Shipwrecks: Chests, Treasure Maps and Finding One

Three chests, if the ship is whole

A shipwreck is a broken wooden ship lying on the sea floor or rammed into a beach. It can be upright, on its side or upside down, and a lot of them are only half a ship. That last part matters, because the chests live in fixed spots in the hull: a supply chest, a treasure chest, and the map chest at the back, in the captain's cabin.

Lose the back half and you lose the map. We counted how often each layout comes up across 4,006 wrecks on Java 26.3 (seeds 1 to 200, every wreck within 1,500 blocks of spawn):

Wrecks are everywhere too. 199 of the 200 seeds had at least one inside that 3,000 × 3,000 block square, and on a typical seed the closest one was 421 blocks from spawn. If you've got a boat, you've got a shipwreck.

What's actually in them

Loot on Java is fixed the moment the wreck generates, and the engine replays it, so this isn't a drop-table guess. It's what was in all 8,752 chests:

• Map chest: found in 3,151 wrecks (79%), and every single one had a buried treasure map. The rest is paper, feathers, books and sometimes a compass or clock.
• Treasure chest: iron ingots and nuggets, emeralds, lapis and gold. Diamonds showed up in 423 of 2,811 treasure chests, so about 15%, and almost always just one.
• Supply chest: food (wheat, carrots, potatoes, suspicious stew), coal, paper, gunpowder, now and then TNT, and enchanted leather armor.

Two things surprised us. First, coast armor trims turned up in 1,301 wrecks, nearly a third, and they always came as a pair of templates in the same chest. Any of the three chests can roll them. If you like the coast trim, you don't need to duplicate it; just raid two wrecks.

Second, 26.3's tables include nautilus armor. Copper nautilus armor was in 953 chests, iron in 440, gold in 220 and diamond in 102. Not common, but if you're riding a nautilus around, wrecks are where that armor comes from.

Seed 129: two full wrecks by spawn

We went looking for a seed with a complete wreck close to spawn and a diamond in it. Seed 129 spawns you at 0, 0 with two three-chest wrecks on the shore, in walking distance.

The closer one is at 80, −112, 138 blocks away on a sandy beach. Its treasure chest has 12 iron ingots, 5 emeralds, 8 lapis, a pile of iron nuggets and a pair of coast trims. The map chest gives you a treasure map and four books.

The better one is at −80, 208, 223 blocks out on a snowy coast. Treasure chest: 17 iron ingots, 1 diamond, 4 emeralds, 7 lapis and 9 gold nuggets. And the supply chest has a leather chestplate with Mending. Leather, sure, but Mending is Mending, and you can put it on the chestplate you're going to wear in the Nether anyway.

Beached vs underwater

Beached wrecks are the lazy option: no breath meter, no drowned in the dark, and they're half buried in sand so you just dig around the hull. They're also much rarer. Only 213 of our 4,006 wrecks had a beach biome under the marker, about one in twenty.

For the underwater ones, bring a stack of doors. Place a door on the hull and the block inside it holds air. Stand in it and breathe while you mine your way to the chest. A Respiration helmet or a turtle shell makes it painless, and night vision helps a lot in the deep ones where the chests are hard to see. Watch for drowned; they love the inside of a ship.

Upside-down wrecks hide the chests under the hull, so you'll be digging through planks from below. Look at the shape first and work out where the back of the ship is. That's where the map chest sits, and on most wrecks it's the one you came for.

Following the treasure map

The map in the stern chest points to a buried treasure chest with a Heart of the Sea, which you need for a conduit. We've covered the whole dig in the buried treasure guide, including where exactly to put the shovel, so we won't repeat it here.

The shortcut: you don't need the map at all. The buried treasure finder shows every treasure chest on your seed. The map from the wreck just leads to one of them. Open both finders with the same seed and you'll usually find a treasure chest a short boat ride from the wreck you looted.

Finding the closest wreck

Open the shipwreck finder, type your seed and pick your version. The Nearest list sorts wrecks by distance from spawn, or from any X and Z you type, like your base. Click one and the popup shows the coordinates, the biome, and on Java 1.18+ the full contents of each chest before you even get wet.

On Bedrock the finder has every real shipwreck, but about half of its markers don't actually generate in the world, so check a couple. Loot isn't predicted on Bedrock. On seed 129 the nearest Bedrock marker is at 8, −168, 168 blocks from spawn, and the next ones are much further out at −376, 488 and −600, −312.