Eroded Badlands

Hoodoos. Thin terracotta spires standing out of red sand valleys, eroded until only the pillars are left, and stained terracotta banding them in colour.

This is one of the rarest biomes in the game and one of the most photographed. Nothing passive spawns on it, world generation gives it a 3% animal chance which is as low as the game goes, and the mineshafts that break the surface are the badlands kind, held up on dark oak.

Temperature 2 with zero humidity is an extremely hot, arid climate, permanently dry and fatal to a snow golem, and one of these can lie thousands of blocks from where you started. minecraft:eroded_badlands has been generating since 1.7.2 and 1.21 still carves it out.

It is Overworld only, and it never starts on its own: Badlands and Wooded Badlands have to be there first, and the erosion happens inside them.

One of the rarest biomes; look for tall, isolated terracotta hoodoo spires rising from red-sand valleys.

Extremely rare, which is as thin as generation gets on this site. Find any badlands and then work along its edge, because that is where the hoodoos stand; sweeping open country for it costs days and finds nothing. No portal is needed to reach it, but on foot it is a project: travel fast along the badlands border, following the rim rather than crossing the middle, because the hoodoos are often the only signposts standing.

Nothing spawns naturally among the spires. Terracotta is not a valid spawn block, passive animals cannot generate on it, and the eroded ground stays well lit enough that it keeps hostile mobs away too while it is day.

In practice the creatures you will meet among the spires wander in from the badlands or the desert around it, because the spires keep those animals from spawning at all, and on terrain this broken they usually arrive from below rather than across.

Eroded badlands is one of 5 biomes with its own animal chance at world generation: 3.0%.

Terracotta, Red Sand and Stained Terracotta, the same three materials as the flat badlands but standing on end. The spires are what erosion leaves behind, so the coloured bands run up the pillars where you can see all of them at once instead of digging down through them.

The extra gold that makes the badlands worth mining is here as well, laid in at any height, so a hoodoo can be a gold vein with a view.

A snow golem melts on this ground the same as on the rest of the badlands.

The small print is the walking. You can carry out as much terracotta as you like, but every spire has to be climbed or cut through first.

Terracotta

Red Sand

Stained Terracotta

Tall terracotta spires with mineshafts running straight through them. The abandoned mineshaft that generates near the surface in eroded badlands leaves its dark oak supports and minecart chests hanging in open air where the ground eroded away, cobwebs included.

No other build belongs to this one. What it gives instead is the shape: pillars, spires and red sand valleys that make the exposed rails easy to spot from a distance. Dungeon rooms and a rare stronghold still generate below, since that placement never checks which biome it landed in. Finding a mineshaft at ground level is the main reason to seek these spires out, and reasons to come are thin otherwise.

Forty eight passes, the same list the ordinary badlands runs, including the extra 50 gold tries per chunk that only the three badlands get. Dry grass on one chunk in six, sugar cane on one in five, cactus on one in thirteen. What makes this biome look so different from its neighbour is the shape of the terrain and not what is placed on it.

Like the flat badlands, this is warm ground with no animals on it. The warm classification for livestock and frogs applies to anything you carry up the spires and to nothing that arrives on its own.

It stays on the stronghold list despite being one of the emptiest surfaces in the Overworld.

The mesa mineshaft runs under the spires as it does under the flat badlands, and that shared kind of tunnel is the clearest link between the three badlands pages on this site.

Nothing stands on the surface, and the chambers below sit in the same -40 to -20 band as the rest of the Overworld.