34 structures: seven are ruined portals, and 23 do not fit the terrain at all
Stronghold spawns in 55 biomes and each village variant in exactly one. Only 11 of the 34 structures adapt to the ground under them — the rest are placed as-is.
Minecraft ships 34 structures, and the list is lumpier than it sounds: seven of them are ruined portal variants and five are villages, so roughly a third of the "34" is two ideas wearing different biome tags. Counted from Mojang's shipped structure files for 26.2, which is the same data the reference on this page renders.
Almost everything generates in the surface step
| generation step | structures |
|---|---|
surface_structures | 26 |
underground_structures | 5 |
underground_decoration | 3 |
Generation step decides ordering, and ordering decides who wins when two structures overlap. With 26 of 34 in one step, most collisions are resolved inside surface_structures rather than between steps — which is why a village and a ruined portal can end up merged, but an ancient city and a village never argue.
Biome spread is the widest range in the data
| structure | biomes it can spawn in |
|---|---|
stronghold | 55 |
trial_chambers | 54 |
mineshaft | 51 |
ruined_portal | 24 |
| … | |
village_desert, village_savanna, village_snowy, village_taiga | 1 each |
Nine structures are locked to a single biome: the four non-plains villages, ancient_city, desert_pyramid, nether_fossil, ruined_portal_desert and swamp_hut.
The contrast is the point. Strongholds, trial chambers and mineshafts are effectively "anywhere" structures — they are placed by distance rules, not by biome — while every village variant is a biome tag with a building set attached. That is why village style tracks biome exactly and stronghold placement feels random.
Only 11 of 34 adapt to the terrain
terrain_adaptation decides whether a structure reshapes the ground it lands on:
- 23 have none. They are placed as-is and the world is not moved for them.
beard_thin7 ·bury2 ·beard_box1 ·encapsulate1
So two thirds of structures do nothing about the terrain — which is the direct cause of the half-buried desert temple and the shipwreck hanging off a ledge. Those are not bugs; they are what "no adaptation" means.
The four that do adapt are the ones that would be unusable otherwise: ancient_city uses beard_box to carve its floor flat in the Deep Dark, and the buried ones use bury.
Ten are jigsaw structures
jigsaw 10 · ruined_portal 7 · mineshaft 2 · ocean_ruin 2 · shipwreck 2 · then eleven one-off types.
Jigsaw is the piece-assembly system — villages, bastions, trail ruins, ancient cities and trial chambers are all built from a pool of templates rather than placed as one fixed model. If you are making a custom structure and want it to vary between instances, jigsaw is what vanilla uses for exactly that; everything else in this list is a fixed template.
Reading it for a datapack
- Pick your generation step to match your collision expectations. Anything in
surface_structures is competing with 25 others.
- Set a terrain adaptation only if you need it. Vanilla leaves it unset on 23 of 34 —
fitting the ground is the exception, not the default.
- Biome lists are the placement control for most structures. A one-biome list is how the
village variants stay in their own biomes without any extra logic.