Abstract. Inflation solved the cosmic homogeneity problem. But does Inflation itself require a homogenous patch to begin? We investigate this problem in full 3+1 numerical relativity. We show that while large field inflation is very robust to inhomogeneities, small field inflation fails in the presence of sub-dominant gradients. We also show that, for large field inflation, attempts to stop inflation by forming a black hole spacetime will fail as long as the initial hyperslice is roughly flat.