. You may take a non-fatal fall now and then, but mostly you will die from falling into lava, and almost never (3% or so) by falling a long distance. Long distance falls almost always happen pretty close to the surface. Once your pit is down to level 30 or 40 you will almost never take a fatal fall after that.
If you only dig straight down to level 15, and stop there, you have nearly a 99% chance of arriving safely, with an occasional non-fatal fall.
If you dig straight down until you HEAR lava, and then start spreading out and digging a 2x2 hole, you can virtually always get safely to bedrock, or to a place where you can see lava below, and avoid it. The only exception is if you fall from a distance high enough above the lava that you can't hear it yet, and that's very rare.
To stay safe when digging straight down, always be sure you are standing in water. Put the water at your feet, dig down one block, remove the water that's now in your face, and put it back at your feet again. That way if you break through to lava the water will hit the lava just a little bit before you do, turning into obsidian. And if you break through to a fatal fall, the water will break your fall. So digging straight down with wet feet is always safe.
Surely switching from pick to bucket and back will take at least as long as digging a stairway? And be a lot more annoying.
If you really want to dig straight down I'd suggest standing on the border between two blocks and digging out both of them, you'll never fall and if you release lava at your feet you can deal with that with a water bucket.
Ironically, changes to the underground in 1.7 made it safer to do this; with fewer and less dense caves you are less likely to fall into lava or suffer a fatal fall. On the other hand, since caves were more concentrated there was a higher chance of no caves under you if you if there are no visible surface openings, and cave density can vary significantly over large areas.
This can be illustrated with this chart of cave distribution I made by counting the number of caves in a 4 chunk radius; despite more caves overall 1.6.4 actually has more areas with no caves at all than any other count; this also shows that there is far more variability in cave density:
Even over a much larger 16 chunk radius (512 blocks in diameter) cave density can vary by as much as 9.5-fold, with anywhere from 60 to 570 caves for 1.6.4, and even in 1.7-1.8 there were 80-360 caves, a variation of 4.5-fold (this also means that in areas with the lowest cave concentration you actually have a higher chance of hitting one in 1.7+), so you really need to test over a wide area to accurately calculate the risk of digging straight down:
There's also a small threat from underground lava lakes, which can be found at any elevation, even at the surface (nearly all of the lava below y=11 is from caves filled with lava instead of air), and you didn't mention the threat of mobs.
Here's my simple solution to not worry about lava, falls, or enemies. Stand on the edge of 2 blocks dig one down like 3 or 4 spaces, you won't fall because of the other block. Then dig the other blocks that you are now on down to the level of the hole you just made and dig it down like 3 or 4 spaces. Keep repeating this and you'll safely be on bottom quickly or will safely discover lava or hole below you then go around or start process over somewhere else. Also, I carry enough ladder pieces to build a ladder all the way to the top and some torches of course. As you go down place torches on one side of the 2X1 hole, then leave the other side open to build a ladder back up. At the bottom I make a little pool of water that is 2 blocks deep below the torch side. I use this so that I can just jump down to the bottom and land in the water, I do advise some caution on this part because if you aren't careful you will miss it, but if you die at the bottom you can easily recover your stuff if you know where your mine is.
Here's my simple solution to not worry about lava, falls, or enemies. Stand on the edge of 2 blocks dig one down like 3 or 4 spaces, you won't fall because of the other block. Then dig the other blocks that you are now on down to the level of the hole you just made and dig it down like 3 or 4 spaces. Keep repeating this and you'll safely be on bottom quickly or will safely discover lava or hole below you then go around or start process over somewhere else. Also, I carry enough ladder pieces to build a ladder all the way to the top and some torches of course. As you go down place torches on one side of the 2X1 hole, then leave the other side open to build a ladder back up. At the bottom I make a little pool of water that is 2 blocks deep below the torch side. I use this so that I can just jump down to the bottom and land in the water, I do advise some caution on this part because if you aren't careful you will miss it, but if you die at the bottom you can easily recover your stuff if you know where your mine is.
+1 I do the exact same thing when I do decide to dig down. Stand with each foot on a different block, dig one down a few blocks and repeat with the other side. I place ladders on one side as I go and torches every 4 blocks down on the other side and fill the empty spaces between torches with cobble. Can't fall on that side anymore and still have torches for light though....I like the water idea ...would make getting down quicker. But usually I take the time that I'm going down the ladder to grab a sip of my drink or a bite to eat.
Let's review a bit, shall we? Digging straight down (1x1) offers multiple hazards. Yes, fatal falls and falling into lava are not the least of them. However, in Survival on anything other than Peaceful difficulty, I would argue that one of the more frequent ways to die by digging straight down is to have a non-fatal fall into a large-ish dark cave, which is very likely to be filled with mobs. Yes if you are quick you can pillar back up, but by the time one skeleton shoots you or a zombie gives you a pat on the back, you're off your mark and will have a tough time lining up to your hole in the ceiling to get back to safety. If the cave offers cover, you might be able to fight your way to safety, but I wouldn't count on it.
While I do have a problem with your analysis (see above), I do appreciate your evidence-based approach to this old chestnut of a problem, however. I think with a little fine tuning (and a lot more data collection) you'd have some interesting results. I encourage you to ignore the nay-sayers and keep working on this.
And to all of the people offering alternative ways to reach bedrock, you're sort of missing the point of this thread; digging straight down we know is dangerous, and we know there are safer ways to dig down, but digging straight down has long ago grown to mythical proportions, to which the OP is merely trying to mix back in a little hard science, which I appreciate. And I'm still probably not going to dig straight down.
Something to research would be the differences between current cave generation now and in Alpha when the "Never dig straight down" rule began.
I'm guessing it wasn't that different; I've even downloaded various jars and decompiled them to look in the code and while I wasn't able to find it prior to an early Beta version, which used the same "size" and "chance" variables as up to release 1.6.4 old screenshots like this suggest it was very similar, complete with circular rooms and all the Wiki itself doesn't make any mention of changes since InfDev:
A Cartograph map I found showing pure Swiss cheese, similar to very dense regions of caves up to 1.6.4:
By comparison, this is a roughly 500x1000 block map of part of one of my worlds, generated in 1.5.1-1.6.4; aside from ravines and mineshafts there doesn't appear to be a big difference in caves, although as mentioned regional areas vary significantly in cave density:
One thing to note - if you lock closely at the Alpha map you can see some breaks in caves across chunk borders; this was due to a bug that wasn't fixed until Beta 1.8, but otherwise had no effect on the overall volume of caves or their distribution across the y-axis.
See also: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Cavern#History (although some of this information seems suspect; for example, the claim that ores are more common in caves (Beta 1.2) is nonsense, unless there was an overall increase in ore concentration, meaning that this had nothing to do with caves, since the game doesn't try to place ores in any particular manner in relation to caves).
I may try downloading an early Alpha version and attempt to find the code, even if that means manually picking through the classes (I normally search for specific strings which I know to be mostly unique to the cave generation code, enabling me to pick it out of a few results; this works even as of the latest versions, using MCP code for older versions, which is how I was able to confirm that caves were indeed made less like Swiss cheese in 1.7 before it was released, as my very first post on this forum shows. They likely changed it after they added the Nether, with its own caves, and additional structures; the current code, MapGenCaves, extends MapGenBase, a base class for all structures).
Note also that to accurately compare caves you need to use a mapping utility that shows the underground as shown in the spoilers; all too often I see seeds for 1.7-1.8 claiming to have found a "HUGE" cave system when it is only a garden-variety average cave system in versions 1.6.4 and earlier, with cave systems in those versions able to get utterly huge.
I finally cracked the mystery of what caves were like back in InfDev and early Alpha- apparently JAD is horribly outdated and didn't decompile all of the code; I found a class that had some of the cave generation code in it but couldn't find the rest, but after using a different decompiler (CFR, using this online decompiler page) I finally found it.
The result? The underground was even more like Swiss cheese back in InfDev, the version I decompiled - the size of cave systems was set to 40, the same as up through 1.6.4 but the chance was set to 10, meaning that there were 50% more caves back then (by comparison, in 1.7 and later these values are set to 15 and 7, resulting in a much smaller but more common cave systems, thus a more even distribution). However, there was no extra multiplier applied to some caves to make them larger; they all had the same size range.
Here is some of the code from inf-20100618\net\minecraft\a\a\c.a.class, which is equivalent to the modern-day ChunkProviderGenerate; instead of using a separate class for cave generation it is all done in one giant method along with terrain generation; chunk decoration is also done in the same class, instead of using a separate BiomeDecorator class:
Compare to the code for 1.6.4; the only significant differences is that they since added a 1-in-10 chance of a multiplier of 1-4 applied to what is the width parameter for a cave, thus giving you occasional bigger caves (this value is actually the maximum radius, and 1.5 is added as a minimum for a width of 3-27 blocks, or 3-9 blocks for caves without the additional multiplier). Note that they also added a method "generateLargeCaveNode" (circular rooms) which just replaces some of the code shown above with a more organized version; they also changed the parameters so that a seed value is passed to the local RNG, fixing the bug where caves cut off at chunk borders:
I found this class by searching for "341873128712L", a constant that is also still used in current versions to set the chunk seed. Caves also had the same distribution with altitude, which looks like the following, placing the majority of caves near lava level (note that the average elevation is 33.25 but half of caves generate below y=26, this is due to caves much higher up biasing it upwards. this also shows why using Customized to make the ground deeper has little effect on the overall volume of caves):
(when ravines, with a minimum center altitude of 20, and mineshafts, most common around y=20-30, are included the overall distribution of air blocks shifts upwards, with a maximum around y=25)
Note that due to changes in how the chunk seed is set and the addition of larger caves it isn't possible to replicate InfDev caves in current versions by simply editing the aforementioned values, but otherwise they will have the same distribution and density if you remove the 1/10 chance of larger caves, which have little impact anyway due to their low chance and the fact that the size multiplier is highly nonlinear with most seeing only a minimal increase.
As mastercaver pointed out cave generation hasn't changed much since late alpha other than fixing a few issues with cave misalignment, so not much has changed since the birth of the old 'never dig straight down' adage. I think digging straight down while having a low probability for serious consequences could be likened to skydiving. Chances are you're going to be okay, however how many times do you want to risk it?
Usually if I want to dig a single hole straight down I will do so with ladders. Hold shift to hang onto the ladder, mine 3 blocks down, if things are okay, drop down and place 3 ladders and repeat.
... I think digging straight down while having a low probability for serious consequences could be likened to skydiving. Chances are you're going to be okay, however how many times do you want to risk it?...
On the other hand, if you are carrying nothing more than a common pickaxe, dying is not such a big deal. After re-spawning you can dig straight down in the adjacent block and know ahead of time when to stop to stay safe.
But on the other-other hand, what's the point of digging straight down except to reach diamond depth quickly, and digging a straight stairway requires breaking only three times as many blocks, and with no risk of sudden death.
Here's a way to go quick, easy, and safe. Put water in the hole like OP said, but don't pick up your water and instead just keep digging while in water. Digging in water isn't all that slow when you're standing on the bottom and not trying to swim against current. When you need a breath, put a torch on the side to convert the block your head is in to air. You only need one torch for the whole trip as it'll just break off again and you'll pick it up.
edit: I tried it and I found that stone tools don't dig in water as well as I thought, also with lighting at maximum you can't see anything. So it doesn't really work. It would work alright with diamond tools and respiration 3.
I haven't had many problems with it either, but I still dig down 3 then dig beside me down three back and forth so I have a better chance of early warning. I figure even if I dug straight down with no problem I still would want some space to place torches so it works out good for me.
If you're digging a 2 block wide shaft anyway then you ought to stand on the crack between blocks, then you can avoid falling altogether, as long as you stop when you knock a hole in the floor, you just need to be ready to place water if lava flows into the shaft from the side.
I did some data gathering and calculations, plus 40 widely-spaced test pits in creative to check the accuracy of my results, and it looks like if you dig straight down in survival you have about an 85% chance of reaching bedrock safely. You may take a non-fatal fall now and then, but mostly you will die from falling into lava, and almost never (3% or so) by falling a long distance. Long distance falls almost always happen pretty close to the surface. Once your pit is down to level 30 or 40 you will almost never take a fatal fall after that.
If you only dig straight down to level 15, and stop there, you have nearly a 99% chance of arriving safely, with an occasional non-fatal fall.
If you dig straight down until you HEAR lava, and then start spreading out and digging a 2x2 hole, you can virtually always get safely to bedrock, or to a place where you can see lava below, and avoid it. The only exception is if you fall from a distance high enough above the lava that you can't hear it yet, and that's very rare.
To stay safe when digging straight down, always be sure you are standing in water. Put the water at your feet, dig down one block, remove the water that's now in your face, and put it back at your feet again. That way if you break through to lava the water will hit the lava just a little bit before you do, turning into obsidian. And if you break through to a fatal fall, the water will break your fall. So digging straight down with wet feet is always safe.
Something to research would be the differences between current cave generation now and in Alpha when the "Never dig straight down" rule began.
Surely switching from pick to bucket and back will take at least as long as digging a stairway? And be a lot more annoying.
If you really want to dig straight down I'd suggest standing on the border between two blocks and digging out both of them, you'll never fall and if you release lava at your feet you can deal with that with a water bucket.
Just testing.
Ironically, changes to the underground in 1.7 made it safer to do this; with fewer and less dense caves you are less likely to fall into lava or suffer a fatal fall. On the other hand, since caves were more concentrated there was a higher chance of no caves under you if you if there are no visible surface openings, and cave density can vary significantly over large areas.
This can be illustrated with this chart of cave distribution I made by counting the number of caves in a 4 chunk radius; despite more caves overall 1.6.4 actually has more areas with no caves at all than any other count; this also shows that there is far more variability in cave density:
Even over a much larger 16 chunk radius (512 blocks in diameter) cave density can vary by as much as 9.5-fold, with anywhere from 60 to 570 caves for 1.6.4, and even in 1.7-1.8 there were 80-360 caves, a variation of 4.5-fold (this also means that in areas with the lowest cave concentration you actually have a higher chance of hitting one in 1.7+), so you really need to test over a wide area to accurately calculate the risk of digging straight down:
There's also a small threat from underground lava lakes, which can be found at any elevation, even at the surface (nearly all of the lava below y=11 is from caves filled with lava instead of air), and you didn't mention the threat of mobs.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Here's my simple solution to not worry about lava, falls, or enemies. Stand on the edge of 2 blocks dig one down like 3 or 4 spaces, you won't fall because of the other block. Then dig the other blocks that you are now on down to the level of the hole you just made and dig it down like 3 or 4 spaces. Keep repeating this and you'll safely be on bottom quickly or will safely discover lava or hole below you then go around or start process over somewhere else. Also, I carry enough ladder pieces to build a ladder all the way to the top and some torches of course. As you go down place torches on one side of the 2X1 hole, then leave the other side open to build a ladder back up. At the bottom I make a little pool of water that is 2 blocks deep below the torch side. I use this so that I can just jump down to the bottom and land in the water, I do advise some caution on this part because if you aren't careful you will miss it, but if you die at the bottom you can easily recover your stuff if you know where your mine is.
+1 I do the exact same thing when I do decide to dig down. Stand with each foot on a different block, dig one down a few blocks and repeat with the other side. I place ladders on one side as I go and torches every 4 blocks down on the other side and fill the empty spaces between torches with cobble. Can't fall on that side anymore and still have torches for light though....I like the water idea ...would make getting down quicker. But usually I take the time that I'm going down the ladder to grab a sip of my drink or a bite to eat.
Let's review a bit, shall we? Digging straight down (1x1) offers multiple hazards. Yes, fatal falls and falling into lava are not the least of them. However, in Survival on anything other than Peaceful difficulty, I would argue that one of the more frequent ways to die by digging straight down is to have a non-fatal fall into a large-ish dark cave, which is very likely to be filled with mobs. Yes if you are quick you can pillar back up, but by the time one skeleton shoots you or a zombie gives you a pat on the back, you're off your mark and will have a tough time lining up to your hole in the ceiling to get back to safety. If the cave offers cover, you might be able to fight your way to safety, but I wouldn't count on it.
While I do have a problem with your analysis (see above), I do appreciate your evidence-based approach to this old chestnut of a problem, however. I think with a little fine tuning (and a lot more data collection) you'd have some interesting results. I encourage you to ignore the nay-sayers and keep working on this.
And to all of the people offering alternative ways to reach bedrock, you're sort of missing the point of this thread; digging straight down we know is dangerous, and we know there are safer ways to dig down, but digging straight down has long ago grown to mythical proportions, to which the OP is merely trying to mix back in a little hard science, which I appreciate. And I'm still probably not going to dig straight down.
That is possible, because in the launcher you can change the version of minecraft you are playing on.
I'm guessing it wasn't that different; I've even downloaded various jars and decompiled them to look in the code and while I wasn't able to find it prior to an early Beta version, which used the same "size" and "chance" variables as up to release 1.6.4 old screenshots like this suggest it was very similar, complete with circular rooms and all the Wiki itself doesn't make any mention of changes since InfDev:
A Cartograph map I found showing pure Swiss cheese, similar to very dense regions of caves up to 1.6.4:
By comparison, this is a roughly 500x1000 block map of part of one of my worlds, generated in 1.5.1-1.6.4; aside from ravines and mineshafts there doesn't appear to be a big difference in caves, although as mentioned regional areas vary significantly in cave density:
One thing to note - if you lock closely at the Alpha map you can see some breaks in caves across chunk borders; this was due to a bug that wasn't fixed until Beta 1.8, but otherwise had no effect on the overall volume of caves or their distribution across the y-axis.
See also: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Cavern#History (although some of this information seems suspect; for example, the claim that ores are more common in caves (Beta 1.2) is nonsense, unless there was an overall increase in ore concentration, meaning that this had nothing to do with caves, since the game doesn't try to place ores in any particular manner in relation to caves).
I may try downloading an early Alpha version and attempt to find the code, even if that means manually picking through the classes (I normally search for specific strings which I know to be mostly unique to the cave generation code, enabling me to pick it out of a few results; this works even as of the latest versions, using MCP code for older versions, which is how I was able to confirm that caves were indeed made less like Swiss cheese in 1.7 before it was released, as my very first post on this forum shows. They likely changed it after they added the Nether, with its own caves, and additional structures; the current code, MapGenCaves, extends MapGenBase, a base class for all structures).
Note also that to accurately compare caves you need to use a mapping utility that shows the underground as shown in the spoilers; all too often I see seeds for 1.7-1.8 claiming to have found a "HUGE" cave system when it is only a garden-variety average cave system in versions 1.6.4 and earlier, with cave systems in those versions able to get utterly huge.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I just use ladders. With them in hand, I have 100% chance of not falling into anything because I dug my hole deeper.
I finally cracked the mystery of what caves were like back in InfDev and early Alpha- apparently JAD is horribly outdated and didn't decompile all of the code; I found a class that had some of the cave generation code in it but couldn't find the rest, but after using a different decompiler (CFR, using this online decompiler page) I finally found it.
The result? The underground was even more like Swiss cheese back in InfDev, the version I decompiled - the size of cave systems was set to 40, the same as up through 1.6.4 but the chance was set to 10, meaning that there were 50% more caves back then (by comparison, in 1.7 and later these values are set to 15 and 7, resulting in a much smaller but more common cave systems, thus a more even distribution). However, there was no extra multiplier applied to some caves to make them larger; they all had the same size range.
Here is some of the code from inf-20100618\net\minecraft\a\a\c.a.class, which is equivalent to the modern-day ChunkProviderGenerate; instead of using a separate class for cave generation it is all done in one giant method along with terrain generation; chunk decoration is also done in the same class, instead of using a separate BiomeDecorator class:
int n19 = a2.a.nextInt(a2.a.nextInt(a2.a.nextInt(40) + 1) + 1); if (a2.a.nextInt(10) != 0) { n19 = 0; } for (n9 = 0; n9 < n19; ++n9) { double d26 = (n << 4) + a2.a.nextInt(16); double d27 = a2.a.nextInt(a2.a.nextInt(120) + 8); double d28 = (n2 << 4) + a2.a.nextInt(16); int n20 = 1; if (a2.a.nextInt(4) == 0) { double d29 = d28; double d30 = d27; double d31 = d26; d3 = (double)arrby2; int n21 = n10; int n22 = n18; a a3 = a2; a3.a(n22, n21, (byte[])d3, d31, d30, d29, 1.0f + a3.a.nextFloat() * 6.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, -1, -1, 0.5); n20 = 1 + a2.a.nextInt(4); } for (d2 = (double)false ? 1 : 0; d2 < n20; ++d2) { float f = a2.a.nextFloat() * 3.1415927f * 2.0f; n5 = (int)((a2.a.nextFloat() - 0.5f) * 2.0f / 8.0f); float f2 = a2.a.nextFloat() * 2.0f + a2.a.nextFloat(); a2.a(n18, n10, arrby2, d26, d27, d28, f2, f, n5, 0, 0, 1.0); } }Compare to the code for 1.6.4; the only significant differences is that they since added a 1-in-10 chance of a multiplier of 1-4 applied to what is the width parameter for a cave, thus giving you occasional bigger caves (this value is actually the maximum radius, and 1.5 is added as a minimum for a width of 3-27 blocks, or 3-9 blocks for caves without the additional multiplier). Note that they also added a method "generateLargeCaveNode" (circular rooms) which just replaces some of the code shown above with a more organized version; they also changed the parameters so that a seed value is passed to the local RNG, fixing the bug where caves cut off at chunk borders:
int var7 = this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(40) + 1) + 1); if (this.rand.nextInt(15) != 0) { var7 = 0; } for (int var8 = 0; var8 < var7; ++var8) { double var9 = (double)(par2 * 16 + this.rand.nextInt(16)); double var11 = (double)this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(120) + 8); double var13 = (double)(par3 * 16 + this.rand.nextInt(16)); int var15 = 1; if (this.rand.nextInt(4) == 0) { this.generateLargeCaveNode(this.rand.nextLong(), par4, par5, par6ArrayOfByte, var9, var11, var13); var15 += this.rand.nextInt(4); } for (int var16 = 0; var16 < var15; ++var16) { float var17 = this.rand.nextFloat() * (float)Math.PI * 2.0F; float var18 = (this.rand.nextFloat() - 0.5F) * 2.0F / 8.0F; float var19 = this.rand.nextFloat() * 2.0F + this.rand.nextFloat(); if (this.rand.nextInt(10) == 0) { var19 *= this.rand.nextFloat() * this.rand.nextFloat() * 3.0F + 1.0F; } this.generateCaveNode(this.rand.nextLong(), par4, par5, par6ArrayOfByte, var9, var11, var13, var19, var17, var18, 0, 0, 1.0D); } } protected void generateLargeCaveNode(long par1, int par3, int par4, byte[] par5ArrayOfByte, double par6, double par8, double par10) { this.generateCaveNode(par1, par3, par4, par5ArrayOfByte, par6, par8, par10, 1.0F + this.rand.nextFloat() * 6.0F, 0.0F, 0.0F, -1, -1, 0.5D); }I found this class by searching for "341873128712L", a constant that is also still used in current versions to set the chunk seed. Caves also had the same distribution with altitude, which looks like the following, placing the majority of caves near lava level (note that the average elevation is 33.25 but half of caves generate below y=26, this is due to caves much higher up biasing it upwards. this also shows why using Customized to make the ground deeper has little effect on the overall volume of caves):
Note that due to changes in how the chunk seed is set and the addition of larger caves it isn't possible to replicate InfDev caves in current versions by simply editing the aforementioned values, but otherwise they will have the same distribution and density if you remove the 1/10 chance of larger caves, which have little impact anyway due to their low chance and the fact that the size multiplier is highly nonlinear with most seeing only a minimal increase.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
honestly that seems very technical.
I'm almost completely inactive, in case you're trawling through really old threads and notice me somewhere.
As mastercaver pointed out cave generation hasn't changed much since late alpha other than fixing a few issues with cave misalignment, so not much has changed since the birth of the old 'never dig straight down' adage. I think digging straight down while having a low probability for serious consequences could be likened to skydiving. Chances are you're going to be okay, however how many times do you want to risk it?
Usually if I want to dig a single hole straight down I will do so with ladders. Hold shift to hang onto the ladder, mine 3 blocks down, if things are okay, drop down and place 3 ladders and repeat.
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
On the other hand, if you are carrying nothing more than a common pickaxe, dying is not such a big deal. After re-spawning you can dig straight down in the adjacent block and know ahead of time when to stop to stay safe.
But on the other-other hand, what's the point of digging straight down except to reach diamond depth quickly, and digging a straight stairway requires breaking only three times as many blocks, and with no risk of sudden death.
Here's a way to go quick, easy, and safe. Put water in the hole like OP said, but don't pick up your water and instead just keep digging while in water. Digging in water isn't all that slow when you're standing on the bottom and not trying to swim against current. When you need a breath, put a torch on the side to convert the block your head is in to air. You only need one torch for the whole trip as it'll just break off again and you'll pick it up.
edit: I tried it and I found that stone tools don't dig in water as well as I thought, also with lighting at maximum you can't see anything. So it doesn't really work. It would work alright with diamond tools and respiration 3.
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).-
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Curse PremiumI haven't had many problems with it either, but I still dig down 3 then dig beside me down three back and forth so I have a better chance of early warning. I figure even if I dug straight down with no problem I still would want some space to place torches so it works out good for me.
If you're digging a 2 block wide shaft anyway then you ought to stand on the crack between blocks, then you can avoid falling altogether, as long as you stop when you knock a hole in the floor, you just need to be ready to place water if lava flows into the shaft from the side.
Just testing.