Stony Shore

A stony shore is what you get where a mountain runs straight into the sea: steep stone cliffs, gravel at the waterline, and no beach worth the name.

What it lacks is what defines it. No passive mob spawns here, no structure calls it home, nothing grows on it, and the block list is plain stone, gravel, andesite, diorite and granite. That also makes it useful: stone by the stack at sea level, where you would otherwise have to dig for it.

Temperature 0.2 with 0.3 humidity is a cool climate with rainfall rather than snow, and the sea does the rest. Its shape is set by the neighbouring high ground, so the outline differs from seed to seed. minecraft:stony_shore is common, came in with 1.7.2, and 1.21 still generates it wherever mountains meet the ocean.

Overworld coast where rock reaches the water instead of sand. Windswept Hills, Ocean and Beach are its neighbours.

Where mountainous land meets the ocean you get sheer stone-and-gravel cliffs instead of sand.

Common along any hilly coastline, and it is a cliff rather than a landing, so sailing into one means climbing out of the boat. Stone, gravel, andesite, diorite and granite all sit exposed for the taking. It forms wherever hills reach the sea, so there is no usual heading: stay on the coast while travelling for other reasons and you will cross one nearly every time the ground rises. That is reason enough not to search for it.

No mobs spawn naturally on the stony shore itself. Stone and gravel cliffs are not a valid spawn block, so passive animals cannot generate on them, and by day the open, well lit coastline keeps hostile mobs away too, though a shaded overhang is still a shaded overhang after dark.

In practice the only creatures on this rock wander in from the ocean at its foot or the hills behind it, because nothing starts here.

The early haul is Stone and Gravel, with Andesite and Diorite in the same cliff and Granite behind them. A stony shore is a quarry that happens to touch water, and all four stones come out without a single torch.

It is the awkward coast to land on and the good one to build into: the cliff face is already flat, and gravel gives you flint for arrows before you have a mine.

Stone, Andesite and Diorite in one cliff means three grey building blocks out of a single wall.

Stone

Gravel

Andesite

Diorite

Granite

A wall of rock where the beach should be. Stony shore has no structure to its name, so the steep stone cliffs, the gravel at their base and the rocky coastline are what it rewards you with instead of buildings to loot.

The cliffs do have a use: they expose stone, andesite, diorite and granite at sea level, which is where a mineshaft the world dug without checking the coastline sometimes opens straight into the water. Dungeon rooms and a stronghold now and again sit deeper under the same shore. What exploring rewards is scenery rather than buildings, since the dungeons and mineshafts generated under the cliffs, an occasional stronghold among them, are tied to nothing on the surface. It sits beneath boundaries that generation ignores, so such a shaft can open as a hole in the cliff face.

Forty five passes, all of them shared with something else. Nothing is planted, nothing is decorated, and no feature here is unique to the biome. A stony shore is the ore list with a cliff on top, which is why it looks the same in every world you visit.

The stony shore carries nothing: no animals spawn, no temperature classification applies, and the biome is not one the game favours for a stronghold.

It is the emptiest entry in this whole comparison, which makes it the useful baseline for reading the rest.

The stony shore builds nothing on its own: no treasure, no shipwreck, no village. The portal that generates here is the mountain variant, because the cliff counts as high ground.

Mineshafts and the chambers below are the whole of the rest, which keeps this biome the emptiest coast on the site.