Terrain features

This page lists generated terrain features that are created in a Minecraft world.

Terrain
Biomes dictate the shape and height of the world. At this stage, the ground is made mostly of stone and stone variants, with water filling in most empty spaces below layer 63, with exception for structures.

Mountain
Mountains are hills with extreme slopes and cliffs. Mountains can sometimes have caves through them. On an amplified world, mountains are extremely common in all biomes except ocean and swamp biomes.

Floating "island"
Floating "islands" are structures that float in midair that are not connected to the ground, the sea, hills or cliffs. Floating "islands" are normally just random pieces of floating dirt and stone found near cliffs, but on rare occasions they can be large, floating structures that even have springs and trees on them. Floating Islands are most frequently found in mountains biomes (and its variants), along with the "hills", "mountains", and "modified" variants of most biomes, especially shattered savannas.

Hollows
Hollows are the opposite of floating islands. They look like caves, but they have nothing to do with cave generation (although they may intersect with them). When there are many overhangs, they close together and create a hollow. They have exactly the same floor as the terrain above, depending on the biome that they are located in, unlike caves. Hollows have no specific floor. Grass blocks can generate inside too, and survive without light. When they generate under the sea level, they are filled with water. They are extremely rare in the default world, but can be found far more commonly in certain customized worlds.

Hill
Hills are randomly generated pieces of land in the map. Like stairs, hills are always traversable to their lowest point by virtue of the algorithm that generates them; there is almost always a place on each level from where the next level can be accessed, meaning that the player can climb a hill one level at a time until they reach the top. Cases, where this is not true, are rare.

Surface layer
The uppermost layers of the terrain are converted to a biome-dependent material: usually grass blocks and dirt, or sand in deserts and beaches. Podzol is found in giant tree taiga, mycelium in mushroom field biomes, and red sand is found in the badlands biome. Sandstone is generated under sand.

Basin
Occasionally, instead of being converted to dirt or sand, the top layer is stripped away, leaving a 'basin' of bare stone. They bear some resemblance to a geological 'shield' (an area of tectonically stable rock that has been exposed to prolonged erosion due to its very old age; it is distinct from the geological term "basin"). They seem to be more common in forest or plains, and are occasionally seen filled with water. Commonly, minerals can be found in these, generally coal ore and iron ore. If generated in a Badlands biome, gold ore can also be seen.

Bryce Pillar
Bryce pillars are tall spike like structures found in badlands, consisting of 6 colors of terracotta. While this structure is found exclusively in eroded badlands, all badlands biomes actually have this structure, but set to false except for eroded badlands. This structure juts out from sea level and can occasionally pass altitude layer 100.

Large lake
Since water generates on the surface of the world below y=63, land it covers can turn into large lakes. Large lakes generate pockets of dirt, sand, gravel and clay on the lake floor. When large lakes generate near the shore they can turn into small bays.

Cave
Caves are large voids found underground in the overworld and nether.

Bee Nest
Bee nests generate on a small amount of oak and birch trees in various biomes. They generate containing three bees.

Disk
Disks are small circular patches of dirt, sand, and gravel found underwater.

Mossy cobblestone boulder
These structures are meant to represent boulders, made entirely of mossy cobblestone. The arrangement of these structures varies greatly. They can be found dotted around areas of the giant tree taiga biome. Mossy cobblestone boulders are quite rare, due to the giant tree taiga biome's rarity.

Ice spike
Ice spikes are tall spires made of packed ice that can be found only in the Ice Spikes variant of snowy tundra biomes. There are two variants of ice spikes: one is short and thick, and the other is tall and thin.

Iceberg
Icebergs are structures that generate in frozen oceans and their deep variants. They consist primarily of packed ice with a little bit of ice and blue ice, and can be topped with snow. They are the only place where blue ice can be found naturally besides snowy taiga villages. Icebergs generate in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from small "islands" to giant mountain-like ice structures. They can also generate with "cave-like" holes in them, which sometimes reach to the other side of the iceberg.

Lava sea
Lava seas are found at and below level 30 in the Nether. They make a large portion of the Nether, and are extremely common. They can stretch for hundreds of meters in any direction, and are usually bordered by netherrack (or more rarely soul sand and/or magma blocks).

Glowstone clusters
Glowstone clusters are typically veins of glowstone that can be among the hardest natural materials to harvest that don't require digging. They form in coral-like structures on the underside of hanging Netherrack, so they are often found on the ceilings of the Nether, where they provide light along with the ever present lava.

Basalt pillars
Basalt pillars are tall terrain features made up of basalt that are found in the Nether. They have their starting points in the ceiling of an area, then have a pillar of between one and three blocks wide in both the X and Z axes going all the way down to the ground, where a flat clump of basalt can be found around a 3×3 area from the center of the pillar, as if a vertical lava flow had solidified.

Central island
The center of the End is a large, asteroid-like island composed entirely of end stone, floating in the void. At a distance of 1000 blocks away, an endless expanse of more islands begins, away from the main island. These consist of large islands, about the size of the main island, and smaller ones, which are usually thin and small.

Outer island
The outer end islands are found 1000 blocks away from the central island. They vary in size from large islands to smaller "mini islands". Generated structures such as End cities and End ships spawn here, along with chorus trees. The player can be taken to the end islands through the End gateway.

Technical details
Features are generated for a given chunk after the terrain has been formed. The chunk format includes a tag called that indicates whether features whose point of origin is in that chunk have been generated. If it is false or missing, they generate again. Feature generation is based on what is already in the chunk, so (for example) flagging a chunk that has already been populated for repopulation approximately doubles the amount of ore in it.

When features are generated, they can spill over into neighboring chunks that have been previously generated. Thus, a tree at the edge of the generated world (and probably visible only via external tools) may be overwritten by a lake before the player reaches it. It is also theoretically possible for two worlds generated with the same seed, from the same version of Minecraft, to differ slightly depending on the players' travel routes, because the chunk generation order may determine which of two conflicting features overwrite or suppress the other.