Around the Block: Old Growth Pine Taiga

Minecraft’s old growth pine taiga has lain undisturbed for endless aeons. The damp environment allows for an endless cycle of growth, dieback, and regrowth, with ancient trees towering over a carpet of ferns and podzol. They’re an impressive place to visit, and perhaps even live in – so don’t you think it’s time that we crowned the Old Growth Pine Taiga our biome of the month? 

As I noted when I wrote about old growth taiga more generally a while back, the biome was originally called MEGA TAIGA when it was added to the game in the Update That Changed the World in 2013. Perhaps concerned that people would think it was a mega tiger and avoid it, our developers renamed it to “giant tree taiga” in 2018, and finally in late 2021 to “old growth taiga”. Less scary, right? 

There are two variants of the old growth taiga – pine and spruce – and it’s pine that we’ll be focusing on today. The difference is mostly in the shapes of the tree. Pines are made of Minecraft’s spruce wood, but they’re shaped a bit like an arrow – with just a small crown of leaves at the top, unlike the “christmas tree” appearance of the spruce.

In this biome, you’ll find grass, podzol, coarse dirt, and plenty of mossy cobblestone, as well as ferns, mushrooms, and sweet berry bushes for the occasional snack. Roaming below the trees you’ll see sheep, chickens, pigs, and cows as normal – plus foxes, wolves, and the occasional rabbit.

Honestly, an Old Growth Pine Taiga is a pretty great place to set up home. There are resources to forage, lots of wood to build with, and the mostly leafless trees make them easier to fell (though you’ll need some ladders, and a head for heights). You might also come across trail ruins, which archaeologists will want to investigate.

Taiga – which refers to a forest of coniferous trees – covers a huge portion of the northern hemisphere of planet Earth. In most places, these aren’t particularly “old growth”, instead they’re managed for timber farming and felled after a few decades. But in Canada and Russia, it’s possible to visit large areas of forest that haven’t seen any human interference.

Honestly, though, even the oldest taigas aren’t that old – only about 12,000 years or so. Before that, Earth was in an ice age and the area covered by the forest today lay beneath a vast ice sheet like the one that covers Antarctica. Even past the edges of the ice sheet, the mammoth population prevented trees from getting too large.

Since humans hunted all the mammoths to extinction, the biggest creatures you’ll find in the taiga these days are moose, reindeer, musk ox, bison, bears, and wolves. But there are a whole host of tiny creatures too – it’s thought that Canada’s taiga is home to more than 32,000 species of insect, for example. These creatures are happy to live below ground, under an insulating blanket of snow, during the winter.

That sounds pretty cozy to me. If it sounds cosy to you too, then consider building your next Minecraft home in the old growth pine taiga. Just watch out for tigers, yeah?