Dark Forest

The canopy is so thick here that the light level under it stays low all day, and hostile mobs spawn at noon as happily as at midnight. Dark oak grows nowhere else in the game, and giant red and brown mushrooms grow between the trunks.

This is also the only biome where a woodland mansion generates, which makes it the only place to find a totem of undying or the maps to one. Bring torches, because everything that spawns in the dark spawns here in daylight too.

Temperature 0.7 with 0.8 humidity gives a mild, wet temperate climate: rainfall, never snow. Uncommon rather than rare, minecraft:dark_forest was planted in 1.7.2, and 1.21 keeps it exactly as dark.

It is an Overworld biome and stays there. Forest, Birch Forest and Plains give onto it, and you notice the crossing because the light drops as you make it.

Its dark, almost black canopy of clustered dark-oak is visible from a distance and stays dim even at noon.

Uncommon, though what stands inside it is not: a woodland mansion generates here and in no other biome, and a cartographer will sell you a map pointing at one. Carry torches, since the canopy keeps the floor dark enough to spawn mobs at noon. No portal is needed: travel through any of the neighbours above and the canopy soon turns black on its own, which is what will reveal it. Watch the light rather than the map.

Four animals are listed and every one of them is harmless: sheep on 30 percent of an attempt, pigs and chickens on 25 percent each, cows on 20 percent, all of them in fours.

That list is not the problem here. The canopy keeps the ground dark enough that hostile mobs turn up between the trees without being listed for the biome at all, so the cows giving beef and leather, the pigs giving porkchops, the chickens laying eggs and dropping feathers and the sheep growing wool back after a shearing all live in a wood you should light before you settle in it. A bucket of milk from one of those cows clears the poison you will pick up on the way. What makes the dark forest special is that the witch spawns here and almost nowhere else in the game, so this is the biome to visit if you want to find one. Counted per attempt, the chicken is a quarter of the animals, four at a time, with the cow a fifth; a cow, for example, leaves leather and beef behind and answers a bucket with milk, and sheep give mutton on top of the wool they keep to themselves. A cow drops its leather here too, and is milked into a bucket like any other.

Cow

Pig

Sheep

Chicken

Dark Oak Log and Dark Oak Leaves grow here and in no other biome in the world, so every dark oak plank, door, boat and sign in your base started in a wood like this one. The trunks come in 2x2 blocks, which is why they drop more than any other tree.

Red Mushroom Block and Brown Mushroom Block are the second reason to bring empty slots. Both, along with Mushroom Stem, count among the blocks that only a few biomes grow, and the giant mushrooms here hand them over in whole roofs at a time.

Leaf Litter lies under the canopy as well, and it is put down as its own layer on the ground rather than falling out of the trees, so you find it in the gaps where no dark oak stands.

One Dark Oak Log with its Dark Oak Leaves still on is worth more than the same pair off any other tree, because neither grows anywhere else.

Dark Oak Log

Dark Oak Leaves

Red Mushroom Block

Brown Mushroom Block

One structure makes this biome worth a long walk, and it is the largest in the game. A woodland mansion is an enormous dark oak fortress full of illagers, with vindicators behind most doors and evokers in the rooms that matter, plus the rare loot rooms hidden among the ordinary ones.

Only two biomes on this site can generate that mansion, which is why finding a dark forest at all is usually the first step of the search. The low light under that canopy is the second problem: it stays dark enough at ground level for hostile mobs, so the walk in is rarely quiet. A mansion containing that many illagers is the main reason people seek out a dark forest. Finding one takes a while and the search reaches far, because so few biomes carry it, and those are reasons enough for a very long walk.

Dark forest vegetation gets 16 tries per chunk, and that single pass is what plants the dark oaks and the giant mushrooms both. Leaf litter comes in two patches of 32 tries, which is unique to this biome. The forest flowers land on one chunk in seven. Forty eight passes in total, and none of them thin the canopy out.

For all its atmosphere the dark forest is climatically ordinary, so the cows, pigs, sheep and chickens that spawn under the canopy carry no warm or cold variant.

The gloom does change what else turns up after dark, and the biome is on the stronghold list as well.

The mansion is the only surface structure here and it is one of two biomes in the world that can carry one, the pale garden being the other.

Underneath, the mineshafts and the trial chambers do what they do everywhere, and the chambers empty every spawn category inside their walls so the room fights you on its own terms.