Cold Ocean
Cold ocean variant with darker, bluer water. Salmon spawn here alongside cod. Gravel forms the ocean floor.
Overview
Darker, bluer water over gravel. The cold ocean is the last stretch before the sea freezes, and the water colour is the first thing that tells you.
Salmon swim here next to the cod, which happens in few other oceans, with squid and drowned below and kelp growing off the gravel. Shipwrecks and ocean ruins lie on the bottom, and a monument can generate in the deep version next door because this water counts towards it.
Temperature 0.5 against 0.5 humidity is a mild temperate reading, so rainfall rather than snow however cold the water looks. minecraft:cold_ocean is common, dates from the 1.13 ocean split, and 1.21 still lays it between the sea and the ice.
Where to find it
This is Overworld water, cold but not yet frozen. Ocean, Frozen Ocean and Deep Cold Ocean lie against it, so it is the band you cross on the way north.
Look for darker, bluer water over a gravel floor in cooler regions.
Common enough that any long sail into cooler latitudes runs through one. Gravel under the hull and salmon in the water are the two signs, and neither of them asks you to dive. It tends to sit between warmer water and the ice, so you will meet one while travelling north for reasons of your own.
Mobs
Squid lead the count at 60 percent of every spawn attempt, one to four at a time, and their ink sacs are the source of a book and quill, and black dye. Cod and salmon then split the fish half evenly, 50 percent each, cod in shoals of three to six and salmon one to five.
That pairing is what makes this water useful: cod is the common food fish and salmon is the cold-water one, and both go into a bucket as easily as onto a hook. No dolphin is listed here, so nobody is leading you to a wreck.
The drowned is the only hostile, at about 1 in 100. It is the underwater zombie, it may be carrying a trident, and it drops nautilus shells when it dies. The numbers behind that: cod is half of the fish, three to six at a time, then salmon half and squid 60%. Cod give bone meal and cod, the meal this water runs on, and squid drop the ink sacs that black dye needs, books and quill after that. On the peaceful side that is everything; the drowned is a zombie that swims and may wield a trident. A salmon, for example, spawns in shoals rather than alone. Those ink sacs are used the moment you have a cauldron.
Blocks & resources
Kelp, Seagrass and Gravel, in the order you meet them coming down. Cold water is where salmon live, so the trip is worth food as well as blocks, and the kelp grows shorter here than it does in the warm seas.
The seagrass is planted by a colder rule than the ordinary sea uses, thinner on the ground, so the gravel shows through in patches instead of being covered over.
People come for the salmon as much as for the plants, and they leave with a full inventory of both.
Gravel
Seagrass
KelpStructures & features
Dark blue water over gravel, with the same two wrecks in it. Ocean ruins here are the cold stone variety, sunken structures with chests of loot and maps marking buried treasure, generating in nine biomes across these pages. A shipwreck can turn up as well, one of eleven such biomes, its chests holding a treasure map, supplies and emeralds.
What cold ocean does not have is depth, so an Elder Guardian never shows up: monuments belong to the deep versions of this water. Salmon shoals swim past the wrecks instead. Mineshaft tunnels generate under the gravel with dungeon rooms cut among them and a rare stronghold below, ignoring what floats above as always. The 2 wrecks are all this water offers: a vessel whose chests hold supplies, and a ruin of cold stone, each with its own loot and challenges for anyone exploring far from shore. The two are able to appear in one cold stretch, both thoroughly worth the dive.
Temperature
Precipitation
Version Added
IDBiome Colors
The water darkens to #3D57D6 here, a blue that only the deep version and the snowy taiga's rivers share. Above the surface nothing changes: the grass and leaf colours are the ocean group's, which 16 pages carry, and the sky is the common one. The music is explicitly the general track, so cold water is quieter than it looks: no loop, no drifting particles, no fog of its own.
Terrain Features
- -gravel floor
- -kelp
- -colder water color
What generates per chunk
Forty eight passes, and the cold sea keeps one of them to itself: seagrass at 32 tries per chunk, thinner than the 48 an ordinary ocean gets and far thinner than the 80 in warm water. Kelp is placed by noise rather than by count, so it thickens and thins across the biome instead of per chunk.
Spawn rules and animal variants
Cold water means cold livestock on paper: the biome is on the cold farm animal list, while what actually spawns is squid, cod, salmon and drowned.
There are no white rabbits or snow foxes here, because the sea itself is not snowy, and the water is drawn on a map outline.
Structure depths and forced spawns
Cold ocean ruins, shipwrecks and an ocean portal, and no monument in the shallow water.
The mineshafts and the chambers underneath belong to the stone below the sea floor rather than to the water itself.
Structures Found
Ocean Ruins
ShipwreckHow to Find
Gravel underfoot and darker water mark the cold sea, and it borders the frozen kind, so let the /locate biome command keep darker water over gravel apart from the frozen sea:
Cold water requires cheats to be enabled in the save the darker water fills, or operator permissions on a server, while the kelp over that gravel grows tall enough to use as a ladder.
