Mineshaft in Minecraft: Loot, Cave Spiders and Free Rails

An abandoned mineshaft is a maze of wooden-supported tunnels underground, with rails, cobwebs, chest minecarts and cave spider spawners. They’re the most common underground structure in the Overworld, and they’re the easiest place to pick up free rails, a name tag and early iron.

Finding a mineshaft

You don’t search for mineshafts so much as run into them. Exploring caves and ravines will usually expose one within the first few hours: look for oak planks, fences and rails in a stone wall. They often cut straight through big caves, so following caves is faster than strip mining. If you’re in a badlands biome, look for dark oak supports in canyon walls; those mineshafts generate high up and often in daylight.

What’s inside

• Rails, lots of them. Break them for a free stack or two. That’s an easy start on a rail line before you can craft rails yourself.
• Chest minecarts. Break the minecart, or open it, and you’ll find iron, gold, redstone, lapis lazuli, diamonds, enchanted books, name tags, golden apples, seeds, bread and occasionally an enchanted golden apple.
• Ores exposed in the tunnel walls. Mineshafts reveal a lot of rock, so they’re good spots to grab iron and coal.
• Cobwebs. Break them with a sword or shears to get string.
• Wood: planks and fences from the supports.

Name tags are worth calling out on older versions, where you can’t craft them. Since 26.1 a name tag is just paper and a nugget, so a mineshaft find is a bonus rather than the main source.

Cave spider spawners

The one real danger is the cave spider spawner, usually sitting in a mess of cobwebs. Cave spiders are small enough to fit through one-block gaps, and on Normal and Hard they poison you with every bite.

How to handle it:

1. Don’t walk into the cobwebs. You’ll be stuck while spiders bite you.
2. Burn the webs with flint and steel or break them with a sword from a distance.
3. Place torches on top of and around the spawner. Light stops it from spawning.
4. Break it with a pickaxe for XP (you can’t pick up a spawner to move it), or keep it and build a cave spider XP farm.

Carry milk, or a honey bottle, for the poison.

Getting lost

Mineshafts are mazes with no map. Place torches on one side of the tunnel as you go (say, always on the right) and you’ll find your way out by keeping them on the left. Our mining guide has more tricks for keeping track underground.

Diamonds nearby?

Mineshafts generate at many heights, including deep ones around diamond levels. A deep mineshaft is a great starting point for finding diamonds, since the tunnels show you more exposed stone per minute than any branch mine. More structures are listed on the structures hub.