Everything About The Deep Dark Biome and Sculk in Minecraft 1.20

Minecraft 1.19 has the mysterious new deep dark biome filled with skulk and skulk blocks but is it all that dangerous or really extremely useful find out in this video so the deep dark biome generates in areas of low erosion which more or less means underneath mountains and groups of mountains you

See you’ve probably noticed that in minecraft 1.18 and above mountains will spawn in large groups there’s lots of areas between them and that entire area is known as an area of low erosion meaning the mountains haven’t been eroded a lot they’re still nice and tall and sharp and so basically underneath

That entire area is deep dark biome underneath every area of low erosion this also means that in minecraft 1.19 there will always be deep dark biome underneath every single mountain and there will generally be ancient cities underneath every mountain as well now this video is not strictly about the

Ancient city but do not click away because i will cover that in a later video for now we’re talking about the deep dark biome itself it makes up a much larger percentage of what you see in this update underneath these mountain ranges and it’s a lot more interesting

Than you may think now what are the features of the deep dark biome well like i said it does generate in areas of low erosion however also it can generate ancient cities inside of them you probably knew that but they’re not part of the biome themselves or just a

Generated structure that can generate in this biome only nowhere else so for instance you would not see an ancient city over here where it’s not the deep dark biome also the steep dark biome only generates very deep underground so for instance here we can see some deep

Dark here but if we go a little bit higher you’ll notice it is not the deep dark biome let’s say up here and if we go around a lot you’ll see there’s maybe some over here but it only starts generating at a certain height and generally it doesn’t even start

Generating this high up this is pretty rare you usually find it much lower down now something that may come as a big surprise to you is that this biome cannot generate any hostile mobs that is to say other than the warden now the warden isn’t even technically a hostile

Mob although it is sort of a boss mob or a neutral mob but the word itself doesn’t even really generate in here unless you make it do so and so what’s interesting is if you go through a deep dark and destroy all these skulk shriekers which i’ll go into later why

You want to do that but more or less it’ll make the wardens not spawn then this biome is completely safe something like a mushroom island so interestingly enough without those skulk shriekers there you have a perfectly safe biome with a lot of other benefits as well so something interesting is this biome

Does not generate abandoned mine shafts in it but if an abandoned mine shaft does generate elsewhere it can intersect into a deep dark biome making a really cool effect but the abandoned mine shaft center will not generate there now the deep dark biome is characteristic of several things first of all it generates

With a large covering of skulk blocks in it doesn’t cover the entire thing but it kind of warps and twists around a place that is a deep direct biome on top of that generates some skulk sensors some sculpt catalysts and finally the dreaded skulk shrieker and there’s also these skulk veins it’ll

Generate at the edges of the skulk patches and this may seem like the end of what there is to know about the deep dark but this biome because of its unique characteristics is actually incredibly useful so like i said earlier if you get rid of the skulk shriekers in

It you do have a more or less peaceful mold biome that may seem like a hard thing to do but it’s usually not that difficult i’ll go more into how to do that later the second thing that is awesome about this is that it’s perfect for strip

Mining and now again there are some issues with the skulk shriekers and if you run into an ancient city what makes it perfect for strip mining is the fact that if we go down here to the right level to strip mine out let’s say down here at maybe negative 57 or 58 whatever

You prefer and mine around down here what will happen is we do not have to put down any torches and the reason for that is that there are no hostile mobs that can spawn in this biome so that makes the deep dirt perfect for strip mining and of course you sometimes want

To put up torches for light unless you have night vision or your gamma turned up but either way that makes it a nice biome when you’re a mining there you may trigger the sculpt streaker so it’s good to be aware of that but again if you go through the surrounding caves first you

Can make this a really safe area to strip mine so more or less this biome can be super safe or super dangerous now here’s the thing that really makes this biome get a bit overpowered and that is it is an amazing source of xp i’ll show

You why if we grab a fast toe let’s say a fortune one that doesn’t matter at all but let’s say an efficiency five one we can insta mine the blocks through the skulk blocks and something awesome happens when we mine these they will drop one piece of experience each which

Doesn’t really seem like a big deal what is a big deal is the fact that there is a massive amount of these blocks here and so if you find with these steep dark biomes which happen to be quite large and mostly covered in the skull cure

What will happen is you can get yourself an amazing source of xp it’s really completely free xp if you think about it especially considering the fact that this tool is getting mended for us you can just see how fast my xp bar is filling up there and that is with more

Or less subpar equipment of course is another right who i’m currently using but you could very easily do this with a stone hoe even a wooden hole or even your fist if you wanted to but the hoe is the quickest material to break the skulk blocks with the xp bar just gets

Higher and higher also breaking the catalysts and the sensors will also give you more xp now unfortunately breaking the skulk veins does not give you any xp you could break those two if you wanted and this makes it a really amazing thing because the entire minecraft meta has

Sort of changed with this biome being in the game forgetting about the ancient cities to think about the fact there’s literally huge amounts of free xp in almost infinite fashion generating very commonly in the underground underneath almost every single mountain biome this really makes xp a much less difficult

Thing to get in the game it also makes things like enderman farms though not completely obsolete something that a lot of players probably will end up not building as all you need to do is find a deep dark biome clear out a couple shriekers and here you have an infinite

Source of xp and after doing this for only a couple minutes you can get yourself right up to level 30 or even higher and also something really cool is that this is probably the best biome to caven that is in the entire game i would really describe the deep dark biome as

Being either incredibly safe or incredibly dangerous sort of a high risk high reward scenario really now the reason why it’s a great biome to mine and is that sort of like the moss block mining that i’ve discussed in a previous video will basically happen when you have those blocks mined off the surface

As you will then have these ores hidden underneath because a lot of the ores in minecraft have this rule where they will not generate if they are touching the air or if they do generate it’s a lot less so so with this we’re basically just removing the air covered blocks or the

Air exposed blocks and so anything underneath here was not air exposed at initial generation making it have tons of ores in fact you can actually see that because if we go over here you’ll notice that there is a diamond or just over here that we uncovered that was underneath the skulk originally there

Was also another diamond or we uncovered around here as well just really shows what a very useful biome this is and especially with these catalysts and shriekers these are also useful for a lot of purposes i’ll get into later but either way i would definitely suggest if

You have a bit of patience to get rid of the shriekers to cave here especially with the added benefit like with the strip mining where there’s absolutely no need to light it up now something i would say as a warning because i’m not going to say this is a completely safe

Biome because it certainly is not what you do want to do is you want to make sure that when you’re caving here when you’re strip mining here when you’re really doing anything in a deep dark biome if you are not in hardcore mode and if you are in hardcore mode

Good luck basically but if you’re not in hardcore mode i would definitely suggest getting a bed placing it down setting your spawn point there and also having an emergency chest and i’ll tell you why these things right here are the shriekers that’s what you want to clear out before you can effectively raid

These without basically getting instantly killed and so all you have to really do to get rid of these is sort of sneak up to them break them with a hoe or just your fist if you want and now you’re fine there’s no ward in someone there’s no nothing else but notice these

Two ones up here this is where it gets very difficult because we need to break both of those at the same time now of course we can place a block below us but you’ll notice they got alerted now if you go in peaceful mode which i

Currently am in you’ll not have too much of an issue but of course most people do not plan peaceful so how would you actually get rid of these there’s a couple things you can do you can break the blocks around it or you can just cover it in the wool that’s rather risky

So for instance let’s say we destroy this one here the second one is alerted so if you find a group of two of them close by that can be rather risky as of course if those things get alerted three times normally a warden would spawn which is incredibly dangerous and hard

To kill especially since it was recently upgraded to be even more deadly with the sonic charge however if you’re up for a bit of a challenge and are fine with dying a couple times towards when initially clearing out those shriekers it is certainly worth it with the amount

Of things you get i mean just imagining the amount of xp that’s just in these walls is absolutely astronomical and speaking of astronomical this block even looks like the night sky a bit so it’s really fun to look at very spacey and it’s awesome for some builds now on to

These skulk blocks that we’re actually mining breaking and dealing with in this biome now we’ll start with the skulk fan here this is the skulk vein it is completely decorative there is no use to it but decorative is its use because if you notice here it goes on top of block

Something like let’s say a vine would or a glow lichen but when it goes on top of blocks it really does modify how they look making some really interesting textured effects so for instance think of this little redstone ore here that looks really cool in my opinion there’s

A lot you can do with this to really make a unique looking area you can use these for a lot of scenarios you can also see here these are a bit animated they glow in and out that’s awesome as well but that’s about the use of those

You can break them a silk touch you cannot break them with your fist and they drop no xp upon breaking them next is the skulk block the one i was just breaking here and of course this main use is just to be collected with xp however what’s also awesome about the

Skulk block is the fact that it can grow but i’ll go more into that in a second here so this is certainly not a limited resource and it’s awesome for collecting lots of xp with and again can also be obtained in the block form with a silk

Touch item preferably a hoe now we have the skulk sensor these are somewhat common definitely one of the most useful skulk items this is a skulk sensor when used in the deep dirt biome and also in the ancient city they can be quite dangerous if they send a signal to the

Skulk shrieker but used normally they can be an amazing redstone application so they emit a light level of one and they can detect any vibrations within a nine block radius now what’s a vibration you probably ask it’s anything that you would assume would cause sound in the

Game more or less things like eating walking moving placing blocks using fireworks just stuff like that and you’ll notice if you have alerted one because a sort of skulk looking signal will travel from you or from where the sound was to the sensor and it will

Light up here so you can see we’re walking here the signal kind of comes from our feet and goes to there and on top of that there’s some other functionalities of it so if you walk on top of it it will trigger but also you can stop things from triggering it if

You are shifting now breaking a block while shifting does not stop that from being sensed however if you are shifting and do things like let’s say jump or let’s say just walk around it cannot sense you unless you go right on top of it then it will still sense you

The reason why you’d want it to not sense you is because it can again send signals to those shriekers we can actually try that right here you can notice here we were moving we placed it down it actually sent that back and forth but if we went like this that

Could send it there to there and this could summon a warden you can also connect a comparator up to the skulk sensors here if we grab some wool there’s an interesting functionality of that around the sensors let’s place a sensor down over here of course it’s going to recognize any vibrations if

We’re not crouching or anything from something else like even i think just throwing one of these could cause a vibration yeah like you can see it just traveled there so basically this wool block will block the signals there you can see here if we make a sound over

Here it just does not travel to the sensor because this will block is in the way sort of stopping it like an acoustic kind of idea but if we’re kind of within the viewable path of here you’ll notice it does travel there so if we surround it in wool blocks we can completely

Incapacitate the sensor right there we can walk all around it it just does not trigger no matter what but if we are in the way that it could trigger you’ll notice that it will sense that so just good to think of it that way and you can

Have these as sort of sound absorbing blocks to stop sounds from going to those makes it really useful also because you can do the same thing with the shriekers like this one over here what you could do is you could surround it in wall blocks just around here like

This and basically what can happen especially if we fully surround it like even on the bottom is you’ll notice these things are now getting signals but they’re not sending them to the shrieker so that can also stop that now i did mention earlier that skull can spread

And now we’re on to the block that makes that happen this is this one the skulk catalyst now these do also generate around the deep dark biome you’ll notice them rather commonly in fact i think they’re a little bit more common than the shriekers are and basically the way that they work is

That if a mob any mob dies around them it will make skulk grow around it so if we kill a mob you’ll see it skulk grows sort of where its feet were if it’s within range of the catalyst so basically if it’s within eight blocks that’s within range so for instance

Killing a mob here you would probably not have sculpt grow beneath it just because it’s not within range of that catalyst but if they died here would definitely make that skulk spread the amount of skulk that generates has to do with how much xp the mob would have

Dropped so for instance killing like a wither here would make an insane amount of xp go around you’ll notice a bubbling charge sort of goes around from the catalyst and makes this generate now this only can generate on certain blocks but more or less you can break it down

As being any naturally generating block that isn’t that important so things like the deep slate things like let’s say stone or granite or diorite or andesite things like that also dirt you can even technically use this to mine if you wanted to because you could have these

Mobs die then break the scroll way more easily than you could the deep slate that’s not really its main use mainly what it does do is it is storing that mob’s xp in the form of the skulk block and the skulk more or less we can tell

From this demonstration is a block form of experience so sort of taking the mob’s experience and converting it into these weird blocks although you cannot see it right here it can also generate around it more than just the skulk blocks it can generate some of these skulk shriekers and the skulk sensors as

Well but the good news is that these shriekers will not spawn in any wardens if they’re generated by the catalysts as any of these shriekers that are broken by the player and placed again or any shriekers that are grown by the catalyst just cannot summon wardens so that’s a

Really good thing to know but you can definitely farm the skulk sensors and shriekers through this but this will not generate any more catalysts the only way to get more catalysts not like you’d really ever need more because they are very common in the deep dark biome but if you did

Want an infinite supply when you kill the warden which is very hard to do they do drop one skulk catalyst if you wanted an infinite supply of those you technically could one of the hardest ways possible and finally on to the shrieker itself which summons in the

Warden now the shrieker has probably the most interesting texture of any of these it even has these animated circling souls on the top of it according to mojing this texture was inspired by the human larynx which is sort of like your voice box what makes you speak and you

Can sort of see on the side here there is a very interesting design that does look a little bit anatomically like the larynx does and because it shriek can be making a sound there now if you step on it it’s activated we get the super cool sort of tracking beam effect coming out

Of it and also if one of these skulk sensors here sends a signal to the catalyst like this you’ll see it goes from here to here and that also makes it send off this shriek it can only do one shriek every 10 seconds now this one might be different because we placed it

Down but generally there is a bit of a cooldown to this also if this was a naturally generating skulk block it would give us the darkness effect now there are warning levels to the shrieker there is three warning levels we start to hear some footsteps that

Means that it’s at warning level one so basically if we activate it one more time it goes to warning level two now listen we can hear it approach again and eventually when it gets to warning level three then we would have the warden summon in and you can see here comes a warden

Right over the ground here we don’t have any of the darkness effects because we’re in creative mode but there is the warden now i’ll go more into the warden in a separate video but for now that is what the skulk shrieker does it summons in that warden and again like i said in

Earlier parts of the video you can make these safe by covering them in wool and you can also just destroy them if you’re careful for it not to sense any others and be aware only skulk shriekers that generate with the world can summon in wardens ones you place down after you

Sulk touch them as you can get the soul silk touch as you can every single skulk block will not generate in any of the wardens as well as another generated in with the catalysts anyway hopefully you found this video all about the deep dark biome and skulk blocks to be useful i

Think it’s definitely an overpowered biome and these blocks are very useful as well see in the next video goodbye