Windswept Gravelly Hills
A variant of windswept hills with gravel replacing much of the surface. Previously called Gravelly Mountains. Can be treacherous due to gravel slides.
Overview
The same hills with the soil stripped off. Gravel covers most of the surface here instead of grass, which looks striking and behaves badly: dig into a slope and it comes down on you.
Emerald ore is still in the stone underneath, llamas still graze what green there is, and the terrain is still as steep as its parent biome. The gravel itself is worth a stack or two for flint. It used to be called Gravelly Mountains.
Temperature 0.2 with 0.3 humidity, a cool climate with rainfall and not snow. minecraft:windswept_gravelly_hills is uncommon, was named in the 1.7.2 variants, and 1.21 still pours gravel down its slopes.
Where to find it
The same broken Overworld hills, surfaced in gravel. Windswept Hills and Windswept Forest are its only neighbours.
It is a windswept-hills variant whose surface is largely gravel; expect treacherous gravel slides.
Uncommon, and the ground itself is the hazard: gravel slides out from under a step and buries whatever falls with it. Emerald ore sits in the stone underneath, which is the reason to put up with the climb. It belongs to the Overworld alone, and gravel like this does not appear in the two dimensions beyond it. Walking any windswept range in the right direction usually finds one, so you do not have to hunt: watch the ground for grey.
Mobs
Same five animals as the hills next door, same weights: sheep 27 percent of an attempt, pigs and chickens 22 percent each, cows 18 percent, llamas 11 percent four to a group to six.
The gravel makes the llamas the practical choice. They spit at attackers, they link into caravans with leads, and they carry what you would otherwise drop down a slope. Cows give beef, leather and a bucket of milk; sheep give wool that grows back after a shearing once they eat grass; pigs give porkchops and will take a saddle and a carrot dangled off a stick; chickens lay eggs and leave feathers behind. Nothing hostile is listed for the biome itself. The quiet residents, counted per attempt: chicken about a sixth of the animals, four at a time, six on a good llama group. Sheep give mutton, a cow takes a bucket if you want the milk, and a llama spits at attackers and is linked into caravans with leads. The numbers put the llamas 4 to 6 at a time, and a llama, for example, drops nothing you need but carries plenty. A cow can be milked, bucket permitting, gravel or no gravel.
Blocks & resources
Gravel first, Stone second, Emerald Ore third. The gravel is the difference from the ordinary windswept hills: it covers the slopes instead of sitting in patches, so this is the fastest flint in the game and the most annoying ground to dig a foundation in.
Emerald ore can be found here as in the other windswept hills, in the same single blocks, so the trade value of the biome is unchanged and only the walking is worse.
In terms of mining, breaking gravel is most of the work and flint is most of the reward.
Gravel
Stone
Emerald OreStructures & features
Gravel over the whole slope and not a building in sight. Nothing is tied to this gravel, so the covered hills, the steep terrain and the thin vegetation are what the exploring rewards.
Gravel does one useful thing: it collapses. A hill face that slides away can open a mineshaft or a cave the world had already placed beneath the gravel, and dungeon rooms with a rare stronghold among them sit in the same stone. Emerald ore is the other reason to swing a pickaxe up here. Exploring pays in scenery rather than buildings, since nothing is generated up here, while the dungeons and mineshafts dug through the gravel ignore boundaries between biomes, an occasional stronghold among them. That is generation which ignores anything above it, and such a hole is easy to walk into.
Temperature
Precipitation
Version Added
IDBiome Colors
Identical colour data to the other two windswept biomes, no music, and nothing that changes fire, snow or fog. The gravel that names it is a block, not a colour setting, which is why this page reads the same as its relatives in every value here. The three carvers are what expose the emerald in the stone.
Terrain Features
- -gravel-covered hills
- -steep terrain
- -less vegetation
What generates per chunk
Trees run at 0.1 per chunk, so one chunk in ten gets a single tree, the same rate the ordinary windswept hills use. Nothing else here belongs to this biome. Forty nine passes, and the gravel that gives the biome its name comes from the surface rules rather than from anything placed on the ground.
Spawn rules and animal variants
Gravel underfoot and cold livestock on top of it: the same cold classification as the ordinary windswept hills applies to every cow, pig and chicken that spawns here.
Llamas are the other regular, and a stronghold can be biased towards this biome.
Structure depths and forced spawns
Same empty surface as the ordinary windswept hills and the same mountain portal, with mineshafts through the stone underneath.
The gravel makes no difference to any of it: no structure in the game asks for gravel on top.
How to Find
Gravel covers these hills instead of grass, and that is the whole difference from the plain neighbour, so let the /locate biome lookup pick the gravel covered hills over their grassy neighbour:
Gravel takes the usual key: this command requires cheats to be enabled wherever the gravel hills are stored, or operator permissions on a server, though loose ground makes the climb slower than the height you use to judge it.
