Pale Gardens and the Creaking: Finding One and Farming Resin

Rarer than cherry groves, and smaller

We read the biome map on seeds 1 to 200 (Java 26.3, an 8,192-block square around spawn, sampled every 16 blocks) and measured the distance to the nearest pale garden. Three seeds had none at all in that square.

Median: about 1,840 blocks. For comparison, the same seeds had their nearest dark forest at a median of 895 blocks and their nearest cherry grove at about 1,300. Pale gardens covered about a fifth of the area cherry groves did.

And they're tiny. We counted 3,472 separate patches, about 17 per seed. The median patch was two map cells (around 500 square blocks), and almost half were a single 16×16 cell. One in ten reached 11 cells, roughly 2,800 square blocks. The biggest in all 200 seeds was 93 cells, about 23,800 square blocks, on seed 198, 4,030 blocks from spawn. A "big" pale garden is about the size of a medium village.

Look for dark forest first

Pale gardens share their climate with dark forests, and it shows. Of those 3,472 patches, 94.5% touched a dark forest on the map. The rest were mostly specks surrounded by other forest types. So if you're exploring without a map, follow the dark oak canopy. When the green goes grey and the hanging moss starts, you're there.

That's also why the closest pale garden on a seed is often a let-down. Seed 83 has one 11 blocks from spawn, which sounds amazing until you see it: a single cell of grey inside a dark forest. Pretty for a screenshot, too small for a base.

Seeds with a usable pale garden

These are the best gardens within 1,000 blocks of spawn that we found, by size. Centres are from the biome map at 16-block resolution. The Overworld biome layout is the same on Bedrock, and we checked each centre on both editions: pale garden on both.

Seed 8675309123456789 is the easy pick. A real garden a short walk from spawn, and if you dig down there are lush caves underneath. Seed 185 is the one for a proper base: a garden of about 10,000 square blocks, jungle and bamboo jungle right next to it, and two villages within 600 blocks of its centre.

Mansions in the grey

Woodland mansions can generate in pale gardens as well as dark forests, and a mansion poking out of grey trees at night is about as creepy as Minecraft gets. It's rare though. On seeds 1 to 200 we found 188 mansions in the 8,192-block squares around spawn, and 9 of them stood in a pale garden. About one in twenty.

The closest one we found is on seed 135, at 416, −2,096, about 2,130 blocks from spawn. To find one on your own seed, open the pale garden finder, turn on woodland mansions in the sidebar and look for a mansion icon on grey. The mansion guide covers how far apart mansions are and what's inside.

The creaking, and how to farm resin

Some pale oak trees have a creaking heart built into the trunk. During the day it does nothing. At night, when a player is close, it spawns a creaking: a tall wooden thing that only moves when nobody is looking at it. Turn around and it's right behind you. Look at it and it freezes.

You can't kill a creaking by hitting it. It flinches and keeps coming. The only way to get rid of it for good is to break its heart, which is in a pale oak log nearby, usually with logs above and below it. Follow the particle trail that appears when you hit the creaking; it leads back to the heart.

• Resin: every time you hit the creaking, its heart grows resin clumps on the pale oak logs around it. Don't break the heart if you want resin. Leave it, come back at night and hit the creaking a bunch.
• Resin bricks: smelt resin clumps into resin bricks, then craft the blocks, stairs, slabs, walls and chiseled bricks. They're a warm orange that looks great against pale oak.
• Eyeblossoms: they open at night and close in the day. Open ones make orange dye, closed ones make gray dye.
• Pale oak: you need four saplings in a square to grow one. The wood is almost white and very popular for modern builds.
• Pale moss: spreads with bone meal like regular moss and hangs off the trees as pale hanging moss.

Versions and old worlds

Pale gardens came with the Garden Awakens drop: Java 1.21.4 and Bedrock 1.21.50. Pick 1.21.4 or newer on the finder or there's nothing to show. In a world that's older than that, only chunks generated after the update can become pale garden. If you've already walked through that dark forest, it stays a dark forest.

Pale gardens are in the same place on Java and Bedrock for the same seed. For mushroom islands, ice spikes and the rest of the rare stuff, see finding rare biomes, and if you want pink instead of grey, the cherry grove guide has the same kind of numbers.