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Dungeons in Minecraft

Dungeons are small rooms made out of mossy cobblestone and cobblestone. Each of these rooms contain a mob spawner and up to 2 chests.

Dungeons are generated as 5×5, 5×7 or 7×7 floors with cobblestone walls. However, generation of other landmarks can partially destroy these rooms, making them smaller or empty. Multiple dungeons next to, or attached to each other are possible to, making them harder to conquer. Though this is quite rare.

The chests can contain all sorts of treasure which would otherwise be unobtainable in game, without using an inventory edit or creative mode.

Dungeons are the only place where you can find moss stone and spider, zombie and skeleton spawners, making them quite valuable, both for decorational and xp farm uses. The mob spawners are always in the middle of the room and have a 25% chance to be a spider spawner, a 25% chance to be a skeleton spawner and a 50% chance to be a zombie spawner.

Finding Dungeons

Finding a dungeon can be really tricky, as they’re mostly located underground. You often have to be lucky while mining, though there are a few tricks that can help you find one.

One such trick is listening. This may seem obvious, but many people either ignore (or run away from) monster sounds in game or simply have sound turned off.
However, a large amount of sounds coming from 1 type of mob often indicates there’s a dungeon nearby. All you have to do then is mine towards that sound.

Moss stone and cobblestone only appear naturally underground as part of dungeons dungeons, so keep an eye out for those and take the necessary precautions once you do reach these stones.

Dungeons are generated without a roof, which means that if they’re close enough to the surface, gravel and sand can fall in. This is easy to detect from the surface, as there’s often cobblestone exposed in that pit of sand or gravel. Desert biomes are therefore a good place to look for these pits, but keep in mind that dungeons close to the surface are quite rare.

Ravines are a great way to start looking for dungeons. They may either partially expose a dungeon or at least allow you to listen for mobs. They will often also expose abandoned mineshafts, which are useful in their own way. Abandoned mineshafts are also a decent way to find dungeons, though these mineshafts can be enormous and getting lost is very easy, so take caution when you decide to venture into one.

Dungeons are pretty much always connected to a cavern. Explore these thoroughly, but make sure you don’t get lost.

Another method involves cheating. There are many programs around that allow you to see through the ground (x-ray) and show you specific blocks like moss stone or monster spawners. These programs are often frowned upon on multiplayer servers though, some servers even have plugins running that’ll catch you, if you do use such a program, which’ll often lead to an instant permanent ban from their server.

Defeating a Dungeon

Dungeons are very easy to defeat, even with with minimal effort. Your main objective will either be disabling the monster spawner or taking the loot while avoiding the mobs completely.

Disabling the monster spawner requires you to either light up the room or to destroy it. Simply placing torches on or around the monster spawner will disable it, leaving you with a safe room to plunder and a monster spawner for a future xp or mob farm. Torches can be placed on the sides of the monster spawner, which means you don’t have to replace torches placed on mossyy cobblestone, if you decide to mine it.

If you want to destroy the spawner completely, all you have to do is mine it with a pickaxe. This will destroy the spawner, there’s no way to harvest it, without using mods.

If you don’t think you’ll be able to defeat the already spawned mobs, you can simply loot the chests by mining your way around the room and mining through the walls. The monsters won’t be able to reach you through a 1 block hole, but you will be able to take the loot out of the chests.
However, skeletons will be able to shoot you if they’re standing in the right angles, so always use caution when trying to use this trick on skeleton dungeons.

If you feel like testing your luck, you can simply destroy the chests and run through the room to pick up all the loot and run out. Breaking a chest will cause all the items inside it to fall on the floor, so if you have enough inventory space this hit and run tactic could work perfectly.

Dungeon Loot

Chests will give you up to 8 item stacks and can contain any of the 11 following items:

  • Bucket: 53% chance of getting 1 bucket per item stack.
  • Bread: 53% chance of getting at least 1 loaf of bread per item stack.
  • Cocoa beans: 53% chance of getting at least 1 cocoa bean per item stack.
  • Golden apple: 0.7% chance of getting 1 golden apple per item stack.
  • Gunpowder: 53% chance of getting uat least 1 gunpowder per item stack.
  • Iron ingot: 53% chance of getting at least 1 iron ingot per item stack.
  • Music discs: 7% chance of getting a music disc per item stack. This disc is either 13 or Cat.
  • Redstone dust: 31% chance of getting at least 1 lump of redstone dust per item stack.
  • Saddle: 53% chance of getting a saddle per item stack.
  • String: 53% chance of getting at least 1 string per item stack. This disc is either 13 or Cat.
  • Wheat: 53% chance of getting at least 1 wheat per item stack.

Other Info

Dungeons will also spawn in peaceful mode, along with the mob spawner, however, no mobs will spawn. You can see them for a split second every once in a while, but they will instantly despawn. The chests will contain loot, so you could turn your game to peaceful if you’re having difficulties defeating a dungeon.

It’s possible for a player to spawn inside a dungeon, there are plenty of known seeds around which’ll spawn you in or around one or several dungeons.