How to find fossils in Minecraft

When you travel in Minecraft, you will find all kinds of unique structures and terrain features. There are simple villages, massive mansions, ruined underground areas, and more. Among all these structures, you might also find age-old fossils. These are extremely rare structure-like features in Minecraft's Overworld dimension but are more common in the Nether realm.

Here is how to find Minecraft fossils in both Overworld and Nether regions.

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Ways to find fossils in Minecraft

How to find fossils in the Nether

Nether fossils generate in Soul Sand Valley biomes (Image via Mojang Studios)

Fossils in the Nether realm are only generated in Soul Sand Valleys. These are spooky biomes in the hellish realm that have soul soil and soul sand blocks that slow you down when you are walking on them. Furthermore, blue flames called Soul Fire randomly burn on these blocks in this biome. The region also spawns ghasts more frequently.

When you find a Soul Sand Valley biome, you will notice that the Nether fog will turn into cyan blue. After finding the biome, you can scout the entire area to find fossils openly generated on the surface. These fossils, like every other, will be made up of bone blocks.

In the Nether, they are most commonly found at Y level 44 and above. They do not generate below Y level 37.

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How to find fossils in the Overworld

You can find Overworld fossils using our seed map (Image via Chunkbase || Mojang Studios)

Finding a fossil in the Overworld is a lot trickier, particularly because they are usually completely inside thick cave walls.

The only way to narrow your search down is by knowing that they can only be found below Desert and Swamp biomes. In the Java Edition, they also generate underneath Mangrove Swamp biomes. They can be anywhere between Y level 50 and Y level -54.

Since they are hard to find simply by exploring all the underground areas, you can use websites like Chunkbase that show these fossils in a seed map. You simply need to find the seed of the world in which you are looking for fossils, paste the seed number on the chunk base seed map tool, select fossils, and start finding one.

Once you find a fossil, you can note the coordinates of the generation and start digging until you find one.

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