Birch Forest

Birch and nothing but birch. Pale trunks, pale planks, rolling hills, lily of the valley in the grass and wildflowers that only a handful of biomes grow.

For building, that uniformity is the point: an entire palette of one wood without a single dark oak or spruce in the way. Cows, pigs, sheep and chickens are the whole animal list, and no structure older than 26.3 is tied to the biome.

Temperature 0.6 and humidity 0.6 make it mild and temperate, with rainfall rather than snow. minecraft:birch_forest is common, has been in the game since 1.7.2, and 26.2 leaves it unchanged.

It grows in the Overworld between other woodland and never stands alone. Forest, Old Growth Birch Forest and Plains hem it in, and the handover is easy to see because the bark turns white.

Find a pale, uniform woodland made entirely of white-barked birch.

Common, so no expedition is called for. Walk any temperate treeline until the oak thins out and lily of the valley starts showing under the canopy. Exploration of the ordinary kind does the work: watch the trunks as you walk and you will meet the neighbours named above without hunting for them.

Only four animals are listed for the birch, and they are the four every farm starts with. Sheep hold 30 percent per spawn attempt, pigs and chickens 25 percent each, cows 20 percent, and all of them arrive four to a group.

Sheep are worth the most here: shear one and the wool regrows once it eats grass, which no other animal on this list can match. A cow gives leather along with its beef and hands over milk once a bucket is under it; a pig gives porkchops and takes a saddle and can be ridden plus the carrot and stick trick; a chicken lays eggs and leaves feathers with its raw chicken. Nothing hostile is on the list at all, which makes the pale wood a reasonable place to build. Harmless company, counted per spawn attempt: chicken a quarter, four at a time, with cow a fifth behind it. Take the cow: it drops leather and beef; sheep give mutton with their wool. A cow, for example, is milked with a bucket rather than sheared.

Cow

Pig

Sheep

Chicken

You can carry out Birch Log, Birch Leaves and Lily of the Valley, and that short list is honest: the birches here grow to ordinary height, five or six logs to a trunk, so the wood comes in fast and predictable loads.

Wildflowers are the find. They are hard to get elsewhere, only a couple of biomes carry them at all, and people come for wood from its trees and leave with a full inventory of both.

Nobody will struggle to find a birch forest, and that is half of why birch is the first wood most worlds cut.

Birch Log

Birch Leaves

Lily of the Valley

One structure does come with the birch forest now. 26.3 brought the Abandoned Camp, and the birch version is fenced in birch, with wildflowers, rose bushes, peonies and lily of the valley around a tent of white wool stairs. Some of its layouts put a little pond by the campfire, the tent holds straw beds, and the chests and barrels are there for the taking.

The birch forest holds nothing built of its own besides that camp, which is unusual for a biome this easy to spot. Its pale, uniform woodland and rolling hills are the whole of what is on offer above ground, and no other buildings come with it.

Below the roots it changes. What gets placed there pays no attention to where one biome stops and the next starts, so a mineshaft, a dungeon room or even a stronghold can be dug up under the birch. None of it is tied to the biome; it simply passes through. Scenery, then, rather than more buildings: exploring rewards a look at the trunks, while dungeons, mineshafts and an occasional stronghold were generated below by a system that ignores boundaries between biomes. It runs beneath the wood as part of the generation every world shares, and such tunnels are still there to be found under the pale wood.

Ten birch trees per chunk, or eleven on one chunk in ten, which is the same rate the forest and the cherry grove run. Wildflowers come on one chunk in two, three patches at a time with 64 tries each. The ordinary forest flowers land on one chunk in seven. Forty nine passes altogether.

Nothing in a birch forest changes what an animal looks like. The biome carries no warm or cold marker, so the cows, pigs, sheep and chickens under the birches are the same ones the plains gets.

What it does carry is the stronghold preference, which is worth knowing if you are counting eyes of ender in a birch wood.

A birch forest gets the ordinary underground three and no surface build at all: mineshaft, stronghold, trial chambers.

The portal that generates here is the standard ruined portal, the one with no biome variant attached, so the blackstone mix is the default one.

Everything that spawns in Birch Forest is worth something. Between them the mobs here drop 6 different things: mutton, porkchops, chicken, feathers, beef and leather.

30 percent of the animal draw in Birch Forest goes to Sheep, so mutton is what this biome hands out most. Behind it in the same draw come Pig on 25 percent for porkchops, Chicken on 25 percent for chicken and feathers and Cow on 20 percent for beef and leather.

The birch forest is the place to go when a build needs pale wood and nothing else: birch logs and birch leaves are all this biome grows, so you never have to sort oak out of your chest afterwards. It is the cleanest single wood source in the overworld.

Cows, pigs, sheep and chickens spawn under the birches, so a temporary camp feeds itself, and lily of the valley grows here for white dye. No structure older than 26.3 generates in a birch forest, which keeps it safe to build in.

A birch forest is a birch_forest in both editions, and 0.6 temperature with 0.6 downfall is what both use, so nothing about the trees or the rain differs.

The water is darker on Bedrock, #0677ce against Java's #3F76E4, and Bedrock still has a birch_forest_hills biome beside this one. Java carried that as Birch Forest Hills until 1.18 merged it into the birch forest itself.

Birch Forest has carried the same name in every release since 1.13, 51 of them, and the biome was added to Java Edition in 1.7.2. The rename round of 1.18 left Birch Forest alone.

Birch Forest is on the Adventuring Time list, the advancement whose text reads "Discover every biome" while it really means 56 of the 67. Birch Forest sits in the temperate group, 16 biomes strong.