Minecraft – What are the odds of spawning in a dungeon

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.

There is no easy answer to this because it depends heavily on the rest of the terrain generation that has already been done before the game checks for valid dungeon placement locations.

When a chunk (a 16x16 wide piece of the world) is generated the game tries 8 times to place dungeons in the chunk, centred on a randomly-chosen block between bedrock and an altitude of 128. First it picks a dungeon shape for the location, then it checks to see if it's a legal dungeon location. It will refuse to place the dungeon if it is above ground, or if where its walls would be placed aren't exposed to air, or if six or more vertical sections of its walls would be visible. That means that it depends on there being air pockets underground, but not too many of them around the spot it randomly tried to place a dungeon.

As a result, there is no guarantee of a dungeon appearing in a chunk, and it's theoretically possible for a chunk to contain up to eight dungeons. Beyond that, it's almost impossible to say what the frequency is, since the game isn't using a simple percentage chance.

There's no way to turn off dungeon spawning. The game options claim that setting "Generate Structures" to OFF will disable dungeon generation, but in reality dungeons are generated in a part if the code that doesn't check that option. The only way to prevent dungeons from spawning is to have no legal locations for them, which can be accomplished by making a flat world that has only a few layers of ground.