Frozen River
Frozen variant of the river biome. Water surface generates as ice. Squid and salmon still swim underneath it.
Overview
The same river, with a lid on. The surface generates as ice, the banks are snow, and the water underneath keeps flowing with squid and salmon in it.
Break through and the river below behaves exactly like the warm version: fewer fish than open sea, and drowned rather more often than you would like. Above the ice, rabbits and foxes are born white to match the snow, and an ocean monument still counts this as the water it needs.
The temperature reads 0, a freezing climate, and what comes down is snowfall where a warmer biome would get rainfall. minecraft:frozen_river is common wherever the cold reaches, shares its Beta 1.8 origin with the river it freezes, and 1.21 lays it down the same way.
Where to find it
A river in the Overworld that runs through cold country and freezes over. Snowy Plains, Snowy Taiga and Frozen Ocean are the biomes it cuts between.
Trace a river through cold, snowy terrain; its surface will be frozen solid into ice.
Common wherever snow lies, and it doubles as the fastest road you will find: the surface is flat ice, so a boat on it beats walking the bank. Salmon swim underneath, and drowned come up through any hole you make. It belongs to the Overworld, where every river does; the other dimensions have none that appear at all. Those cold biomes commonly hold one, which means you cross a frozen river while travelling for reasons of your own, close enough to always that nobody goes looking.
Mobs
Under the ice it is the same two fish as any river: squid, one to four at a time, dropping ink sacs, out of which black dye and a book and quill are made, and salmon in shoals of up to five, the cold-water food fish that suits this water better than anywhere.
Drowned are on the list too, but at roughly 1 in 500 they are a rumour rather than a threat. One still carries the same underwater zombie problem, a trident if you are unlucky, and nautilus shells when it goes down. Breaking through the ice to fish is the more likely way to get hurt here. The numbers behind that: salmon is all of the fish, one to five at a time, then squid all and drowned 1 in 500. The squid, for example, drops ink sacs: black dye on one side, books and quill on the other, and the drowned is a zombie that swims and may wield a trident, so the fish keep to themselves and you keep an eye on the meal that swims back. Cod are absent here, so nothing gives bone meal under this ice. Ink sacs are used the same way here as in open water.
Blocks & resources
Blocks here: Ice, Snow Block and Snow. The whole biome is water with a lid on it, so what you carry out is what you break off the surface, and ice mines back into water unless you bring silk touch.
That makes a frozen river the quickest source of ice near spawn: no diving, no boat, and the sheet reforms behind you while you work.
Ice
Snow Block
SnowStructures & features
Frozen river has nothing built on it. The ice layer over the water and the snowy banks are the whole of it above the surface, and nothing generated is tied to the ice.
Break through and it behaves like any other stretch of world. Whatever sits under the ice was placed without checking the surface above: mineshaft tunnels, a dungeon room here and there, sometimes a stronghold. Scenery over buildings is the trade here, and beneath the ice the dungeons and mineshafts dug by generation that ignores biome boundaries carry on, an occasional stronghold among them. Exploring rewards the eye, not the inventory, and such tunnels run under the ice all the same.
Temperature
Precipitation
Version Added
IDBiome Colors
Ice blue water, #3938C9, matching the two frozen oceans and nothing else. The general music is written in rather than left out, so the game keeps playing over the ice. There is no fog value and no particle: what makes a frozen river look different is the surface itself, not any colour the biome applies.
Terrain Features
- -frozen water surface
- -ice layer
- -snowy banks
What generates per chunk
Forty seven passes and not one of them belongs to the frozen river. Even the seagrass that an ordinary river gets is missing, because the surface is ice. What runs here is the standard ore list, the standard springs and the same underground features every Overworld chunk gets, all of it below the frozen top.
Spawn rules and animal variants
A frozen river carries more separate rules than any other water on this site: more frequent drowned, fewer ordinary water spawns, cold farm animal variants, cold frogs, white rabbits and snow foxes all at once.
Almost none of them fire, because the only things that spawn under this ice are squid, salmon and drowned. The classification is there waiting for anything you bring in yourself.
Structure depths and forced spawns
The same empty surface as an open river, with the same three underground structures below it: mineshaft, stronghold, chambers in the -40 to -20 band.
Nothing about the ice changes what is placed under it, which makes the frozen river the plainest structure list in the cold half of this site.
How to Find
Ice over a river hides the water and looks like any frozen surface, so reach for the /locate biome command, so the frozen channel is named rather than any white line through the snow:
Ice over water changes nothing, and this lookup requires cheats to be enabled wherever that ice covered channel is kept, or operator permissions on a server, whoever owns the world you use it on.
