Snowy Taiga
A cold spruce forest covered in snow. Igloos can generate here. White-coat foxes spawn instead of the orange variant.
Overview
A taiga with the snow left on. Spruce trees carry it on their branches, frozen rivers cut through, and sweet berry bushes push up through the white.
Foxes are born in their white coat here rather than the orange one, wolves hunt in packs, and rabbits and sheep keep to the clearings. Igloos generate on the flatter stretches, one of only three biomes that get them, and trail ruins can lie buried underneath.
At minus 0.5 this is one of the coldest surfaces in the Overworld, freezing, with 0.4 humidity and snowfall instead of rain, rainfall being for warmer taiga. minecraft:snowy_taiga is common in cold country, has been in the game since 1.0.0, and 1.21 generates it as it always did.
Where to find it
Cold Overworld spruce forest with snow lying on it. Taiga, Snowy Plains and Grove are its borders.
Find a spruce forest where the trees and ground are covered in snow.
Common in the north of any world. Sweet berry bushes catch you between the trunks, wolves hunt in packs, and an igloo is the only thing anyone built out here. Walking north in almost any direction usually finds one, and following the border of an ordinary taiga is the most reliable of the signposts. Nowhere else do those packs share ground with foxes this often, so you rarely need anything more to tell you.
Mobs
Four animals in the snow, weighted towards the sheep at 20 percent of a spawn attempt four to a group. Wolves and foxes follow on 13 percent each, and rabbits close it out on 7 percent.
The foxes here are born in their white coat instead of orange, they hunt the rabbits and any chicken that wanders in, and they hold what they pick up in their mouth. Wolves come in packs of four and take bones to tame, and a tamed one is a better answer to this biome than armour is. Rabbits leave raw rabbit and hide, with the odd rabbit's foot, and sheep grow their wool back after a shearing once they find grass under the snow. The quiet residents behind those numbers: sheep drop mutton, foxes hunt for their own meal, and a wolf tamed with bones becomes a loyal combat pet. Per attempt the rabbit is 1 in 15 of the animals at any one time. A wolf will become yours for a few bones, and the fox, for example, drops nothing worth the chase. Occasionally a rabbit's foot drops with the hide.
Blocks & resources
Spruce Log, Snow, Sweet Berry Bush and Fern: a short list, and three of the four are the ordinary taiga with a white coat. The spruces keep the snow on their leaves, so the wood cuts the same but looks nothing alike.
The berries are the difference in the data rather than in the picture: the bushes are planted far more sparingly here than in the warm taiga, so a berry run in a snowy taiga is a walk rather than a stop. Worth a detour if you need wood from its trees and sweet berries in the same trip and do not mind the cold.
The generator gives this wood rare berry patches rather than the full ones the neighbouring taiga is filled with, and that is what made it the longer walk for the same basket.
Spruce Log
Snow
Sweet Berry Bush
FernStructures & features
An igloo is the one building tied to this snow, and it belongs to three biomes in this list. From outside it is a small snow shelter with a bed and a furnace. Under the carpet is sometimes a ladder, and the basement laboratory it leads to holds a captured villager, a zombie villager in a cell and the brewing stand you need to cure one into the other.
That is the whole built inventory here. Snow covered spruce, frozen rivers and sweet berry bushes are the rest, while mineshaft tunnels and, beside them, dungeon rooms sit underneath along with the odd stronghold, none of them tied to the snow above. Snowy taiga is also among the six biomes here that carry Trail Ruins. Finding an igloo is the main reason to seek this snow out, since what it hides below is not visible from outside, and that generation reaches few biomes. Reasons to cross this snow start there, and all of it sits under the same white cover.
Temperature
Precipitation
Version Added
IDBiome Colors
Cold grass at #80B497 with the darker #3D57D6 water that the cold oceans also carry, so the rivers here read bluer than the ones further south. Minus 0.5 is cold enough for snow rather than rain. There is no music of its own and no fog, so a snowy taiga sounds exactly like the taiga it borders.
Terrain Features
- -snow-covered spruce trees
- -frozen rivers
- -sweet berry bushes
What generates per chunk
Ten spruce per chunk, eleven on one chunk in ten. The berry pass here is the rarest of its kind: one chunk in 384, against one in 32 in the warmer taigas. Mushrooms split the same way as elsewhere, brown on one chunk in four and red on one in 256. Forty eight passes altogether.
Spawn rules and animal variants
The snowy taiga is where the fox changes coat. In the ordinary taiga they are red; here the snow variant spawns instead, and the rabbits alongside them come out white.
Farm animals take the cold form and frogs would be the cold kind, which makes this the only taiga on the site where all four winter rules apply at once.
Structure depths and forced spawns
An igloo can stand in a snowy taiga, and this is one of only six biomes with trail ruins buried at fifteen blocks below zero, so the same wood has a house on it and a ruin under it.
There is no village of any type here, which is the difference between this taiga and the unfrozen one.
Structures Found
IglooHow to Find
Snow on spruce turns taiga into a different biome, and igloos generate only in the cold version, so use the /locate biome query, which points at the cold spruce with its igloos and not at the green taiga:
Cold spruce requires cheats to be enabled before the cold spruce can be named, or operator permissions on a server, though the berry bushes under the snow survive the walk the command sets you.
