One rare Minecraft structure can come loaded with diamond ores

Diamond is inarguably one of Minecraft's most important resources. It's used to make the best armor, tools, and weapons that the Overworld can offer. There are a plethora of ways to obtain diamonds, from mining to looting rare and hard-to-find structures. However, one of the strangest ways to get mass amounts of diamonds that players might not be aware of is the Overworld's different fossils.

Everything about Overworld fossils and the potential resources they can provide can be found in detail below.

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Overworld Minecraft fossils are great for getting diamonds

The fossil "spine_2" was found deep underground (Image via Mojang)

Overworld fossils are a bizarre but great way to accumulate diamonds. This is due to how these unique underground anomalies are generated. There are eight different fossils that can spawn: four skulls and four spines. These designs range in size from 32 blocks all the way up to 121 blocks. Fossils have a structural integrity of 0.9, which means 10% of these blocks will fail to generate.

A full list of the eight different fossil types and the number of blocks they contain is mentioned below.

Fossil Type (File Name)	Maximum number of blocks	Fossil Description
skull_1	86	The largest of the skull types.
skull_2	75	The second largest skull.
skull_3	58	The third largest skull. Final skull with two eyes.
skull_4	32	The smallest skull in the game. Only has a single eye.
spine_1	37	The narrowest spine. Ribs don't curve.
spine_2	61	The second narrowest spine.
spine_3	91	The second widest spine.
spine_4	121	The largest spine, and fossil, in the game.

After this first bone block generation process, there's a secondary generation process. This pass generates ore with an integrity of 0.1. This means 10% of blocks will be replaced with coal or Minecraft diamond ore, depending on where in the world the fossils are generated. Anything above Y level 0 will get coal, while anything below Y level -8 gets deepslate diamond ore.

Note that this secondary ore pass can overwrite both regular terrain and bone blocks. This usually results in fossils being incomplete and perforated with these ore blocks.

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The other type of fossil

A Nether fossil in front of a bastion remnant (Image via Mojang)

Minecraft's Nether also has 14 variants of fossils that can be found in soul sand valley biomes. Unfortunately, these fossils are nowhere near as useful as their overworld cousins. While these variants don't have reduced integrity, meaning they always fully generate, they range in size only from five to 27 blocks.

Additionally, these fossils don't generate any additional Minecraft ores or useful resources. They consist only of bone blocks. While it makes sense that it doesn't have extra coal or diamond, as those ores are missing from the Nether, it would be good to see some kind of bonus resource for them.