Mushroom Islands: How Far Out They Are and Living on One

The numbers first

We ran seeds 1 to 200 on Java 26.3 and read the biome map around each spawn, 8,192 blocks on a side, every 16 blocks. Then we measured the walk (well, the sail) to the nearest patch of mushroom fields.

So 32 seeds, one in six, had no mushroom fields anywhere in that square. For the ones that did, the median trip was about 2,550 blocks. That's not a stroll. It's a proper expedition with food, a bed and a boat, and on a bad seed it's a dead end.

Compare that with cherry groves, which every one of the same 200 seeds had in range. Mushroom fields need the lowest continentalness value in the game, which only happens in the middle of big oceans. No big ocean near spawn, no island.

How far from land, and how big

The thing that surprised us: islands aren't hugging the coast. For the nearest island on each seed we measured from its centre to the closest bit of normal land (anything that isn't ocean, beach or river). The median was 455 blocks of open water, never less than 252 and up to 822.

That's a long way in a boat at night with drowned around, and it's why you can't just spot one from the shore. You'll see deep ocean in every direction for a good while before purple shows up on the horizon.

Size varies a lot. Across the 200 seeds we counted 588 islands. The median one was about 7,700 square blocks, roughly 90 by 90, which is plenty for a base. One in ten was over 84,000 square blocks. The biggest was on seed 120 at −3,099, 2,278: about 466,000 square blocks, nearly 700 blocks across. That's a continent, not an island.

Seeds with an island close by

Out of the 200 seeds, these had the best islands within 1,000 blocks of spawn. Coordinates are island centres from the biome map, so expect the shore a little closer to you. Same seed on Bedrock, same island: we checked each centre on both editions.

Seed 176 is the standout and honestly a great survival seed. You spawn on plains, there's an ocean monument at 16, 112, about 150 blocks from spawn, and a mushroom island big enough to fit a dozen villages 330 blocks to the west. There's even a shipwreck on the island itself at −112, 656. Seed 75 is the runner-up, with a monument 258 blocks from the island's centre at 656, 160 and a shipwreck 127 blocks out at 928, 432.

Why build there

Hostile mobs don't spawn naturally in mushroom fields. No zombies at the door, no creeper in the storage room, no spider on the roof. You can build with glass walls and no torches and it stays clean. Spawners, raids and mobs that wander in from the ocean are the exceptions, so a wall along the shore doesn't hurt.

• Mooshrooms are your food. Milk a red one with a bowl for mushroom stew, shear one for five mushrooms (it turns into a normal cow), breed them with wheat.
• Brown mooshrooms come from a red one getting hit by lightning. Feed a brown one a flower, then milk it with a bowl, and you get suspicious stew with that flower's effect.
• Huge mushrooms are free building blocks and a pile of mushrooms for stew without farming.
• Mycelium spreads to dirt next to it, so your base slowly goes purple. Some people love that. Some people pave everything.

Getting there without dying

1. Open the mushroom island finder with your seed. It opens zoomed out because the islands are far; zoom out even more if nothing is purple.
2. Pick the island by size, not just distance. A speck 900 blocks out is worse than a big one at 1,300.
3. Drop a marker on it, and turn on shipwrecks and monuments in the sidebar to plan stops on the way.
4. Leave in the morning. You want the open-water part done in daylight, when drowned are fewer and you can see the purple from a distance.
5. Pack a bed, a stack of food, a spare boat and a few blocks. If the boat breaks 300 blocks from anything, the spare is the difference.

Once you're there, set your spawn with the bed and build a nether portal. The island's Nether position is a fraction of the ocean distance, so the next trip is a two-minute walk. The portal calculator does the divide-by-eight.

Bedrock and old worlds

Since 1.18, Java and Bedrock make Overworld biomes the same way, so the islands in our tables are in the same places on Bedrock. Worlds from before 1.18 used a completely different system that turned small patches of ocean into islands, so pick your exact version on the finder.

Updated an old world? Biomes only change in fresh chunks. If you've sailed past the spot before, the island won't appear there now. For the other rare biomes (ice spikes, badlands, the deep dark) see finding rare biomes.