Since Minecraft was first released in 2011, fans have been discovering hidden details in strange places, most recently a desert temple in a particularly unusual location. While Desert Temples typically generate in Minecraft sand biomes and feel very natural, they can end up in areas where they don’t make much sense.
Biomes have always been an important aspect of Minecraft, adding variety to the expansive overworld and the multitude of mineshafts and caves scattered beneath each seed. Minecraft biomes encourage exploration, as players can collect different resources in a birch forest than in a jungle or snowy tundra, and these different visuals overlap where they meet. While it’s not unusual for sand and snow or jungle and swamp to overlap, one Minecraft fan has found a desert temple in a place even expert speedrunners might not expect.
A post by Reddit user Zerelz garnering 1,500 upvotes highlighted a Minecraft desert temple in a lush cave, which may be an exception considering how little the event is shared. In the middle of the massive veins of glowing berries, copper, grass, and stone, the screenshot shows the main entrance to the desert temple, emphasized by the creeper symbol between two orange terracotta tiles. While the tower to the right of the entrance can be made out behind some vines in Zerelz’s imagery, the tower to the left appears to be completely obscured by stone, leaving it partially buried in a lush cave at least a dozen blocks below the world’s surface.
I found a desert temple in a lush cave! Added in Minecraft by u/Zerelz Lush Caves were added in the 2021 Minecraft Update, biomes are often found under Rhododendron trees and often include the aforementioned resources such as Berries, Moss, Root Soil, Leaf Drops, and more. While desert temples don’t usually belong to these biomes, the temple layout in Zerelz’s post is likely to be similar to the temple layout in the sand area, with options from gunpowder, saddles, horse armor, golden apples and ingots, and possibly even enchanted books sex. The Minecraft Desert Temple is composed almost entirely of sand, sandstone, TNT, and orange clay, which is slightly less useful to Zerelz if he’s looking for the typical lush cave-making ingredients.
Given that not every desert biome is guaranteed to have temples like the one Zerelz found, and Minecraft’s lush caves often don’t have them, this screenshot seems to prove that both are possible, despite their rarity. Although it’s an uncommon location for a biome, it’s possible that the dense cave is beneath the desert rather than the rhododendron tree, which could mean that Zerelz’s screenshot is from an area that mixes the two environments.
Minecraft is now available for mobile, PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One.