Abandoned Mineshafts: Finding One and Looting It

How many mineshafts are there, really?

A lot more than villages, a lot fewer than caves. Mineshafts don't use the region grid that villages and temples use. Every chunk rolls its own small chance to start one, so they show up in clumps and gaps instead of a neat spacing.

We had the engine list every shaft on three seeds, Java and Bedrock 26.3, in a 1,024×1,024 square centred on spawn and in a much bigger 4,096×4,096 square around the origin.

On seed 0 Java that's 258 shafts across 65,536 chunks, so roughly one chunk in 250. What surprised us is how empty the area right next to spawn was: not one shaft within 128 blocks of spawn on any of the six runs. You'll walk at least a couple of hundred blocks, and on Bedrock seed 8675309123456789 the nearest one sits 422 blocks out, under the edge of a lukewarm ocean.

Picking one with the finder

The marker on the mineshaft finder is the chunk with the dirt start room, not every tunnel. From that room the corridors run out up to about 80 blocks in any direction, up and down too, so a shaft marked 200 blocks away might have a corridor a lot closer to you.

1. Type your seed, set the edition and the version your world was made in.
2. Open the Nearest list in the side panel. It sorts shafts by distance from spawn, or from any X and Z you type in, like your base.
3. Click one to centre it and read the coordinates from the popup. Remember it's the start chunk, give or take a chunk.
4. Head there and dig a staircase down in the middle of that chunk. Most of the time you'll hit planks, fences or a cobweb before you've gone very deep.

Our tip: don't just take the closest one. Check what the biome is on top. On seed 0 the nearest start is in a birch forest at −208, −112, which is a pleasant walk. The third-nearest is on a beach at 208, 112, and a shaft under a beach often means half its corridors end in a wall of water or sand.

Bedrock works too, and the placement there is exact rather than ±1 chunk. Just don't mix the editions up: the same seed gives a completely different set of shafts on Bedrock, as the table shows.

Badlands shafts: no digging required

Mesa mineshafts are the fun ones. When a shaft starts in a badlands biome it's built from dark oak instead of oak and generates much higher, so corridors cut straight through the terracotta hills and stick out into the open air. You can spot the supports from a distance and walk right in.

They're only as common as badlands, which is not very. Seed 123456789 had zero in the 4,096² square. Seed 8675309123456789 is the opposite: eight badlands shafts packed into a patch of about 500 by 270 blocks, between −720, −1440 and −192, −1680, across plain, wooded and eroded badlands.

Badlands also get extra gold ore far higher up than anywhere else, so the walls of a mesa shaft tend to glitter. Bring an iron pickaxe and a few stacks of torches and you'll come back with a decent pile of gold without ever going below sea level.

Dealing with the cave spider spawner

If you see a corridor that's thick with cobwebs, there's a spawner in it. Cave spiders only come from these spawners, and they're the reason most people hate mineshafts. They're small enough to squeeze through one-block gaps that stop normal spiders, and on Normal and Hard their bite poisons you.

Poison can't take your last half heart on its own, but combined with a fall or a creeper it kills plenty of players. Carry a bucket of milk. It clears the poison instantly and it's cheap insurance.

• Light it before you fight it. Approach from the side with a block in front of you, then put torches on and around the cage. Once it's lit up, it stops spawning and you can deal with the spiders already out.
• Cut the webs with a sword, not your hands. You get string, and you'll need it. Shears pick up the cobweb itself if you want it for a trap.
• Mine the spawner or keep it. Breaking it with a pickaxe gives a nice chunk of XP. Keeping it gives you a cave spider XP farm later, the same way a dungeon spawner does.
• Fight from a one-block hole if you get swarmed. Spiders crowd into the opening one at a time.

One thing we learned the hard way: never dig straight down into a shaft corridor. You land on a rail, in the dark, next to a web, with three spiders already on you. Dig a staircase and break into the side of a tunnel instead.

What's worth taking

Minecart chests are the obvious prize. They're dotted along straight corridors, never in the start room, and a big shaft can have several. Their loot table can turn up rails, name tags, enchanted books and golden apples, but our finder doesn't predict what a specific cart holds yet, so treat every cart as a surprise. Break the cart after you empty it and you get the minecart and the chest back as items.

Then there's the stuff nobody thinks about until they need it.

• Rails. Every corridor floor is half rails. Pick them up and you've skipped a lot of iron for your first rail line.
• String from all those cobwebs. Bows, fishing rods, leads and scaffolding all eat string, and a web-heavy corridor gives you more than a spider farm's first hour.
• Planks and fences. Free wood underground. Handy when you're out of torches and need sticks.
• Ores in the walls. The shaft cuts through a huge volume of stone, which is basically a pre-dug strip mine. Walk it with a light and pick off whatever's exposed.

Shafts often break into caves and ravines too, which makes them a great starting point for an early mining trip. The cave finder shows the big cheese caves nearby, and the ore finder shows exactly which ore blocks are near a given corridor. If you came for diamonds, the diamond mining guide explains the Y level to drop to from there.