Beach
Generates where land biomes meet the ocean. Turtles lay eggs on beaches. Buried treasure chests can be found using treasure maps from shipwrecks.
Overview
Sand between the land and the water, sloping in gently, with sugar cane where the grass runs out and sandstone underneath.
Turtles come ashore here to lay their eggs, and they lay them nowhere else. Buried treasure is hidden under this sand in only one other biome, and the map that finds it comes out of a shipwreck lying just offshore.
Temperature 0.8 with 0.4 humidity gives a mild humid climate and rainfall rather than snow, warm enough that the water at the edge never freezes. minecraft:beach is common wherever land meets sea, has drawn that line since Beta 1.8, and 1.21 draws it still.
Where to find it
Beaches are Overworld coastline and nothing else, forming wherever the land runs out. Ocean, Plains, Forest and River all meet along one, which is why nearly every seed puts one within a short walk of where you wake up.
It forms the sandy shoreline wherever ordinary land biomes meet the sea.
About as common as a biome gets: swim or sail in any direction and the first sand you touch is one. Turtles lay their eggs on it, and a buried treasure map ends on a strip of it as often as not. No portal is needed for a biome that borders half the map, and you will cross one for reasons that have nothing to do with sand: it commonly means buried treasure lies near, and travelling by boat starts here.
Mobs
One animal is listed for a beach and it is the turtle, filling its spawn slot outright, two to five at a time.
A turtle lays its eggs in the sand it hatched on, which is the reason to leave a beach the way you found it, and it drops a turtle scute that goes into the Turtle Shell helmet. Nothing hostile spawns here on the biome's own account, so the sand is as safe as any surface gets until night arrives from somewhere else. The numbers behind that: turtle is all of the animals, two to five at a time. Turtles keep to themselves, and the scute used for the Turtle Shell helmet is the only thing they leave behind. A turtle, for example, lays its eggs on the sand it hatched on.
Blocks & resources
Sand, Sandstone and Sugar Cane. The sand goes down as far as you care to dig and turns into glass by the stack, and the sandstone under it is already a building block.
Most trips here are for sugar cane for paper and books, and a beach is where it grows without you planting it: the whole waterline is a farm you did not build.
Turtles come ashore on this sand rather than on the snowy or stony coasts, so a beach near your base is a source of scutes as well as sand.
Sand
Sandstone
Sugar CaneStructures & features
The shovel matters more than the sword here. Buried treasure is the structure tied to this sand: a single loot chest, marked on the maps you pull out of shipwrecks and ocean ruins, and it usually holds a Heart of the Sea. Only two biomes in this list can hide one.
A shipwreck can also lie at the water edge, since that vessel reaches eleven biomes across this list, and its chests hold emeralds, supplies and treasure maps. One chest points at the other, so a beach is normally where a treasure hunt ends rather than starts.
Sugar cane and the gentle slope into the water are the rest of it, while under the sand lie mineshaft tunnels, dungeon rooms behind them and the odd stronghold, placed with no eye for the shoreline above. Finding it is the main reason to seek a beach out with a shovel: the map recovered from a wreck marks the chest, and beaches generate little else worth holding on to. Among the sand, only that one chest is marked.
Temperature
Precipitation
Version Added
IDBiome Colors
A beach borrows everything it has. Plains grass at #91BD59, the ordinary blue water that 50 of our 64 pages share, the common sky, and no music of its own, so whatever was already playing keeps playing. Only the sand tells you where you are, which is why a coastline never reads as its own place from a distance.
Terrain Features
- -sand shoreline
- -sugar cane
- -gentle slope into water
What generates per chunk
Forty five passes run over a beach chunk and not one of them belongs to the beach. Every feature here is shared with the land or the sea beside it: ordinary ore, ordinary springs, the same seagrass the shallow water gets. That is the whole biome in one number, and it is why a beach never surprises anyone.
Spawn rules and animal variants
A beach is one of the few biomes on this site with no rules attached to it at all: no temperature class, no rabbit or fox variant, and not even a place on the stronghold list.
Turtles are the whole population, and they are the same turtles everywhere.
Structure depths and forced spawns
Buried treasure and a beached shipwreck are the two things a beach builds, and the treasure is the only structure in the game you need a map to find rather than your eyes.
Both sit in the sand rather than on it, which is why a beach looks empty until you dig.
Structures Found
Buried TreasureHow to Find
Sand meets water almost everywhere, but buried treasure only generates on this shore, so use the /locate biome query, and the sand where buried treasure generates becomes the start of the map hunt:
Buried treasure is no exception: this requires cheats to be enabled before the treasure sand can be named, or operator permissions on a server, after which sugar cane along the waterline confirms the command was right.
