How to excavate trail ruins in Minecraft

Trail ruins is a new structure that was added with the latest Minecraft 1.20 Trails and Tales update. It is a unique structure since it is completely buried underground or underwater and is hard to spot. However, once you find one, you can spend some time exploring the ancient building.

There are a few things to remember before you venture into these new structures. Mojang has added new blocks and items specific to trail ruins with completely new mechanics. Here is a short tutorial on how to excavate these buried places.

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Steps to excavate trail ruins in Minecraft

Items and resources needed

Players will have to stay close to the ground to spot trail ruins and use a brush on suspicious gravel in Minecraft (Image via Sportskeeda)

First, you must gather the resources you'll need for finding and excavating the new structure. Here is a list of all the items:

• Brush
• Saddled horse
• Lots of food items
• Bed (if you want to skip night)
• Other tools and weapons

A horse is mentioned on the list since you'll likely have to travel quite far before finding a trail ruin, especially if you have already explored the old world. Although you could use elytra to travel faster in the air, you might miss the structure since it only protrudes a little and can be missed from above.

The new brush tool will be needed to extract items from all the suspicious gravel blocks located there.

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What do trail ruins look like?

Trail Ruins will have a few gravel and terracotta blocks in the middle of a grassy biome in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

When searching for trail ruins, you must keep an eye out for a cluster of blocks consisting of gravel and terracotta in particular. Since these structures are generated in taiga and jungle biomes, they'll look out of place. Once found, you'll know that there is an entire structure buried underneath it.

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How to dig around and distinguish suspicious gravel

Suspicious gravel blocks will have darker pixels right at the center in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

The aim is to dig and find as many suspicious gravel blocks as possible. The new brush tool can be used on them to extract random items, including some valuable ones.

The suspicious gravel blocks are slightly darker right at the center compared to regular gravel. Hence, look closely and do not randomly shovel all the gravel blocks. Whenever you find a suspicious gravel block, make sure that you do not step on it (do not dig straight down to avoid this) or let any other gravel or sand block fall on it.

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Keep digging for more items

Keep on digging and find new items from suspicious gravel in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

The trail ruins structure is quite massive, even though it might initially feel small. You can keep going deeper and branching out in different directions to find more of these new suspicious gravel blocks to brush.