Building Blocks: Ocean Ruins

While the size and shape of different ocean ruins vary a lot, they have some things largely in common. Most of them contain chests packed with tasty loot, including enchanted books, emeralds, buried treasure maps, and enchanted fishing rods. Also, they’ll almost always be buried under a lot of suspicious sand or gravel, making them a great place to hone your archaeology skills.

Be wary though – these ruins are guarded by their former inhabitants, underwater zombies known as drowned. If you approach, they’ll stir to life to attack you. Many will attack with their bare hands, like regular zombies, but others come armed with tridents that they’ll hurl in your direction as you approach (or flee). Be warned!

Finally, a quick tip – if you want an easy way to get down to a ruin without using too much breath, then look for one that has magma blocks surrounding it. The bubble columns that these blocks produce underwater will allow you to descend fast. Getting up to the surface again, though? That might be more tricky.

The real world has plenty of ocean ruins – usually in places where the ocean level has risen significantly. One good example is an ancient Egyptian port city called Heracleion that dates back to the 12th century BC. It was built on marshy islands in the Nile Delta, but a series of earthquakes around 101 BC caused the ground it was built on to sink into the water. It wasn’t rediscovered until the early 2000s.

Another example is Shicheng, which lies underneath Qiandao Lake in Zhejiang Province in China. It was inhabited for many centuries, but was flooded in 1959 when the Chinese government decided to build a hydroelectric dam in the region. Today, it’s a tourist attraction for scuba divers.

Due to climate change, researchers estimate that we can expect between 30cm and one metre of sea level rise by 2100. That’s not enough to totally submerge structures, but it is enough to make many low-lying coastal communities unlivable – including cities like Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka and Shanghai. Looking further ahead, we could see between two and 22 metres of sea level rise over the course of the next 2,000 years – depending very much on how quickly we cut emissions. The higher end of that range would very definitely create a lot of ocean ruins.

Luckily there’s no indication of Minecraft’s seas rising – so you can safely build on the beach without fear of having your home submerged. Just be careful when you venture below the waves – the drowned are waiting...