Badlands is the biome Minecraft players remember and rarely live in. Orange and red terracotta banding, mesa plateaus, exposed gold at unusual heights, and almost nothing you actually need. It is the most photogenic terrain the game generates and the least practical to settle.
What makes it worth finding
Terracotta, in quantity. Badlands is the only reliable source of the coloured terracotta bands, and those colours cannot be made any other way. Red, orange, yellow, white, light grey and brown terracotta in the natural banding pattern is a builder’s material that has no substitute.
Gold at surface level. Gold ore generates far more abundantly in badlands and at much higher Y levels than anywhere else in the Overworld, including in exposed cliff faces. It is the fastest gold in the game if you know to look there, and it breaks the usual assumptions from the ore distribution by depth.
Abandoned mineshafts at the surface. Badlands mineshafts generate much higher than normal ones, sometimes visible in open air. That means loot without a long descent.
Dead bushes and red sand. Both are common here and awkward to farm elsewhere.
The sub-variants and which you want
Three forms generate, and they are not interchangeable:
- Badlands. The flat base version. Terracotta banding, some plateaus, easiest to traverse.
- Eroded Badlands. The dramatic one – narrow spires and deep ravines carved into the plateau. Hardest to build in, best to look at.
- Wooded Badlands. Plateau tops covered with oak forest and coarse dirt. The most liveable, because it has wood.
Wooded badlands is the one to look for if you actually want to settle. Plain badlands gives you a world with no trees and no passive mobs within a long walk, which is a harder start than it sounds.
How to find one
Badlands generates in the hot, dry biome group, so it neighbours desert and savanna. If you are in jungle or swamp you are in the wrong climate band and should travel rather than search.
The colour is the tell at distance – nothing else in the Overworld is that orange. A long-range terrain mod turns this from a search into a glance, because the biome is large enough and distinct enough to spot from thousands of blocks away.
On foot, follow desert. Badlands frequently borders it, and desert is easy to traverse. Failing that, an explorer’s approach of picking a direction and flying a grid works, though badlands is common enough that you rarely need it.
Living there
Three problems, all solvable, all worth knowing before you commit.
No wood. Plain and eroded badlands have essentially none. Bring saplings and plan a tree farm on coarse dirt, or settle on the border with a forested biome.
No passive mobs. Badlands has almost no natural animal spawns, so no early wool, leather or food. Lead animals in or farm crops instead.
Terrain that fights you. Eroded badlands in particular has almost no flat ground. Building there means either terraforming heavily or building into the cliffs, and the second is far more rewarding – the building on slopes approach applies directly.
Building with what is there
The banded terracotta is the best natural palette in the game and most people waste it by mining it into a chest. Build with the bands in place where you can – a structure cut into a plateau inherits the striping, which is an effect you cannot recreate by hand without enormous effort.
For structures above ground, terracotta pairs well with dark wood and with smooth sandstone, and badly with anything grey. Deepslate against terracotta looks like two mistakes meeting.
Choosing a seed
If you are picking a world rather than exploring into one, badlands proximity is a reasonable thing to filter on – not because you need it early, but because it is one of the few biomes whose absence you notice a hundred hours in when you want a colour you cannot get. The rest of what to check at world creation is in reading a seed in the first ten minutes.
Mining in badlands
Two things make it unlike mining anywhere else. Gold generates up to much higher Y levels, so the usual deep-strip-mine logic is wrong – you want to be scanning cliff faces and shallow caves rather than digging down.
And mineshafts generate high enough that their tunnels sometimes break the surface. Following an exposed rail into a plateau is a faster route to loot than any planned excavation, and it is free.
The thing to bring is a water bucket. Badlands terrain is vertical and the drops are long, and a plateau edge you misjudge is a death with your inventory at the bottom of a ravine.
Harvesting terracotta without wrecking it
Terracotta bands are horizontal layers, so mining straight into a cliff face gives you a handful of each colour mixed together. Mining along a single band gives you a stack of one colour.
Pick the band you want and tunnel sideways at that exact Y level. It is slower per block and far faster per usable stack, and it leaves the cliff looking intact from the outside rather than gouged.
Images: Galosphere project gallery.