Badlands biome in Minecraft
The Badlands are a dry, red landscape of mesas striped with bands of colored terracotta and covered with red sand. It never rains and animals are scarce, but the biome holds more gold than any other Overworld biome, plus mineshafts built from dark oak that often reach the surface.
/execute in minecraft:overworld run tp @s -4160 115 -3100 90 15Climate
- Dimension
- Overworld
- Temperature
- 2
- Downfall
- 0
- Weather
- None
- Grass / water
- #90814d
How to find Badlands
/locate biome minecraft:badlandsMap by Chunkbase, shown as a companion to this guide. Without your seed, it shows an example world. Results depend on the edition and version you pick.
Badlands in numbers
- Share of the world
- 0.87%of the Overworld surface
- Rarity rank
- 26 / 521 = the rarest
- Distance from spawn
- ~2,820 blocksmedian, 1,000 worlds
- Within 1,000 blocks
- 14.8%of worlds
- Spawn biome
- 1%of worlds start here
Desert26.3%Wooded Badlands14.7%Eroded Badlands10.1%
Savanna2.1%// 1,000 random seeds, normal world. Java 26.2 world generation computed with cubiomes, plus the 26.3 Dappled Forest rule. Estimates, not exact 26.3 values.
/execute in minecraft:overworld run tp @s -4230 96 -3135 65 4Mobs in the Badlands
Structures in the Badlands
What you find in the Badlands
The mesas are made of terracotta in horizontal bands of orange, red, yellow, brown, white and light gray. The flat ground and the tops are covered with red sand, with red sandstone underneath. Plants are sparse: cacti, many dead bushes, dry grass, and sugar cane along water. The grass and leaves that do grow here take a dull brown tint.
For builders, the bands are a free supply of colored terracotta: mine them with a pickaxe and you save all the dye.
Mining gold in the Badlands
On top of the usual ores, the Badlands generate an extra layer of gold ore in the stone between Y 32 and Y 256. That puts it right in the caves and canyon walls you walk past, far from the deep levels where gold usually hides. Each block gives raw gold to smelt into ingots.
The Mineshafts of this biome are a special version built from dark oak planks. They are placed between sea level and the surface, so their corridors can open straight onto cliffs and canyons.
Surviving the Badlands
Few animals are placed when the terrain generates, so food is hard to find. Armadillos roam the sand, and pigs, cows and chickens appear in their warm variant. A Snow Golem melts here. At night, the open mesas give mobs plenty of room: light up your camp. The Badlands often lie next to the Desert, and have two variants, Eroded Badlands and Wooded Badlands.
✓ Checked in Java Edition 26.3 · updated 1 November 2026
Badlands — FAQ
Why is there so much gold in the Badlands?
The three badlands biomes have an extra gold ore placement in the stone between Y 32 and Y 256, on top of the normal one. Gold ore is often visible in caves and canyon walls.
Can you collect the colored terracotta of the Badlands?
Yes. Mine it with any pickaxe; without one it drops nothing. The bands give you several colors of terracotta without using a single dye.
Which mobs spawn in the Badlands?
Sheep, Pig, Chicken, Cow, Armadillo, Spider, Skeleton, Creeper, Slime, Zombie, Enderman, Zombie Villager, Witch, Bat and Glow Squid.
Which structures generate in the Badlands?
Mineshaft, Ruined Portal, Stronghold and Trial Chambers.
How do you find the Badlands?
With cheats on, /locate biome minecraft:badlands gives the coordinates of the nearest one. Without cheats, a seed map of your world shows where it is.
