How to Find Ancient Cities in Minecraft: Easiest Ways

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An in-depth guide for exploring Ancient Cities in Minecraft

Co-authored by Hannah Dillon

Last Updated: July 9, 2024 Fact Checked

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How to Find an Ancient City

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Using Cheats to Find Ancient Cities

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Using Chunkbase to Find Ancient Cities

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Ancient City Overview

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Are you trying to find an Ancient City in Minecraft? Finding an Ancient City may seem like a difficult task, but thankfully there are a few ways you can make it easier. In this article we'll go over how you can find an Ancient City without any cheats or apps, then we'll teach you how you can use cheat codes or third-party tools to find an Ancient City in your game.

Things You Should Know

Ancient Cities only spawn within Deep Dark Biomes, so the only way to find them is to mine until you reach one at Y-level -51
An Ancient City will always spawn on Y-level -51 in the Deep Dark Biome.
You can use the cheat code "/locate structure minecraft:ancient_city" to find the coordinates to the closest Ancient City.

Section 1 of 4:

How to Find an Ancient City

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Go exploring to find a Deep Dark Biome. Ancient Cities are only found in Deep Dark Biomes in Minecraft, which spawn deep underground. They most often spawn under mountains (such as jagged peaks, stony peaks, and snowy slopes) but can also spawn under groves (cherry groves included), meadows, and savannah plateaus.^{[1]
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Research source} They will never spawn under oceans, rivers, swamps, or deserts.
- Unfortunately, the only way to find an Ancient City without using cheats or third-party tools is to go digging and exploring. There are no surface-level indicators that there's an Ancient City under your current location.
- The floor of an ancient city will always generate at Y level (altitude) of -51, though the Deep Dark Biome may start before that.^{[2]
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- You'll know when you've found a Deep Dark Biome because it's surrounded by sculk blocks and sculk veins.

Section 2 of 4:

Using Cheats to Find Ancient Cities

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Use the /locate structure cheat to find an Ancient City. If you don't feel like looking around for an Ancient City yourself, you can use a cheat to locate the nearest Ancient City. Simply type /locate structure minecraft:ancient_city to get the coordinates to an Ancient City.
- You must be playing on a server that allows cheats. If your current game doesn't allow cheats, you won't be able to use this method.
- Open the console by pressing T or /. Using the forward-slash button will auto-fill a forward slash into the console, which can save you a little time when writing your cheat command. Then type the cheat command and press Enter or Return.
- If you want to teleport directly to the Ancient City, you can do so with another cheat. Simply type /tp [username] [coordinates] into the console, where [username] is your username and [coordinates] are the coordinates that the cheat code gave you.

Section 3 of 4:

Using Chunkbase to Find Ancient Cities

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Chunkbase, a popular site for Minecraft tutorials, mods, and more, has an Ancient City Finder tool that will locate all of the Ancient Cities in your world.
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Enter your seed in the text box next to "Seed". If you don't know how to get your Minecraft world seed, simply type /seed into the chat console on Java edition. You must have permission to use commands in the server to get the seed in this way.
- If you don't want to get the seed of your server (or you can't, due to server permissions) you can also load your seed from a save file. Simply click the Load from Save… button and select the level.dat file for your game (which is a small file located in the folder for your Minecraft saved game).
- You can also press the Random button to put a random seed into the Ancient City Finder. Alternatively, you can find a seed for an interesting-looking Minecraft world] and check to see where any Ancient Cities are located.
You can currently select Java 1.19-1.20, Java 1.19-1.20 (Large Biomes), or Bedrock 1.19-1.20, but these options will change if/when there are any future Minecraft updates.
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Find an Ancient City on the map you want to navigate to in-game. The dots on the map are all Ancient City locations. Hover over a nearby dot and the coordinates to the Ancient City will be under the map.
- Lining up your mouse to get the coordinates can be tricky, so zoom all the way in if you're not able to find the coordinates to the ancient city.
If you prefer to not use cheat codes, you can manually navigate in your Minecraft game to the coordinates provided by Chunkbase. Otherwise, type /tp [username] [coordinates] into the console, where [username] is your username and [coordinates] are the coordinates that Chunkbase gave you.

Section 4 of 4:

Ancient City Overview

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Ancient Cities are very large; they're about 220 blocks wide on each horizontal axis.^{[3]
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Ancient Cities have many unique items. There are a number of unique blocks and items that you can get in Ancient Cities, including the following:
- Blocks: Reinforced Deepslate, Sculk Sensor, Redstone Lamp, Soul Fire, Redstone Dust, Lectern, Gray, Blue, Cyan, and Light Blue Carpet, among many others^{[4]
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- Chest Loot: Soul Torch, Sculk (and Sculk Sensors and Sculk Catalysts), Ward Armor Trim Smithing Template, Silence Armor Trim Smithing Template, and many more
Because the Ancient City is located in the Deep Dark Biome, there are still sculk shriekers in the city that will spawn a Warden if four shriekers are activated.^{[5]
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Research source} While Wardens are very strong, they can be defeated with a little practice.