Spawning in or near a village provides game play opportunities that are otherwise hard to come by. If you want to materialize in such a location, and are using version 1.16.1, try one of these seeds. To use the seed, enter the number as it is here (including the negative sign if there is one) in the seed box under “options” when you are creating a world. The version of Minecraft you are running matters. These seeds are for version 1.16.1

Version 1.16.3

NEW

This seed is a mixed bag. You appear very near a deep forest village that is a short distance from a desert biome. There is a lot of coal but almost no iron as far as I can tell. But, it is a nice village.

Seed: -4718454556811912285

Near a village with amazing mine/chasm

This seed: 5532707655392736628 will get you a couple of hundred blocks from a village. At the edge of the village is a squarish and deep chasm. Down in the chasm is a pretty good mine complex. The bottom of the visible complex is at altitude ca 34, but nearby is a deep extention of the chasm (but no old mine down there) that will get you to 12 blocks elevation. So the entire range of mining possibilities is already dug for you, though not easily navigated.

It is a very large and nice village with major water, like an inland waterway. If you explore along the waterway you’ll find a most unusual shipwreck, entirely on land, like it was buried in an old sandbar.

There is a desert village not too far away (a few hundred blocks) which also has a shipwreck near it (but this one is totally under the desert-side ocean).

Super Mine

This is the best mine I’ve seen, so I’m breaking the theme and giving it to you even though you do not spawn in a village

Enter the world and TP to -670 70 -280 There is a village here and several interesting nearby open caves. There is a second smaller village so close it might be the same village. Mining under the village you will find an extensive mine system with a lot of exposed ore and three chests with good stuff in them.

The seed is -8494316167453570516

Spawning within or in sight of a village:

-1053128584069537523

This spawns within sight of a village on an open landscape near desert and water. There is a mineshaft at about 416 ~ 128, beneath the desert and ocean region.

Spawn right in front of a pillager outpost

Then you die then yo respawn then you die then you respawn… have fun!

See: 9220675143558309571

_______________ everything below this is 1.16.1 or 1.16.2

-6792219503154658043

Spawns right in the middle of a village.
There is a river running through the village, and down river not too far is a mineshaft. The nearest point to the mineshaft is on the surface near 68.90 ~ -261.54

Spawning near a village:

-5296127309940685884

The village is 207 blocks away.

Sparsely populated forest village with some rugged terrain.

Go right around or over the steep sided squarish mountain the village is next to to find a cave with plenty of surface charcoal. There is a mineshaft nearby as well, north of the village, also on the other side of that mountain.

Even though you are in a forest, there is ocean within 400 blocks, where you will find a buried treasure at about -40, -325. Dig around, you’ll find it.

This map also has one of the more spectacular mountain-ocean interfaces.

-1498961200349013624

The village is just over 300 blocks away. There is a mineshaft close by. There is a large house with a library inside. Go to the front steps, then measure out about 8 paces from there, and dig straight down, and you’ll hit the mine system.

2336358023575630299

The spawn point is near a fairly deep cave with a lot of potential, inclining lava.

A Village is just over 100 blocks to the northwest, but you’ll have to go through thick woods and rugged terrain. Head for high ground, you’ll probably find some path blocks there to give you a clue as to where it is.

There is a tall house with a second floor only reachable by an outside stairway. The lower floor has a bed and a crafting table. Go to the front of the house and head out about five or six blocks and dig straight down. That will be your mineshaft. You will have to dig down just over 40 blocks, but it is a spectacular mineshaft with many hazards including water and lava.

807383736090756821

You will spawn on a small island off an elongated, mountainous peninsula. Head north, crossing the water. After going around a big mountain you will find a village.

In the village is a squarish house with a red carpet and a brewing station in it, with some grass overgrowing the floor. Directly below the red carpet is a void containing a special prize. You’ll have to dig down about 16 blocks or so.

To locate the nearest underground mineshaft, locate the house on stilts that has the cartography table in it. Go to the back of the house and move about 15 paces (blocks) north. Then walk west about 21 paces, through the garden area. You will need to dig down about 40 blocks, then you will be in part of the mine.

Head east from the village, along the shore, to find large island mountain with a huge void in the middle of it. Off a low rocky peninsula of the island, facing east, is a comma shaped sandbar/island. Just off the sandbar, under the water and under the sand, is a buried treasure that has lots of goods stuff in it.

-3100377989373862997

You will spawn at about 15.50 63.00 41.50 just a short distance from a desert village. There is a mineshaft not too far away. One point within the mineshaft is 277.48 26.00 35.11. Happy digging.

-6936997656315095788

Spawn at -168 82 204
Nearest village: -226 74 128 (Medium size village with nearby cliffs and good terrain, and water.)

Another village: 170 64 157

Mineshaft not too far away at -383 74 304
Point inside the mineshaft: -404 24 295
Buried treasure on a small island at 425 66 473

6014823249579880796

Spawn at 231.50 70.00 3.50 and travel from there to a desert village at 63.00 63.00 106.68.
There is a nearby mineshaft. If you can dig your way to about -48.85 15.00 87.80 you will find an interesting integration between a large natural chasm and the mineshaft. Careful. The floor is lava!

Bonus village at -790.54 63.94 748.07.

Bonus adventure seed!

Try this seed: -8376010895890193196

You will spawn here: -3.50 110.00 -1.50. Good luck with that.

It is a cool book in that it comes very nicely packaged like an iPhone, and it is a six sided blocky thing with a pixelated cover and 300 pages. This is the go to reference for everything you need to know, and probably, can know, about each of the Minecraft block, up through version 1.8,which isn’t even out yet. The blocks are grouped by fundamental type (natural, ores and minerals, plants, and liquids and gasses). Important information like the blast resistance, transparency, and so on are included. The book even covers blocks found only in the Netherlands. Not the ones in Europe. The one in the other dimension.

The book is published by Egmont, which is a children’s book publisher, but it is also a full on Mojang product.

The visuals are highly pixelated, in that everything is a three dimensional square block. Like this:

The game can be simple, or complex. It requires creativity and knowledge of complex thing. Once a player discovers that the game is hackable, it requires hacking. My 9 year old son has developed fairly impressive programming abilities just from messing with Minecraft (aside from his robot building, etc.)

But if you didn’t know all that you likely would not be reading a review of minecraft books.

Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, has produced a nmber of “handbooks” covering basic minecraft activities, like working with redstone (an important substance, it makes fire) or constructing things like buildings. Here’s the thing (I whisper conspiratorially to fellow parents) … you don’t really need books to learn Minecraft. You can learn everything you need to know by watching tens of hours of mindless YouTube videos. Or, you can trick your kids into reading books about Minecraft, then, they … well … read!

And, for this reason, I recommend the Minecraft Handbook Collection – 4 books (Beginner’s Handbook, Redstone Handbook, Combat Handbook, Construction Handbook). This set comes in a very nice gold embossed (not real gold) dust cover, and the cloth bound editions are nice books.

… Includes the Essential Handbook, Redstone Handbook, Combat Handbook, and Construction Handbook.

For the first time ever, Minecraft’s four bestselling handbooks are available in a stunning, gold-foiled boxed set! This ultimate collection includes the Essential Handbook, Redstone Handbook, Combat Handbook, and Construction Handbook.

Minecraft–the indie sandbox video game that took the world by storm–has been hailed as one of the greatest phenomena amongst gamers and educators for both its simplicity and its brilliance. Allowing players to build, explore, create, collaborate, and even survive, Minecraft has created a brave new world of gameplay. Each handbook contains helpful tips and information from the creators themselves, all of which will prove vital to your survival and creativity as you learn to mine, craft, and build in a world that you control.

Well crafted, very useful, attractive books are good for kids.

You can buy Minecraft in various forms such as an XBox 360 version. It comes in Lego form (for example, this), and you can get a Minecraft cloud server version at Minecraft.net.

If you install Minecraft from Minecraft.net (about 30 bucks) and have Python 3, Java, the Minceraft Python API, and a Spigot Minecraft Server, you can program your own versions of the game using Python programming/scripting language.

But how? How do you do that?

Well, you can get Learn to Program with Minecraft: Transform Your World with the Power of Python. This book is intended to teach programming, in the Minecraft setting. The book is designed for kids 10 years and older, though I’m sure some younger kids can use it. Also, it must be admitted that a learning to program book like this may be most valuable for adults who are not coders but want to learn some coding, and happen to be gamers and like Minecraft.

The book, new on the market, provides excellent instructions for setting up all that stuff mentioned above. Everything should work on a Windows machine, on Mac OS X, and Linux.

The programming you do with this book is pretty sophisticated. You learn to create palaces, pyramids, to teleoport players around, to stack blocks, interact with Minecraft’s chat feature, blow stuff up, cast spells, and replicate sections of the Minecraft countryside.

Here is what is interesting about this approach. Python programming is pretty basic, and pretty useful, but one has to do a lot of work to develop something slick and fancy and highly functional (counting working video games or interfaces as highly functional). But working with the existing Minecraft system, via the API, allows some relatively simple programming to produce impressive results. This is “Hello World” on steroids, at the very least.

Of all the diverse No Starch Press programming guides, this one may turn out to be the most effective, as a teaching tools, for that special case where a person is already interested in Minecraft and wants to learn Python.

Here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Setting Up for Your Adventure
Chapter 2: Teleporting with Variables
Chapter 3: Building Quickly and Traveling Far with Math
Chapter 4: Chatting with Strings
Chapter 5: Figuring Out What’s True and False with Booleans
Chapter 6: Making Mini-Games with if Statements
Chapter 7: Dance Parties and Flower Parades with while Loops
Chapter 8: Functions Give You Superpowers
Chapter 9: Hitting Things with Lists and Dictionaries
Chapter 10: Minecraft Magic with for Loops
Chapter 11: Saving and Loading Buildings with Files and Modules
Chapter 12: Getting Classy with Object-Oriented Programming
Afterword
Block ID Cheat Sheet

The author, Craig Richardson, is a teacher of Python, former high school computing science teacher, and has been involved with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.