Seabed

A seagrass meadow on the floor of Dwejra Bay

The seabed round Gozo and Comino in Malta in Minecraft is the real sea floor, measured in a 2012 survey of the waters round the islands. Vanilla Minecraft makes up its oceans. Here, every reef, drop-off, channel and sandy bay is where it is in real life, at its real depth, out to about 1.85 km from the coast.

How it differs from vanilla

• Real depths, 1:1. One block is one metre all the way down to 200 m. The shallow bays are a few metres deep and further out the sea floor drops past 200 m, where vanilla oceans are rarely deeper than 30 blocks.
• Real shapes. Underwater cliffs, reefs, boulder fields and channels come from the survey, at a detail of 2 m. Vanilla sea floors are smooth rolling hills.
• Seagrass where it really grows. Seagrass meadows (the Mediterranean's Posidonia) cover the sea floor between about 3 and 35 m deep, and in shallow water the survey's own photos decide where there is sand and where there is seagrass.
• Rock layers under water. Underwater walls show the same rock layers as the cliffs above them, at any depth.
• No magma blocks or bubble columns anywhere in Maltese waters.
• Maltese sea biomes with their own water colours (see below).
• More dolphins off Dwejra. In the waters round Dwejra, dolphins come in pods of 2 to 4 and are about 13 times more common than in the rest of the sea.

Sea biomes

Biome (F3 screen)	Where	What it is like
maltamc:posidonia_meadows	shallow water with seagrass beds	lukewarm ocean, blue-green water, dense seagrass
maltamc:bahar_sea	the open sea near the coast	lukewarm ocean, clear blue water, sand, rock and patchy seagrass
maltamc:fond_deep_sea	deeper than about 30 m	deep lukewarm ocean, the same blue at the surface, darker below
maltamc:bejn_blue_lagoon	the Blue Lagoon between Comino and Cominotto	warm ocean, bright turquoise water over white sand, with some coral
maltamc:qawra_inland_sea	the Inland Sea at Dwejra	turquoise water, sand and pebbles, no seagrass or coral
maltamc:zerqa_blue_hole	the Blue Hole at Dwejra	dark blue water, gravel floor, bare rock walls
maltamc:dwejra_…	the sea round Dwejra	the same as the three open-sea biomes, but with many more dolphins

Shipwrecks and warm ocean ruins turn up in the open sea, as in vanilla.

Depths

What	In the world
Sea level	y 63
Down to 200 m	exactly 1:1, from the survey
Deeper than 200 m	squeezed, so that it fits above the bottom of the world: a real 300 m is about 221 blocks
Deepest sea floor	below y −150 in places, south-west of Gozo
Close to the shore	the survey doesn't reach the last 25 m or so before the rocks, so the sea floor there is modelled to join the two

Where to see it

Place	What you see
Crocodile Rock, off Dwejra Point	a plateau ending in a sheer underwater wall
Seaward side of Fungus Rock	the sea floor drops to about 60 m within 100 m of the rock
Dwejra Bay	sand and seagrass meadows, 8–10 m deep
The Blue Lagoon, Comino	white sand, seagrass and coral in very shallow turquoise water

Coordinates

• Crocodile Rock wall (under water): /tp @s -17285 54 -13430
• Seaward side of Fungus Rock: /tp @s -17310 63 -13000
• Dwejra Bay (under water): /tp @s -17045 56 -13040
• The Blue Lagoon, from above: /tp @s -5185 142 -9205

• 
  The Blue Lagoon, Comino
• 
  The underwater wall at Crocodile Rock
• 
  Seagrass and sand round Fungus Rock

Sources

• Sea floor: the 2012 seabed survey of the Maltese islands (an EU-funded survey, published in the University of Malta's 3-D viewer). It combines a laser flown from the air for shallow water (down to about 54 m) and sonar from a ship for deeper water.
• Sand and seagrass in shallow water: the colours of the same survey's aerial photos.
• Beyond the survey and next to the shore: modelled from coarser sea charts (EMODnet) and joined smoothly to the survey.

Trivia

• The survey holds about 776 million measured points of sea floor.

See also

• Dwejra: the dive sites at Crocodile Rock, Fungus Rock and the Blue Hole
• Blue Hole and Inland Sea: the two saltwater pools with their own biomes
• Rock layers: the rock in the underwater walls