The Shaft
A legendary zone. A round hole about 200 blocks wide goes straight down to the bedrock.
The Shaft is a zone type in the Overworld. In the middle of the zone a perfectly round hole goes straight down to the bottom of the world.
What it looks like
- The hole is about 200 blocks wide. It is round to the block.
- It goes from the surface down to the bedrock. Over the sea, a round wall holds the water back at sea level.
- Every 12 or 16 blocks a line of a different block runs round the wall, so it reads as tiers.
- A ledge 3 blocks wide runs down the wall in a spiral, one block lower every few steps. It starts where the ground was and ends just above the water.
- At the bottom is still water, 5 blocks deep, over the bedrock.
- There is no ore in the wall and no cave opens into the hole.
The rest of the zone is ordinary land.
What the wall is made of
The wall follows the biomes it cuts through, at every depth, so it changes as you go down. Near the top it takes the blocks of the land around it. Deeper down, cave biomes such as lush caves and the deep dark take over where they reach the hole.
| Biome | Wall and ledge | Tier lines |
|---|---|---|
| Most of the world | Tuff bricks | Stone bricks |
| Oceans | Prismarine | Stone bricks |
| Deserts | Cut sandstone | Orange terracotta |
| Badlands | Yellow terracotta | Terracotta |
| Snowy land and snowy plains | Stone bricks | Clay |
| Swamps | Mossy stone bricks | Mossy cobblestone |
| Mangrove swamps | Mossy stone bricks | Clay |
| Jungles | Mud bricks | Mossy cobblestone |
| Lush caves | Mossy cobblestone | Clay |
| Deep dark | Polished deepslate | Deepslate tiles |
Going down
The ledge is the slow way. From just under sea level down it never breaks, and it goes all the way to the water. Higher up, it only runs where there was rock, so in places it starts and stops.
The fast way is to jump. Land in the water and you live.
It is dark in the hole. Monsters spawn on the ledge as they do in caves.
How rare it is
The Shaft is a legendary zone. About 0.05 percent of zones are a Shaft, about one zone in 2,000. It exists in the Overworld only, only in zones big enough to hold the whole hole, and only in land far from anything that existed when it was added. The land around spawn never gets it, so go far.
There are no other chunk errors inside the zone.
See Chunk errors for every zone type, and Exploring for how finds are logged.