How to use the Cave Finder
Since 1.18, the biggest open spaces underground are cheese caves: caverns hundreds of blocks wide, full of stone pillars, ore-covered walls and underground lakes. The Cave Finder evaluates the game's own cave noise for your seed and marks every large cave with its size, how deep it goes and a point near its centre you can dig to.
- Enter your seed and a Java version from 1.18 to 26.3; caves are switched on and the map zooms in.
- Hover a cave to see whether it is small, medium, large or huge, with its outline on the map.
- Click a cave for the Y of its centre, how far it reaches up and down, and a /tp command into it.
- Below Y 0 caves are usually dry; between Y 0 and sea level many are partly flooded, and the bottom (below Y -54) is lava.
What cheese caves are
Minecraft 1.18 replaced most of the old worm-like caves with noise caves. Three kinds exist: cheese caves (huge open caverns with pillars), spaghetti caves (long thin tunnels) and noodle caves (very narrow, twisting). Cheese caves are the ones worth finding: one cave can hold thousands of exposed ore blocks, a lake, dripstone or a lush cave biome.
They form wherever the cave_cheese noise dips low enough, deep under the surface. The finder samples that noise on an 8-block grid from Y -48 up to the surface and joins neighbouring open points into caves, so it lists each cavern once with its volume.
Getting there
Dig a staircase down to the marker's Y, or follow a ravine or cave entrance nearby. Bring a water bucket and blocks: big caves often have drops of 30 blocks or more, and the floor of the deepest ones is lava.
Huge caves are the best places for strip-free mining: iron and copper in the upper parts, redstone, gold and diamonds close to the bottom.
Editions and versions
| Dimension | Overworld |
|---|---|
| Editions | Java, up to 26.3 |
Questions
Is the Cave Finder accurate?
The caves come straight from the game's cave noise. We checked them against worlds generated by the official Java 26.3 server (two seeds, twelve areas of 256×256 blocks): every cave marker in those areas (9 of 9) pointed into open cave — none of them into solid rock, water or lava. The outline is approximate: it is the cave's extent on an 8-block grid.
How big is a huge cave?
Huge caves hold at least 1.5 million blocks of open space — often several hundred blocks across. Small ones still hold about 150,000 blocks, far more than a normal tunnel system.
Why do some caves have two markers?
A cave bigger than the area the finder looks at in one go is reported once per 256-block square it crosses, so the largest caverns can show two or three markers. Each one points into the same cave.
Does it work for Bedrock?
No. The engine models Java's cave noise only, so the finder shows Java Edition caves rather than guessing Bedrock ones.
Which versions are supported?
Java 1.18 to 26.3 — the versions with noise caves. Before 1.18 there were no cheese caves.
Updated · data for Minecraft Java up to 26.3