Abandoned Camps Guide: The Free Loot Stop You Shouldn't Walk Past

Abandoned camps are one of the more useful additions coming to Minecraft: small surface campsites with a wool tent, a cold campfire, supply barrels, and occasionally a hidden chest worth genuinely good loot. They're part of the third game drop of 2026, the autumn-themed update built around the new dappled forest biome.

The feature has already moved past its early experimental stage. Recent Preview and Beta builds removed the experimental toggle entirely, meaning camps and the rest of Drop 3 now generate by default rather than requiring an extra setting. A full stable release is expected soon, so this is a good time to get familiar with them before they show up in everyone's worlds.

What They Look Like

The centerpiece is a tent built from wool stairs, and it can generate in any of the 16 wool colors. Around it you'll typically find chests, barrels, an unlit campfire, a crafting table, cauldrons, hay bales, oxidized copper lanterns, and sometimes a copper golem statue for decoration. Some camps generate in a more ruined state with cobwebs and leaves replacing sections of the tent, and a few come with a small crop farm or a tree nearby.

The dressing around the camp changes based on biome. A cherry grove camp picks up cherry blocks and leaves, while a dappled forest camp comes surrounded by poplar wood and shelf mushrooms, so no two camps feel quite identical.

Where to Find Them

Camps generate in common Overworld surface biomes, including forest, taiga, savanna, swamp, cherry grove, meadow, wooded badlands, bamboo jungle, and dappled forest. You don't need to search for anything rare, just cover ground across forested or grassy terrain and you'll run into one naturally. Look for the tent's hard-edged silhouette against the landscape, and be aware that dense canopy in dappled or dark forests can hide them from ground level.

The Loot

Camps use a tiered loot system. Barrels are the most common container and hold basic food and supplies. Most camps also include at least one chest with better items like tools and copper gear. The real prize is a rare oxidized copper chest that can contain diamonds, iron gear, potions, and gold. This hidden chest sometimes generates directly underneath a standard container, so it's worth breaking the block below any barrel or chest you loot just to check.

Worth Grabbing

Beyond the loot, wool stairs and slabs, oxidized copper golem statues, and copper lanterns are all worth mining and taking home, especially early in a world before you've set up proper resource chains for them.

Using One as a Starter Base

A camp makes a solid temporary base. Loot everything first, relight the campfire, seal the tent with a door, add torches inside so nothing spawns, and keep the barrels as storage rather than breaking them. If you want an extreme version of this, there's a seed with an isolated island that spawns you directly on top of an abandoned camp, giving you shelter and supplies with nothing else around for a genuine survival challenge.

How Camps Compare

They're smaller and less rewarding than villages or temples, but they carry no danger and show up far more often. No hostile mobs guard them, no traps wait inside, and you'll come across dozens of camps in the time it takes to find a single woodland mansion. The intent seems clear: a low-risk, frequent reward for exploring rather than a rare landmark to hunt down.