minecraft-java-edition
So after loading a new map for 1.8 I found a desert. In the desert is a few spots where there is no sand but a blank stone face with assorted dirt, coal, etc. There is sand nearby and it gradually drops to this spot. The average height of these are y = 66. Is this just a feature of the desert biome or do others have this feature too?
Also you can see it across the river in my forest biome.
As Ben Blank said, the only thing that will spontaneously cause an explosion, if you haven't made any TNT, is a creeper that got into your house. I see three possible directions for the creeper to enter from:
The caves
Most likely, either you have an insufficiently lit patch of floor in the connected caves (walls and ceilings don't matter), or there is a dark branch that you haven't found. I strongly recommend always installing doors at connections between caves and living space.
The front door
The damage you described seems to be focused around the doorward side of you. You say you removed "the bricks leading up to the door", but if there is still a one-block-jump path it is possible a creeper got in anyway. Next time, don't worry about removing the path, just close the door! If you have a wooden door, zombies can break them - this will cause a loud sound of someone punching some wood.
The ceiling
You haven't said anything about your ceiling design. Is it possible that your ceiling had a hole in it through which a creeper entered? There are [minimal spoilers] ways for dirt/grass blocks to go away, so if you had a dirt roof perhaps a creeper fell in.
Miscellany
To my surprise, it appeared that nearly all my objects were still there. Most were sitting in the same spot that their chest was in. As best I can tell, I was able to recover nearly everything, with the exception of the signs and 2 of the 5 chest blocks.
Chests drop their contents when destroyed, as you saw. If there had been two explosions, then the second one would have destroyed all of your resources, as they have almost no “health”.
They also tend to leave big craters, and there seemed to be too little structural damage in this case.
The size of an explosion crater depends on the strength of the materials. If you meet a creeper outside, then it will leave a large hole in the dirt, but the same explosion will do much less damage to stone.
Oddly, the door and torches outside were gone, but the structure itself was untouched save for two holes in the floor (marked "Gone" in the above picture).
Wooden objects are generally weaker against explosions, and torches have no blast resistance at all.
You can press F3 to bring up the debug information, there is information regarding the light level of the block your head is in. So you need to keep it above 8 (so the floor is above 7).
The number you need to pay attention to is rl (real light) as long as this is high enough mobs cannot spawn.
Best Answer
Like in real life, sometime the terrain generator makes spots of exposed stone on the surface. This seems a bit counterintuitive in a desert, but it can happen in any biome.