Snowy Beach

Where a cold biome runs into the sea you get a snowy beach: sand with snow lying on it, sandstone underneath, and water at the edge that may freeze over.

Nothing spawns here of its own, which makes it the quietest shoreline in the game. What it does have is loot: buried treasure hides in the sand, and only one other biome holds that, while shipwrecks run aground along the same strip. Rabbits and foxes born on this side of the treeline come out white.

Temperature 0.05 with 0.3 humidity is a cold climate by a hair, so snowfall rather than rain. minecraft:snowy_beach is common wherever cold land meets water, arrived in 1.7.2, and 1.21 still draws that white line between the two.

Overworld shoreline in cold country. Snowy Plains, Snowy Taiga and Frozen Ocean meet along it, which is exactly what it is: the seam between them.

It forms the thin snow-dusted shoreline wherever a cold land biome meets the sea.

Common wherever cold land reaches the sea. Nothing spawns on the sand itself, so it is a quiet place to put a dock, with sandstone under the snow to build one from. The other dimensions have no coast, so none of this can appear there, and exploration along any cold shore does the work: watch for the line where snow stops and sand starts.

No mobs spawn naturally on a snowy beach. Sand under snow is not a valid spawn block for passive animals, so they cannot generate here at all, because the surface itself refuses them, and the open, well lit shore keeps hostile mobs away too until the light goes.

In practice the creatures you will meet here wander in from those neighbours: the snowy plains, the frozen ocean and the snowy taiga all border it, which makes the beach a corridor rather than a home for anything.

Sand, Snow and Sandstone. A beach with a snow layer over it, and the sandstone under the sand is the same block you would dig on a warm shore.

What it is really good for is the boundary: cold water on one side, sand on the other, and turtles do not lay here, so the shore stays clear for a dock.

Breaking the snow layer is worth doing before you build: the sand under it is what a dock needs, and it is already flat enough to build on.

Sand

Snow

Sandstone

Two things turn up along this shore rather than on it. A shipwreck can lie in the water at the edge, one of eleven biomes here where a sunken vessel generates, and its chests hold supplies, emeralds and a treasure map. The map is the point: it marks buried treasure, a single loot chest that reaches only two biomes across these pages and usually holds a Heart of the Sea.

No generated building is tied to the snowy sand itself, so the shores, the snow over them and the frozen water edge are what exploring rewards. Under the sand the world places what it likes: mineshaft tunnels under the shore, a dungeon room off them, a stronghold if one fell nearby. Nothing generated stands on the snow itself, so what is dug beneath it, dungeons and mineshafts with an occasional stronghold, belongs to no shore in particular and ignores biome boundaries as usual. The scenery and the buildings you put up are your own business. Generation of the ordinary kind, in other words, so such a shaft can open right on the waterline.

Forty five passes and none of them belong to this biome. A snowy beach is an ordinary beach list with the temperature turned down, so the snow layer on top comes from the climate rather than from anything placed. No trees, no grass, no flowers.

Nothing spawns naturally on a snowy beach, and yet it carries four separate rules: white rabbits, snow foxes, cold farm animals and cold frogs.

That makes it the clearest example on this site of a classification with nothing to classify, and it is one of the few beaches that is not on the stronghold list.

Buried treasure and a beached shipwreck are the two things this shore builds, and both are the reason to bring a shovel rather than a pickaxe.

The mineshafts and the chambers below follow the ordinary pattern, the chambers in the -40 to -20 band with their spawn lists blanked out.