Chibi’s guide to Minecraft: Life Under the Sea
Let me paint you a picture. You’re creating a new world to enjoy in survival mode. As you load in, you notice that you have nothing but a small patch of land and a vast ocean. Water stretches as far as the eye can see long after you leave your maps boarders. What can you do to make do with what you have?
The ocean biomes in Minecraft can provide a wide range of resources as long as you know what you’re looking for. You can find tools, repurpose wrecked ships, and build yourself up to ransacking ocean monuments with ease. Let me show you how. I hope you’re not afraid to get wet.
Since the nether update, we’ve seen plenty of ruined portals peppered across our worlds. They’re still relatively common to find and can be a great source of starter equipment.
A portal under water is easy to spot. Its decorative gold block sticks out like a sore thumb and the lava found on land is replaced with bubbling magma cubes. Once you’ve located the portals chest, go towards the nearest bubbling point. Use the bubbles from magma cubes to reach the ocean floor with ease while sparing those precious moments of oxygen. Make sure to avoid landing on the magma and start hitting the chest the moment you leave the bubbles.
Once you’ve collected the chest and its contents, head back to the surface and give yourself a minute to look over what you’ve found. You’ll typically find golden armor or tools that have been enchanted. Followed by valuable materials and a means to start a fire. Fire charges, flint and steal, etc. If you want to make diving easier for yourself later, collect a couple magma cubes to take with you as you explore.
Another plus to spending time near ruined portals is for the fish. Local fish will spawn in nearby and typically get stuck in the bubbles. The magma cube that they land on deals damage to the fish and drops edible fish on despawn.
The next step depends on the type of tools you collected from the ruined portal. If you’re lucky enough to have found an axe, the next place to stop would be a shipwreck. These sights have plenty of wood to get started on shelter with other spare materials and more treasure.
Once you’ve collected a few blocks of wood, you’ll want to make a crafting table and a boat before anything else it made. The way I go about placing the crafting table is by building a single line of sand or gravel from the ship. Then I place the table down on the side of the top block.
Place your boat down the moment it’s in your inventory. The boat can be a quick break from swimming to check you inventory. Instead of fighting drowned while you’re trying to mine, lead them to your boat as an easy way to trap them in the sunlight.
By the time most of the ship has been collected, you can get started on a base. You can find a wide range of builds on YouTube, go for what feels right for you, or try to rebuild the boat. Whatever suits your fancy.
Beds can be made if the ship has a surplus of string and any tool your missing can start out as wood until you get better materials. Iron nuggets are a common find when searching through chests underwater as well as coal, crops, and rotten flesh.
If you collected a pickaxe from the ruined portals instead of an axe, the second step would then be to go looking for materials in ruins.
These drowned villages are a gold mine for resources. Typically littered with magma cubes and chests in each home. You can find crops, rotten flesh, maps, paper, and much more. While it’s also a hot spot for drowned, some thorough searching can make it worth the risk. A base can be made out of the home's materials while the innerworkings of your base may need to be made through other means.
Now that you’ve established a sort of base, it’s time to hunt for treasure.
Treasure maps can be found in both wrecks and ruins. You’ll find that these maps can be a bit of a hit or miss when it comes to actually finding treasure. Whether that’s leading you to an area that may not be accurately depicted on the parchment or there may not be any land where the map suggests land. There are even moments where there is no treasure to speak of. If there is treasure, you have a high likelihood of it looking something like what you’ll see in the picture. A variety of potions, ingots of some sort, armor, other miscellaneous items and a heart of the sea.
By the time that you’ve got your hands on a heart of the sea, it’s likely that you already have all that you need to make a conduit.
You’ve already fought plenty of drowned if you’ve gotten to this point. Conveniently enough, a lot of them have something called nautilus shells in their off hands. A conduit is made up of 8 of these shells with the heart of the sea at its center.
You may be holding onto this conduit for a while before you find an ocean monument and that’s completely ok. Once you do find one, it’ll make your experience a whole lot easier to set up your conduit.
It’s a large building full of uniquely hostile mobs, treasure, resources, and of course water. Setting up shop to explore is going to be difficult regardless of circumstance. However, that conduit is going to make at least 2 issues disappear as soon as it’s set up. Dive down to mine a bunch of prismarine blocks from the outside of the monument. The guardians will need to be addressed however you see fit during this process. While difficult and time consuming, you’ll want to collect enough to set up a square ring or 2 at first to activate your conduit.
The moment that the conduit is activated, the ocean is your oyster as long as you’re in its range. Increase the number of rings for a wider range until you reach its limit of three rings. At this point, you’ve not only reached the max radius of its effects, but it’ll now attack hostile mobs that happen to be near it.
At that particular point, anything you find in that monument is almost as good as yours. From the sponge room to the massive stash of gold blocks at in the large corridor you first step into. Just keep an eye out for the elder guardians that have been tucked away in different parts of the building.
As always, I hope this article was either entertaining or helpful in some sort of way. Thanks for reading
