Shipwrecks worth diving for

Better Shipwrecks replaces every vanilla shipwreck with a full-size, fully 3D, procedurally generated ship — then sinks it. Coral-covered galleons with two gun decks, brigs snapped in two on the sea floor, merchantmen lying on their side with their cargo spilling out, Viking longships keel-up in cold seas, black-sailed pirate wrecks and hulls half-buried on the beach… and no two of them are ever the same.

It only changes world generation: server-side, no dependencies, vanilla loot and treasure maps, and it works with every mod that knows what a shipwreck is.

Every ship, every wreck and every sea of the mod, in a book you can turn, zoom and slice open.
The Shipwreck Guide draws its ships with the same generator that builds them in your world: what you see in the book is what waits for you on the sea floor.

Put a book and any boat in the crafting grid, then right-click the guide to open it.

The five ship classes with their size, masts, guns, chests and crew — afloat as they sailed, or wrecked as you will find them.

Pull the slider to cut a ship open deck by deck. Treasure, map and supply chests and the drowned crew are marked, even through the planks.

Pick a ship, her waters and her fate, roll again as often as you like, and read the /bettershipwrecks place command that builds that very wreck in your world.

• 📖 27 pages in six chapters: logbook, ships, wrecks, waters, loot and the shipyard.
• 🧭 English and Spanish, following the language of your game.
• 🖥️ Still server-side: the guide is a vanilla written book. Players without the mod join as before and read a short version of it; with the mod on the client, the same book opens the interactive guide.
• 💬 A bookmark on the book takes you to our Discord.

At a glance

Five ship classes

Every hull is generated block by block from real ship lines: a sharp bow with a cutwater, a curved U-shaped hull, a keel that rises at the ends and a flat transom stern with a rudder. Nothing is a copied template.

⛵ The Sloop (~30 blocks) — one tall mast with a fore-and-aft mainsail and a jib to the bowsprit, a raised stern cabin and a small cargo hold.

🚩 The Brig (~43 blocks) — two square-rigged masts with three yards each and a crow's nest, forecastle and quarterdeck, the captain's cabin with stern windows and a row of deck guns.

📦 The Merchantman (~47 blocks) — three masts and a deep belly: a hold and a tween deck stacked with barrels, crates and hay, and a tall stern with two cabins.

⚓ The Galleon (~66 blocks, deep water only) — three masts up to 42 blocks tall, two gun decks lined with cannons, a three-tier stern castle with a lit stern gallery, a gilded figurehead and the biggest haul of chests.

🐉 The Viking Longship (~35 blocks, mostly cold seas) — clinker-built hull, carved dragon prow and stern post, painted shields along the gunwales, rowing benches and a striped square sail.

Five ways to wreck (plus the beach)

• Settled upright on the sea floor, keel buried in the sand
• Listing hard to one side
• Snapped in two — both halves settle apart, pitched up from the broken ends
• On its side, masts lying along the sea floor
• Keel up, hull facing the surface
• Beached: shipwrecks on beaches are half-buried in the sand and heeled over, high and dry

Six biome styles

The water a ship sank in decides its look:

• Temperate oceans — oak and spruce hulls, barnacle crusts, seagrass on the decks
• Warm oceans — living coral growing over the hull, coral fans and glowing sea pickles
• Lukewarm oceans — seagrass and sea pickles
• Cold oceans — dark spruce hulls, gravel drifts, Viking longships
• Frozen seas — ice on the hull; snow on beached wrecks
• Pirate ships (anywhere, 15% of sloops, brigs and galleons) — black sails, dark hulls with red trim, soul lanterns

What makes them feel alive

• Real interiors: captain's cabin with a cartography table and the map chest, crew stores in the forecastle, holds and tween decks full of cargo, gun decks with cannons on their carriages
• Treasure where it belongs: the map chest in the captain's cabin, supplies in the forecastle and the hold, the treasure deep in the hold (bigger ships carry more chests)
• Wear and tear: a breach in the side where the ship took the fatal blow, collapsed decks, broken masts whose tops lie on the sea floor with their torn canvas, shattered stern windows
• The sea moves in: flooded, waterlogged interiors, sand drifting into the hold, kelp forests and seagrass around the wreck
• A drowned crew haunts the bigger sunken wrecks
• Hanging lanterns still burning below deck, stern lanterns, anchors on their chains, flags, bells and cobwebs on beached wrecks
• Procedural: every wreck is generated from the world seed, so each one is different
• Rare finds: about one wreck in five wears a rare look — cherry clippers, pale oak ghost ships, royal flagships under purple sails, green-sailed spice traders, crimson mangrove brigs…
• Spilled cargo: barrels, broken planks, hay bales and lost guns lie scattered on the seabed around the hull

Configuration

config/bettershipwrecks-common.toml

Changes apply to shipwrecks generated after the change (existing chunks are not touched).

Commands (for builders and screenshots)

• /bettershipwrecks place <sloop|brig|merchant|galleon|longship> [temperate|warm|lukewarm|cold|frozen|pirate] [upright|listing|broken|capsized|upside_down] — wrecks a ship on the sea floor (or beach) below you
• /bettershipwrecks info — which wreck you are standing at
• /bettershipwrecks test — plans every variant in memory and checks them

Gallery

More screenshots in the Gallery tab.

Which file do I download?

Pick your loader and Minecraft version on the Files tab. Every file was tested on a real server before upload.

File names follow bettershipwrecks-1.1.0+<loader>-<minecraft>.jar (113 files in total).

FAQ

Do I need a new world? Only for new chunks: shipwrecks that already exist stay as they are. Sail to unexplored oceans (or start a new world) to find the new ones.

Does it work on servers? Yes, and only the server needs it: it only changes world generation.

Do treasure maps still work? Yes. The map chest uses the vanilla chests/shipwreck_map loot table, so you still get buried treasure maps, and dolphins still lead you to shipwrecks.

Is it compatible with ocean and biome mods? It uses the vanilla biome tags #minecraft:has_structure/shipwreck and #minecraft:has_structure/shipwreck_beached, so wrecks spawn wherever those mods allow shipwrecks, and pick a style from the biome's name.

Are the ship variants tied to the Minecraft version? The ships themselves are not: every ship class, wreck type and biome style generates on every version. Only some blocks are: cherry hulls need Minecraft 1.20, pale oak ghost ships 1.21.4 and mangrove trims 1.19, and older versions build those wrecks from the closest older wood (birch or jungle). Since 1.1 this is no longer strict: if a backport mod such as Vanilla Backport adds those woods under their vanilla block names, the wrecks are built from the real wood automatically.

Can I use it in my modpack? Yes. MIT licence.

Forge? Yes, see the table above. On 1.20.1 one file works on both Forge 47 and NeoForge 1.20.1.

Fabric? Yes, every version from 1.14 to 26.3. Install Fabric API too.

More from the same author

• Better Bastions — the Nether bastion overhaul: huge procedural piglin fortresses
• TNT Expansion (+100 new craftable TNT) — nukes, meteors, black holes and 130+ TNTs

Screenshots taken with Complementary Reimagined shaders (not included).