Ocean Ruin Finder

What to know about Ocean Ruins

• Warm vs ColdWarm and lukewarm oceans generate sandstone ruins in a yellow-beige palette, while cold and frozen oceans produce stone-brick ruins in grey. The loot tables are nearly identical between the two — only the visual style changes.
• SizeOcean Ruins range from single-room "cottages" up to multi-building complexes that almost feel like sunken villages. The bigger sites contain three or four chests and are well worth the longer dive.
• DrownedA small number of drowned spawn around each ruin. The ones holding tridents are the real threat — they can throw their spear from a distance and hit you for serious damage even before you've closed in.
• Brushable blocksEach ruin contains two or three patches of suspicious sand or gravel. Brushing them with a brush item turns up pottery sherds (some exclusive to ocean ruins) and the occasional emerald or iron, so they're always worth a few seconds of brushing.
• Buried ruinsSome Ocean Ruins are almost entirely hidden under sand or gravel. Bring a shovel and dig around the pin location — these half-buried ruins often have untouched chests, since most casual explorers swim straight past them.

What's in the Chests

How to loot a ruin

1. Approach with Respiration on your helmet and Depth Strider on your boots. Respiration (an enchant from chest loot or villager trades) extends how long you can hold your breath underwater — Respiration III gives you roughly 45 seconds before drowning damage starts. Depth Strider on boots removes most of the underwater movement penalty so you can walk along the seabed at near-normal speed. A Trident with the Loyalty enchant is the perfect ranged underwater weapon because it returns to your hand after every throw.
2. Take out the Drowned mobs before you start looting. Drowned are zombie variants that spawn in oceans and around ruins. The ones holding a Trident are the priority — they throw the trident at you from off-screen and a single hit takes off several hearts even with iron armour. Sprint behind a wall or pillar to break line of sight, then circle around and close in for melee. The non-trident Drowned are slow and can be ignored until you've dealt with the dangerous ones.
3. Sweep the ruin for chests. Most Ocean Ruins have one or two loot chests, but the bigger multi-building ruins can hide three or four. Look under staircases, inside half-collapsed walls, and in any small outer rooms that don't obviously connect to the main building — these are the easiest to miss. The buried-treasure map (when it appears) usually sits in the deepest chest of the ruin.
4. Brush every suspicious sand or gravel block you can find. Each ruin generates a handful of suspicious blocks — warm ruins use Suspicious Sand, cold ruins use Suspicious Gravel. Right-click them with a Brush (crafted from a feather, copper ingot and stick) and they slowly reveal pottery sherds, emeralds and iron. The ocean-ruin exclusive sherds are Angler, Shelter and Snort (warm biome) and Blade, Explorer, Mourner and Plenty (cold biome) — you need four sherds to craft a Decorated Pot, so collect them all even if you only want to display one.
5. If the ruin chest contains a Treasure Map, follow the X straight away. The map points at the nearest Buried Treasure chest — usually within a few hundred blocks of the ruin. Buried treasure always contains a Heart of the Sea (used to craft a Conduit), so cashing the map in on the same trip turns one ruin run into both pottery and Conduit progress.

Build a full ocean circuit

Ocean ruins, shipwrecks, buried treasure and ocean monuments together form the full "ocean circuit" — a complete route that nets you Heart of the Sea, nautilus shells, a conduit, treasure maps and sponges. A few evenings' worth of play can make it feel like you've properly inhabited the sea.