Desert Temples: Loot, the TNT Trap and Finding One

What you're walking into

From the outside it's a big sandstone pyramid with two towers and an orange terracotta pattern. The interesting part is in the middle of the ground floor: a design of orange terracotta with a single blue terracotta block at its centre. That block is the lid. Under it a shaft drops straight down into a small room with a chest in each of its four walls.

In the floor of that room sits a stone pressure plate, and under the plate are nine TNT. Step on it and the whole room goes up, chests included. Mobs count too. A husk or a zombie that wanders in and falls down the shaft can set it off before you ever get there, and every now and then you'll find a temple that's just a crater in the floor.

On top of that, since 1.20 there's suspicious sand around the treasure room for archaeology. More on that further down, because it's a separate trip and it needs a brush.

Getting the loot without dying

Don't jump down the middle. The drop is long enough to hurt, and you'd land within a block of the plate. What we do every time:

1. Stand next to the blue terracotta, not on it, and dig a staircase down one block over from the shaft. It's solid sandstone the whole way, so there's nothing to fall into.
2. Keep going until you break into the treasure room from the side. You'll come out level with the chests, looking at the pressure plate.
3. Mine the pressure plate first. With the plate gone the TNT can't be triggered by walking, so the room is safe.
4. Loot the four chests, then dig up the TNT under the floor. That's nine free TNT, enough to clear out a lot of netherrack later.

Getting out is a ladder or a pillar of sand back up the shaft. Water bucket for the trip down if you prefer the shaft anyway: place it at the bottom from above and drop into it, but you're still landing next to the plate, so we don't recommend it.

Is the loot any good? We counted

The finder rolls each chest with the game's own loot tables, and the contents are already fixed by the seed the moment the temple generates. So instead of trusting a wiki table of weights, we let the engine open every desert temple within 1,500 blocks of spawn on seeds 1 to 1,000. That came out to 453 temples, 1,812 chests, Java 26.3.

Honest take: most of a temple is junk. You'll carry home about 20 bones, 20 rotten flesh and a stack of string, which is fine if you need bone meal or a bow, and the gunpowder is genuinely handy. The real stuff is a golden apple, an enchanted book and a handful of ingots. Diamonds show up in fewer than a quarter of temples.

The notch apple is the headline. 52 of 453 temples had one, so roughly one in nine. That's not great odds if you're walking blind, and that's where the enchanted golden apple finder earns its keep: it only marks the temples and ruined portals whose chests actually hold one.

The dune trim is worth grabbing even if you don't care about armour looks. It shows up in pairs when it shows up, and one copy plus seven diamonds and a block of sandstone duplicates it at a crafting table.

Seed 118: a notch apple 66 blocks from spawn

Out of those thousand seeds, 118 had the best temple right next to spawn. You spawn at 0, 0 in a desert, and the pyramid is at 16, 64. Its four chests, straight from the engine:

• Chest 1: 3 spider eyes, 4 leather, 10 string, 1 sand, 6 bones.
• Chest 2: 3 emeralds, 3 gunpowder, 4 sand, 7 string, 5 bones.
• Chest 3: 1 enchanted golden apple, 1 diamond horse armor, 11 bones, 5 rotten flesh, 1 spider eye, 1 string.
• Chest 4: 1 golden apple, 2 gold ingots, 8 rotten flesh, 11 string, 8 bones.

The neighbourhood is good too. Desert villages at 144, −176, 208, 208 and −240, −384, all within 460 blocks, and two more temples at −448, −432 and −688, −192. The −688 one has a Channeling book and a Lure II book, which is a nice trident bonus if you get one later.

If you'd rather have diamonds, seed 897 has a temple at −400, −384 with 3 diamonds, 2 emeralds, a notch apple and four dune trims across its chests, about 550 blocks from spawn.

Finding the closest temple on your own seed

Temples only start in deserts, and since 1.18 all four corners of the footprint have to be above sea level, so a pyramid that would sit half in an oasis lake just doesn't spawn. That's also why plenty of big deserts turn out empty. On a lot of seeds there simply isn't one near spawn: on seeds 0, 123456789 and chunkscout, there's none within 1,500 blocks.

1. Open the desert temple finder, paste your seed and pick your edition and version.
2. Look at the Nearest list in the side panel. It sorts every temple by distance from spawn, or from any X and Z you type in.
3. Click a pyramid icon for the exact coordinates and a copy button for the /tp command if you play with cheats.
4. On Java, open Chest loot in the popup before you walk anywhere. If it's bones and string, skip it.

Bedrock works for positions but not for loot. Bedrock places temples with its own algorithm, which the finder implements exactly, so the spots are completely different from Java on the same seed. On seed 118 Bedrock gets five temples within 1,000 blocks of 0, 0, the closest at 248, 56, and none of them at 16, 64. Chest contents are Java only.

Suspicious sand and desert wells

The archaeology loot is its own thing. Brush the suspicious sand around the treasure room and you can get the Archer, Miner, Prize and Skull pottery sherds, plus emeralds, gunpowder, TNT and the odd diamond. Each block gives one item and then turns into plain sand. Don't mine it with a shovel, or the item's gone.

We can't tell you what's in a given block of suspicious sand. The finder doesn't simulate archaeology, only chests. What it can do is point you at desert wells, which have their own suspicious sand with the Arms Up and Brewer sherds. On seed 118 there are well attempts at −71, −72 and 25, 123, both under 130 blocks from spawn. Wells are Java only on the map and marked approximate, since a slope can cancel one.

If you're collecting sherds, a desert spawn like 118 is about as good as it gets: one temple, two wells and three villages in walking distance.