Much of Minecraft's exploration aspect comes in the form of mysterious structures to explore, but a cool terrain generation glitch causes one of the game's ocean monument structures to generate beneath a mountain instead. There's no shortage of naturally-generated structures to find in Minecraft, with each of these ancient buildings typically offering their own variety of unique and useful loot.
As one might expect, Minecraft's vast ocean monuments can be found deep beneath the waves of a world's ocean biomes and represent a real challenge, thanks not only to the imposing oxygen limits but also due to the unique type of mob that protects these structures. Minecraft's Guardians are some of the tougher enemies that the game has to offer, and are found exclusively in proximity to these otherwise abandoned ruins. It takes some pretty high-level gear to effectively raid these structures, but the available rewards are often worth the risk, as ocean monuments are the only places where players can find sponge blocks.
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Though it would seem ridiculous to find an ocean monument anywhere that isn't underwater, one lucky player happens to unearth one of these structures that spawned underground due to a world generation issue in Minecraft. The player to discover it, a fan known as saape on Reddit, shared the find in a post on the site which shows the monument fully excavated and laying beneath a mesa biome near the sea. According to the player, it was found submerged in a huge pool of water underground, and took them around 10 hours to fully unearth and subsequently drain.
While coming across an ocean monument underground certainly isn't supposed to happen in terms of world generation, Minecraft's method of procedurally generating maps doesn't always work as it should. Finding such a temple underground would offer a fantastic exploration experience nonetheless, bringing to mind some of the game's subterranean structures such as the ancient cities and strongholds. Discovering an ocean monument in an enclosed area also offers a practical benefit, that being the opportunity to more easily construct a Guardian farm which allows players to quickly gather the prismarine shards that Guardians drop as loot.
Though they've existed in the game for some time now, ocean monuments are still highly coveted by Minecraft fans today due to the rare types of building blocks that can be gathered from the structures. Minecraft has doubled down on the usage of naturally-generated structures in the time since Update Aquatic, introducing new structures with almost every update that serve to enhance the game's exploration opportunities. While the Wild Update introduced a similar type of structure in the ancient city which introduced an exclusive and terrifying new mob called the Warden, Minecraft's latest Trails and Tales update has added the trail ruins, which offer their own, less dangerous mysteries to uncover.
Minecraft is available on mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, and most legacy platforms.
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Source: Reddit