SALMON

Salmon are one of the four types of fish in Minecraft. They spawn in the Cold and Frozen Ocean Biomes as well as River and Frozen River Biomes. You’ll often find them swimming in schools with other salmon. You can fish for salmon and catch them live with a water bucket. Raw salmon is also a possible drop when you kill guardians or polar bears, and cooked salmon can be found in buried treasure chests. As with other fish, you can use salmon to tame ocelots, lure annoying cats from beds and chests, and breed cats. In the Bedrock Edition, salmon can be small, normal, or large. You can feed a dolphin salmon, too, and it will lead you to a loot chest in a shipwreck or underwater ruins!

See also: Fish.

SAND

Sand is one of the four main blocks that make up the ocean floor as well as beaches and coastlines. (Red sand, a variant, is only found in badlands biomes.) Sand is one of the few blocks, like gravel, that is affected by gravity. This property means it falls if it is placed without a block beneath it, and breaks if it falls on a non-solid block like a torch. Sand is used to craft concrete powder, sandstone, and TNT, and smelted to make glass. Cactus must be, and sugar cane can be, grown on sand.

SCUTE

Scutes are bony plates on turtle shells, and baby turtles crop one scute when they mature into adult turtles. You can use the bright green scute item to craft turtle shells, a type of helmet. You can also brew a scute with Awkward potion to create potion of the Turtle Master.

See also: Turtle Shell, Potion of the Turtle Master.

SEA LANTERN

Sea lanterns are one of the light-emitting blocks in Minecraft, giving out light at a level of fifteen, the brightest light possible. You can find them naturally generated only as part of ocean monuments and underwater ruins. It is one of the few blocks that can be used to activate a conduit.

Light Fantastic

Minecraft’s sixteen possible light levels go from zero to fifteen. Blocks are given a brightness level according to the light level. Daylight gives blocks a light level of fifteen. A light source gives out light at a level specific to that source. Magma blocks give a light level of three, a single sea pickle has a level of six, a torch gives a light level of fourteen, and glowstone and sea lanterns give out light at a level of fifteen. Light from light sources other than the sun decrease by one level for each block away from the source. That means a stone block next to a sea lantern will start at light level fourteen; the sea lantern light on a block five blocks away will be level ten.

To harvest a sea lantern, you must break it with a pick enchanted with Silk Touch. Otherwise, it will drop a few prismarine crystals, but not enough to craft a replacement sea lantern block. To craft a sea lantern block, you need four prismarine shards and five prismarine crystals.

SEA PICKLE

Although sea pickles in real life are animals, in Minecraft the sea pickle behaves very similarly to a plant. It resembles an upright, green pickle, and is found in Lukewarm and Warm Ocean Biomes on the ocean floor or on coral blocks. You can place up to four sea pickles on the same block. If you use bone meal on a sea pickle, you will not only grow more pickles (again, up to four) on the same block, but there’s also a chance the pickles will expand to adjacent live coral blocks. A solitary sea pickle generates a light level of 6, two generate 9, three generate 12, and four generate 15 light levels.

In real life, sea pickles are also known as pyrosomes, tubular colonies of thousands of tiny ocean animals called zooids. The colonies float around in the ocean, although they can slowly move themselves. They are also known for being luminescent, shining a pale greenish blue light underwater.

Up to four sea pickles can spawn on the same block. The more sea pickles, the brighter they are.

SEAGRASS

Seagrass is a plant that grows on the sea floor in all ocean biomes but the Frozen Ocean. You can also find it in rivers, swamps, and waterlogged caves. Like kelp, it’s one of the few animated plant blocks in Minecraft. Seagrass comes in two sizes: one block high and two blocks high. You can grow seagrass by using bone meal on any solid block underwater, but you can gather it only with shears. Bone meal will also grow a one-block-tall seagrass into a two-block-tall seagrass. You can lure and breed turtles with seagrass, and turtles will sometimes drop seagrass when they are killed.

Seagrass can be one or two blocks high.

SHIPWRECKS

Long, long ago in Minecraft, apparently, there were pirates! Given what they’ve left behind for us to find, these pirates were vegetarians that traveled in three-masted ships and were lousy navigators and sailors. We know this because they buried treasure, left many treasure maps with villagers, and wrecked every single ship. All we have left now are the loot chests, the maps, and the shipwrecks. If you study the supplies left in their ships’ chests, you can see other clues to their lives and interests. In fact, the height of the passageway to the captain’s cabin seems to indicate that at least the captains were shorter than a villager or player. You’ll want to carry an axe with you when you explore to get rid of the slab at the top of that doorway.

Game-wise, shipwrecks are a structure generated with Minecraft’s terrain, and you can find them typically submerged in oceans, as well as occasionally on coastlines and sometimes even in or beside rivers. The ships are made entirely of wood, and in most cases are missing chunks of their structure, like the bow or stern or masts. They may be sunk on their side or even upside down. They are typically constructed with the planks and logs of two different types of wood, except for acacia planks and logs. There are actually twenty different shipwreck models in various states of decay that can be generated with different combinations of wood.

Most important, however, are the one to three loot chests contained within a ship. In the captain’s cabin, at the back of the ship off the main (top) deck, you’ll find the treasure chest. Belowdeck there are two more chests. In the back room over the rudder, you’ll find the map chest. At the front or bow, you’ll find another room, the forecastle, with a supply chest. Not all shipwrecks have all three chests, though: if a ship is missing a chest’s location, it’s missing that chest.

You’ll get a random assortment of possible goodies in the three types of chests.

Treasure chest: bottles o’ enchanting, diamonds, emeralds, gold ingots and nuggets, lapis lazuli, iron ingots and nuggets.

Map chest: Books, buried treasure map, clocks, compasses, empty maps, feathers, paper.

Supply chest: Bamboo, carrots, coal, gunpowder, leather armor, rotten flesh, paper, potatoes, pumpkin, suspicious stew, TNT, wheat.

SNOW

Snow blocks are one of the blocks naturally generated as part of Frozen Ocean Biomes, as part of icebergs (usually the tips), as well as in other snowy biomes. Snow is an easily broken block, but you must use a shovel to gather four snowballs from it. A Silk Touch pick will let you gather the block itself.

Snow blocks are used in the igloo structures of Minecraft. You can also craft snow golems from two blocks of snow and a carved pumpkin (or Jack o’ Lantern).

SNOWY BEACH

You’ll find the rare Snowy Beach Biome whenever a snowy land biome meets the ocean. Although the beach is sand, it is usually covered in layers of snow, and ocean water at its edge turns to ice. It is too cold for turtles to spawn here. As with other coastlines, pirates of the past have buried treasure and sunk their ships here.

The Snowy Biomes

Snowy Taiga: Land of spruce trees, snow, and wolves. This biome has two variants: Snowy Taiga Hills and rare Snowy Taiga Mountains. The Snowy Tundra Biome is a flat expanse of snow with some trees. This biome also has two variants: Snowy Mountains and the rare Ice Spikes, which is crowded with large spikes of packed ice.

SPONGE

Sponges are one of the rarest blocks in Minecraft. They can’t be crafted; you can only find them in the ocean monument sponge rooms (if they are generated) or as a drop from an elder guardian. Elder guardians don’t respawn, and there are only three per monument, so the total number of sponges in a world is limited by the number of ocean monuments found. A sponge room in an ocean monument typically contains around thirty sponges.

Sponges can be wet or dry. If they are wet, you can dry them in a furnace. Once dry, a sponge placed in water can soak up dozens of nearby water source blocks, after which they must be dried again.

In real life, sponges are a group of ancient aquatic animals that survive by attaching to a surface and having water flow through their channels and pores to help collect food and oxygen, and remove waste. They’re often shaped like hollow tubes to help the water flow through them. Their makeup includes spongin, a material that makes them soft. Some sponges are grown commercially to sell as bathroom sponges often called “natural sea wool sponges.” The soft spongy material these are made of are actually the animal’s skeleton.

SQUID

The squid holds the honor of being Minecraft’s first aquatic mob. (Fish have been items but only mobs since the Aquatic Update.) It is a passive mob, nearly two blocks high, with eight long arms. As the squid swims, its arms open and close, as if it is moving by jet propulsion, as real-life squid do. As it rolls about in the water, you can see its red open mouth surrounded by teeth on its bottom surface. Squid can spawn in any biome in water at levels from y=46 to sea level, y=63. If you strike them, squid will release a black ink cloud from their bottom mouth as they try to escape, and if you kill them, they will drop ink sacs. At ocean monuments, they are the constant prey of the guardians’ laser beams.

Got Squilk?

When squid were first introduced into Minecraft’s Java Edition Beta 1.2, you could milk them. You could just right-click them as you would a cow and get a bucket of white milk. This interesting characteristic was phased out by Beta 1.4.

STONE SHORE

The Stone Shore Biome is a variant of the Beach Biome, and generates only when a Mountain or Wooded Biome meets an Ocean Biome. The shoreline is made only of stone and occasional gravel patches and usually falls steeply into the ocean.

SWAMP

The Swamp Biome is a waterlogged lowland, where shallow water is interspersed with usually flat patches of land. The water is a murky greenish color, often just one block deep at sea level. However, some swamp areas may be lower than sea level, giving deeper pools. The swamp floor is made of mostly dirt with patches of clay. Seagrass grows in the swampy water and lily pads above it. A unique type of oak tree grows in swamps, both in water and on land. These oaks are broader and wider than typical oak trees, and vines grow from their leaves to the ground. They are only created with the terrain generation, so you cannot grow them from an oak sapling. Other flora and fauna specific to the swamp include blue orchids, sugar cane, mushrooms, fossils, and slimes. Witch huts, along with witches, can also generate in the Swamp Biome. There is a rarer, hillier variant of the Swamp Biome called Swamp Hills; these do not have witch huts or slimes.

SWIMMING

Swimming in Minecraft is much like walking; just press W or your forwards key to move in the direction you are looking. You can even sprint-swim (as long as your hunger level is above three haunches) by pressing the same sprint button or tapping W (or forwards) twice. Like sprinting on land, this will cause you to lose haunches on your hunger bar faster. To swim down more quickly, press Shift or the sneak button. When you swim, your size changes so that you can fit through one-block-high spaces—so make your hidden underwater base with this in mind!