I've been searching for hours in the game to find a Stronghold and haven't seen one. Apparently lots of mobs and treasures can be found there, but the question is where can we find those?
Can we find them near a ravine or abandoned tunnels?
Minecraft – How to find the World’s Strongholds
minecraft-java-edition
Related Solutions
An easy way, which you may consider cheating, is using a map viewer.
Without doing that, there are at least two ways:
- Find mossy cobblestone, which is guaranteed to be beside a dungeon (see the first paragraph of the Minecraft Wiki article on dungeons):
- Listen for a mass of zombie or spider sounds underground. They love to make noise and you can hear them through walls, making them easy to find. There's a chance that you'll find an underground cave or a dungeon near them. Creepers do not make noise but there are no such creeper dungeons.
Some guesses:
Levels have relatively little pattern between components like caves and veins so dungeons might be completely randomly placed, even near the top of the levels:
I'd guess that deeper down you have a better chance, but without diving into the code there's no way to confirm this.
Out of interest:
If your goal is to generate a map with lots of dungeons then Minecraft Seeds provides random seeds that do exactly that. Here are three examples:
- Two nearby dungeons after climbing a mountain.
- Three dungeons at spawn if you're too lazy to climb.
- Inside a dungeon if you're too lazy to walk.
Note that an update to map generation could change what a seed produces.
This may not be exactly what you're looking for but you'll get to see a village at least. Try a new map with the seed gimmeabreak - it generates a map with a village right at the spawn point.
Oh and while you're there, dig below the well to find the abandoned mine!
[via Minecraft reddit]
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Best Answer
From a Reddit thread about stronghold distribution, it was reported that Jens (the development lead on Minecraft) said at PAX that strongholds spawn within a 500 block radius, centered around your initial spawn point.
As of 1.8, the number of strongholds spawned per world was increased from one to three, which makes them rare, but not egregiously so like they were in 1.8-pre1. Combined with the 500 block radius spawn parameter, if you do any amount of exploring, you should hit one by sheer dumb luck.
If you're impatient, there are alternatives depending on the version of Minecraft you're using:
Beta 1.9
As of 1.9-pre4, you can use Eyes of Ender to locate the direction of a stronghold by throwing them up in the air. Once thrown, they'll change direction to point to the stronghold.
Example usage from CaptainSparklez:
Beta 1.8
There is no in-game way to find a stronghold, but you can use a cartography program like MCMap Live (Mac) or Cartograph G (Windows) (see also this question for other alternatives) to look for tell-tale signs of a stronghold: iron bars and bookshelves.
Here's a render of a world I just generated, highlighting bookshelves (click to enlarge):
The bookshelves are just barely visible at this resolution, but they're marked by the green circles.
Enhance!
Bam, stronghold. The render is from
x=-750,z=-750tox=750,z=750, so it appears the Strongholds are on the very cusp of the reported 500 block radius limit, if not a little outside.