Buried Treasure Finder

Before You Dig

A few quick facts that make the hunt far less frustrating once you're actually at the coordinates:

• Where it spawnsBuried treasure chests sit under Beach and Snowy Beach biomes on Java. Bedrock adds Stony Shore as a third valid biome, so Bedrock players will occasionally find one tucked under a pebble-and-stone coastline too. The finder pins each chest to the exact block in your seed so you don't spend ages shovelling blindly through sand.
• How deepMost chests sit two to four blocks beneath the surface sand or gravel. On steeper coastline terrain the generator can bury them deeper, so if your shovel hasn't hit the chest in the first few blocks, keep digging — it's rarely more than ten blocks down.
• HeightsThe chest follows the surface of the beach it's placed under, so the actual Y value depends on how tall or low that chunk of coastline is. The finder pins the X and Z precisely — dig straight down from the marker with a shovel and you'll hit the sand cap in a few seconds.
• ToolsA stone or iron shovel with Efficiency does the job nicely. There's nothing fancy needed for the trip itself — no Warden, no piglins, no time pressure, just a few minutes of digging once you're at the pin.
• Minecraft versionBuried treasure was added in the 1.13 Update Aquatic and has been present in every Java, Bedrock and Large Biomes world since then.

The Real Prize: Heart of the Sea

The thing that makes Buried Treasure more than "a few diamonds and some cooked fish" is the Heart of the Sea. Every chest has exactly one, and it's the only way to get one in the entire game — you cannot craft it, cannot trade for it, cannot find it anywhere else. That rarity is what makes the finder actually useful: if you want multiple conduits, you need multiple hearts, and you need to know where every beach chest is.

The Heart of the Sea crafts into a Conduit

Surround one Heart of the Sea with eight nautilus shells. Activate it inside a prismarine frame underwater and it grants every nearby player water breathing, underwater night vision, and extra mining speed — plus it damages hostile mobs. It's the single best quality-of-life block for any aquatic build.

1x Heart of the Sea + 8x Nautilus Shell

Nautilus shells drop from drowned mobs with a trident, and you can also fish them up or buy them from wandering traders. The shells are the easy half of the recipe — the Heart is the rare half, and this finder exists so you don't have to rely on shipwreck luck to get it.

What Else Is in the Chest

Alongside the Heart of the Sea, every chest rolls a handful of random loot from a generous table. You won't always hit the jackpot, but the drops are consistently useful for early-to-mid game survival.

Planning a Coastal Run

Buried treasure gets much more efficient when you pair it with the rest of the ocean-structure finders. A single trip along a coastline can hit shipwrecks, ocean ruins and buried chests all in one outing if you plan the route on the map first. It also gives you an excuse to fish up a handful of nautilus shells along the way, so by the time you're back at base you've got everything you need for a conduit.

1. Open the SeedLander map and pin Shipwrecks, Ocean Ruins and Buried Treasure together. Buried Treasure rarely sits alone — the same coastlines that generate beach chests also produce Shipwrecks (which contain extra Heart of the Sea, treasure maps and emeralds) and Ocean Ruins (which drop suspicious sand for archaeology). Toggling all three at once shows you which stretch of coastline gives the most stops per minute of travel.
2. Pick a coastline run of five to ten pins and plan a boat route between them. Boats travel much faster across water than walking along the beach, and you can pull them onto land at each stop. If you have a pair of boots enchanted with Depth Strider (an enchant from chest loot or villager trades that makes you walk through water at near-normal speed), bring them — chasing Drowned mobs underwater for Nautilus Shells along the way is far quicker than swimming.
3. At each buried-treasure pin, dig straight down with a shovel. Most chests sit two to four blocks beneath the surface sand or gravel — close enough that a stone shovel finds them in under a minute. The chest itself looks like a regular oak chest in a small pocket of air, sometimes alongside a single suspicious gravel block. If the first hole comes up empty, widen the dig outwards by a block or two before going deeper.
4. Before you sail on, check any nearby Shipwrecks for extra Nautilus Shells. A Shipwreck has up to three loot chests — the map chest at the back (containing the buried treasure map and often a Heart of the Sea), the supply chest amidships, and the treasure chest at the front. Nautilus Shells frequently appear in the map and treasure chests and you need eight of them plus a Heart of the Sea to craft a Conduit.
5. Back at base, build the Conduit frame. Surround the activated Conduit with a 3×3×3 prismarine frame (use any combination of prismarine, prismarine bricks, dark prismarine or sea lanterns) and the Conduit will start glowing. Inside its range you get Water Breathing, Night Vision underwater and a Haste-style mining boost — perfect for clearing an Ocean Monument or running a long underwater build with no potions needed.

If you're on an SMP, Premium world tracking lets you mark each treasure as dug up so teammates don't retrace the same coastline — a bigger quality-of-life win than it sounds once you've got 20+ pins to coordinate.

Where Else Can I Read About This?

The Minecraft Wiki's Buried Treasure entry is the authoritative source for loot tables and version history. For the crafting side, the Conduit page covers activation frames and exact range mechanics. And if you've never set one up before, the ocean monument finder is a natural follow-up — conduit power turns monument raids from a slow slog into a genuinely fun afternoon.