Where To Find Fossils! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 175]

Hello everyone my name is pixel riffs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you guys are having a good day today I’m on my way out to the ender ender just to do a quick bit of tool mending because as you can see I have some pretty low

Durability shovels in my inventory that need mending because today we’re going to do ourselves a lot of digging and we’re gonna look for something that is possibly one of the more elusive things about Minecraft people have trouble finding biomes in Minecraft people have trouble finding certain structures in

Minecraft and there are various things that can help you with that you have stuff like ice of ender to help you find the stronghold you have things like maps that will lead you to ocean monuments and woodland mansions and if you explore a desert for long enough you’ll probably

Encounter a desert temple or two here and there let me just check that I am facing north good I think I am there we go because I need to head out to my ender ender and the stronghold o is actually to the south so the compass

Isn’t helping me at all so far but hopefully I’ll get my bearings at one of these days so yeah I want to head out to a desert in search of a fossil fossils we will go into a little bit more in depth in later on in this episode but

First of all I have to point out that there is really no guaranteed way of finding a fossil in Minecraft you kind of have to just dig a whole bunch in certain areas and so with that in mind I need to repair my shovels and we need to

Do a great deal of digging which is why I find myself once again turning down my mob sounds at the ender ender and taking care of a few of these shovels because gosh we’ve got a lot of ender pearls already and this thing is is trying to

Cart them up to the surface as quickly as possible but I am throwing them out by the bucketload we need to do a lot of digging in either a desert or a swamp and I’ve decided that a desert is probably where we’re going to end up because there’s a lot of desert there’s

A large amount of desert and I have been told by a couple of people who’ve been using the same world seed as I have that there is a location in the swamp where they have found a fossil and it’s actually very very close to the place where we’re building our main base I’ve

Been doing a little bit digging around there looking caves and stuff and it seems like the fossil hasn’t generated in the same place for me because it’s not there for me at all so I figure because I need glass for my nether hub projects and I need sandstone

Actually for the floor cuz I’ve decided to swap out all of those stone slabs down there for sandstone slabs I figured I would head out to a desert and gather as much sand and sandstone as I possibly could and I’m going to be bringing a whole lot of shovels with me and so

That’s three shovels repaired and the rest of my tools except for a small amount of durability on the sword I guess and in here I actually have a whole bunch of other shovels that I’m going to bring with me we got to bringing all our digging equipment that

We can possibly bring for this particular expedition yes including one that has cursive vanishing and mending I guess for when we get desperate but yeah we got a ton of extra tools in here that we could always use if we want to but the main reason we are going is to find

A fossil and fossils are best found in deserts and swamps and all variants of deserts and swamps but those are the only places you’re going to find them and people have been asking me to make videos about fossils for quite a while and there’s a reason I haven’t done it

Yet and it’s because it’s not guaranteed to find one like you aren’t actually guaranteed even if you go looking for fossils to find one particularly easily there are some things that you can do in order to search for them more effectively but there is no surface indication there’s no Maps even mapping

Tools like amidst ore mine atlas don’t show fossils as far as I’m aware I think maybe the most recent version of amidst might do but even so I want to show you guys how to find one or how at least to search for one more effectively if you

Aren’t able to access those tools or if you’re playing on a version for which those tools don’t apply like amidst only really works for the Java version of Minecraft and we have tools like chunk base available for other versions but even those don’t seem to track where fossils can generate because for all

Intents and purposes it seems to be pretty random so this time I’m going to head east out past the nether fortress to my desert temple portal which is going to take us to the largest stretch of desert that I visit frequently and we are going to be searching at very

Specific coordinates underneath the surface of the desert so we are obviously going to have to mine down through the sand and that’s why I brought myself a bunch of shovels and some shelcha boxes that I can collect the sand and sandstone in but we need to dig

Down to around why 4249 typically like just above the height where you would expect slimes to start spawning in caves and things like that those are the depths at which you will find fossils generating so we probably want to find a relatively low point in

This desert or maybe even the start of a cave system the majority of the time when you find fossils it’s not intentional it’s by accident and you’ll find them by accident when you’re out caving in a desert or a swamp you’ll just kind of stumble upon them in this

Case let’s do a quick fly around to see if there are any cave entrances I mean maybe some stuff like this would be a good starting point but there are relatively few fossils generating in the world typically they will be only a I think a 1 in 64 chance for a chunk to

Generate a fossil I believe that’s the statistic that that counts that’s the the math behind it let’s take down that sand block how about that that’s our first sand block that we’re going to gather on this expedition and absolutely not the last but yet we want to be

Digging down to around why 48 because yet every chunk has a 1 in 64 chance to spawn a fossil and if your desert has less than 64 chunks then chances are none of them will have generated one and I have absolutely no idea at this point

If I’m even going to find a fossil in this expedition but it looks like we are starting to get towards the right set of coordinates I’m going to light up this cave just to make sure that nothing terrible spawns and just to make sure that we can’t easily find a fossil by

Exploring looks like we are not going to all right well I’m gonna do a lot of digging in this episode but I’m gonna do the majority of that off-camera or on a live stream so that I can gather a bunch of materials and do a bit of caving

Effectively what we want to do if we can’t find one just by casually exploring like this is get down to around this level between kind of Y 49 and Y 40 and we want to effectively strip mine at those coordinates so it might be worth bringing a beacon over

Here in the fullness of time as well so that we can just dig out a large area in a straight line and mine out a bunch of stone as well as all of the sand and sandstone on the surface but once we find a fossil if we find a fossil I’m

Gonna try and excavate it as though it’s kind of like an archeological dig and we’re actually going to plan a feature of this desert around the area where we found a I want to treat it like an actual like paleontological expedition which is gonna be really cool and it’s not a

Mineshaft I see down here in the distance it is oh how lovely well I don’t exactly want to come here and explore an abandoned mineshaft especially if it’s not at the right level but chances are if there are sections of this mineshaft which you know go along at the coordinates that we

Want to be searching for between y40 and around y50 I suppose then that’s that’s gonna be ideal for looking for fossils because they will have dug through large sections of the rock and possibly even replaced sections of the fossil but we’ll be able to dig out what we can but

On second thoughts I don’t really want to deal with cave spiders right now so I’m going to leave that feature behind I’m gonna stick around here probably bring a beacon over and do a whole bunch of strip mining we’ll probably dig out in various directions from here see if we can find

Ourselves a fossil and hopefully when I bring you guys back in we will be able to explore what exactly a fossil looks like well folks we did it I had absolutely no confidence that we were actually going to be able to pull this off but we

Actually did it and below my feet in the ground down here is a fossil I’ve actually found one and we are going to do a little bit of work over this episode and the next episode I think turning this into a kind of cool archaeological dig site I like the

Location of this actually it’s right by a kind of intake from the ocean over here so we’ve got access to water which would kind of be ideal for an archaeological expedition out here we’ve got a few interesting caves to look up this one kind of looks like a nose of

Some kind and there’s a lot of really interesting terrain to be explored around here we’ve got tons of desert and open space we’ve got savanna biomes around here let me take you on a very quick tour of what I was doing before I discovered the fossil because out here

Close to the desert temple where I have my nether portal over here I actually set up a beacon and my idea at first was to kind of do a large-scale strip mining operation in order to try and find a fossil that had been buried somewhere underground because that is typically

Where you find them they are smushed in with the stone and even if you flew around in spectator mode at some point it would be very very difficult to actually find one I’m gonna very quickly to the desert temple and take a quick nap because otherwise the monsters in

This area are gonna get a little bit overwhelming and after a very quick trip to build height to despawn any husks in the local area there we go we can sweep down here and obviously as you can see I’ve got a beacon set up over here

Giving me haste to so that I could do a bunch of strip mining and what I mean strip mining I mean branching out in tunnels that are whoa hello now that the the mobs are all gone from the surface oh okay there’s some weird stuff happening with the creepers and

Skeletons also I turn my hostile creature sounds down because I was back at the end of an farm again so yeah I decided to dig out three by three tunnels down here spaced out maybe nine blocks or so in each direction simply because the fossils themselves

Are quite large and I figured we would probably run into them eventually if we carried on tunneling out like this and I imagine that if I have the time and effort to put into this as a large-scale operation then would but after a while of digging out

All of this underneath the desert I thought I was gonna get a little bit bored of that and so instead I decided to just go caving I was looking for surface caves that I could get to little ravines and patches like that that I could go a little bit further down and

Try and get to roughly the height I expected fossils to spawn and that way I could cover a larger area without having to gather so many resources digging it up because to be honest storage space for some of this stuff is a bit of an

Issue at this point and also so I could spend a little bit less time digging and a little bit more time just covering more ground so I ended up venturing down into this cave over here right now in the world we are at negative 3000 2100

Or there abouts if you guys want to explore this if you’re using the same seat but then again bear in mind that I have no guarantees that the fossils are going to generate here remember that I have regenerated some of the chunks in my world and that might have messed with

A little bit of the terrain generation but eventually I explored around here and I came across an abandoned mineshaft which presented an interesting opportunity because we are around y46 here and that’s roughly halfway between the two coordinates where we could expect fossils to start generating but

Then it was always going to be a little bit of potluck whether or not we actually encountered anything and I decided to make my way through this mineshaft just lighting up things like cave spider spawner Xand exploring minecart chests and stuff like that then I came down this little section here

Found myself in a giant ravine filled with lava and creepers and all kinds of nasty stuff but then over there I can actually hold the camera steady for a second that right there is a fossil and as you can see right now it is hanging above a precarious ravine filled with

Lava so I didn’t exactly want to go and explore the fossil immediately and digging to it from the surface was going to be a little bit of a hazard so I figured what we could end up doing is coming down here and just pouring water

Over all of this lava so that it could turn into obsidian and make sure that we had a safe floor down there or alternatively we could try and section off areas of the ravine as though this archaeological dig maybe even started by this mineshaft here has actually filled out the rest of the

Ravine and allow us to work from a safe platform while we take a closer look at the fossil and I’ve kind of created a little bit of a scaffold around the site here so we can get a slightly closer look at the thing as you can see there

Are bones there is coal there’s even a skeleton walking around inside there a fossil inside a fossil and the geometry of this cave was sort of a bit disorienting but eventually I dug my way over here and found myself standing over the fossil and over that giant ravine of

Lava so I think what I’m gonna do is I’m going to dig down from the surface still but we’re going to take this very very carefully because I know that there is a giant lava ravine here now that I don’t want to fall into so I’m gonna excavate

This very very carefully at this level build out a couple of bridges and a kind of like framework underneath the fossil itself to stop us from falling in lava and make the area a little bit safer and then we’re going to dig this entire thing out probably dig down from the

Surface and open it up to the sky above and then we’re gonna see exactly what this fossil looks like when we’ve unearthed the entire thing but that’s gonna require a quick trip back to base I want to get some materials that we can use to make the mineshaft kind of

Integrated with everything I need to bring some oak wood over in large quantities and I think we’re gonna do all of this in the form of a time-lapse Hey folks welcome back I hope you guys enjoy the time-lapse I like this place I do want to do a lot more to it though I feel like we can make this place look really great if we have a little bit more time and right now unfortunately I

Don’t have a huge amount of time to finish up this episode and get it out to you guys on time but down there we’ve kept the lover the lover looks so ominous at the bottom of the ravine down there we have ourselves a fossil and I

Actually want to go down and add a few slabs to this platform here because the coal blocks are currently floating above the platform of slabs and I think I might introduce more wood types to this one detail I’m really happy with it actually is the use of grindstones as

Pulleys I just couldn’t decide which direction made the most sense for them and whether we should swap out the oak wood here for something like dark oak and maybe have either no like fence gates here instead of fence posts I feel like that might potentially give it a

Little bit more of the connectivity with the grindstone block model here but I don’t know how that would look if they were just like fence gates all the way down it might seem a little bit weird maybe we can open up the fence gates though I don’t know we will try that

I’ll try that a little bit off-camera maybe in a creative world or something maybe you guys can let me know in the comments what you think as well but down here we do need to do a little bit more terraforming of the wall I was just worried about water flowing in from

Outside and flooding the lava down there and I really want to keep the lava I actually quite like it it feels sort of it goes with the prehistoric theme of all of the bones so what I’m gonna do I think and we’re going to do this maybe

In tomorrow’s episode is connect up the landmasses here using like a sand land bridge kind of situation over here and then we can do a lot more with the the overall look of this place I imagined it being like a long trench that the archaeologists had dug out and

Unfortunately we’ve had to kind of box it off here so that it could not have water flowing into it the entire time so we’re gonna do a lot of terraforming there I’ve got a bunch of sand obviously from digging out this place so hopefully we’ll be able to make that look good and

Spend a lot more time on it when I’ve got the time now down here I can finally show you exactly what these fossils look like up close although you’ve seen a fair amount of that in the time-lapse already I’ll give you guys a quick tour of fossil as it exists down here because

It’s a pretty neat little construction and for folks playing in peaceful mode this is actually one of the few ways to get a large quantity of bone meal at least before the introduction of composters because before composters you couldn’t really do anything about bone meal because bone meal required

Skeletons and skeletons aren’t really present in peaceful modes so the only real sources of bone meal were stuff like fossils like this and the bones that you would find in dungeon chests or desert temples so you can exactly grow stuff manually the way that we are used

To bone mailing stuff when we play on normal or hard difficulty and so forth but right here this is the fossil in its entirety I have checked inside the wall and obviously I’ve dug out an area over there as well and there doesn’t seem to be any further bone blocks nestled into

The rock here this is just a giant ribcage made out of bone blocks and of course while I could harvest all of this and break it down for the bone blocks I think it is much much cooler having one of these things in our world now you

Might be wondering why I haven’t removed these coal blocks the coal blocks themselves are actually generated as part of the fossil coal itself is kind of a fossilized thing I mean if you think about the natural process that creates coal it’s lots of vegetable matter and peat and stuff compressed

Over thousands if not millions of years and so the coal being part of this almost feels like a natural thing to me and I like the fact that here the bone blocks kind of imply there were some sort of giant creatures that roamed the Minecraft landscape long ago and have

Since been buried in deserts and swamps so I think that’s a perfect thing to have in this world to kind of create a little bit of a atmosphere in a little bit of lore and down here I actually have a tunnel that will lead us back out

To the abandoned mineshaft so this whole thing gets connected up I need to make it slightly more accessible to the surface and I wanted to include scaffolding a little bit more in this because I think the scaffolding would be a really great thing to have around here

But I wasn’t quite sure how to use it if maybe we should have some scaffolding just kind of going up into the skeleton itself so that people could chip away at it and bring back samples to the dig site up there and that kind of thing but

I like the elevator design it’s a fairly simple kind of pulley elevator sort of thing we need to maybe make a crane or something around here with like counterweights and stuff on it as well I think that would look really really cool but for now I am running out of time for this

Episode so I think we’re gonna call it a day here and I’m so so happy that we have showcased this as a fossil and I want to give a quick shout out to Alison who was a supporter of mine on patreon and has been suggesting for a little

While that I do an episode about fossils and was even the person who sent me the coordinates of a fossil in the same world using the same seed but for whatever reason that fossil didn’t generate in my world so thank you very much Alison and I hope everybody else

Enjoyed the episode as well thank you so much for watching this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide my name is Ben Pixar IFS don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now You