Watchtowers and Guide Posts

Watchtowers and Guide Posts are two groups of small surface structures added by Explorify. A watchtower is a lookout tower attached to a house, with chests in both. A guide post is a tall cobblestone structure with wood trim and campfires, placed in cold and warm biomes. Guide posts hold no chests and no mobs, so their value is mainly as landmarks.

Generation

Both groups generate on the Overworld surface. Watchtowers form one structure set of three variants, and each variant takes an equal share of the set. The plains variant can generate in 35 biomes, the savanna variant in 17 and the taiga variant in 52. Biome lists are shown in the table below and include plains, savanna and taiga biomes.

Guide posts form a second set of two variants. The cold variant generates in 28 biomes, mostly snowy and mountain biomes such as Grove, Snowy Slopes and Frozen Peaks. The warm variant generates in four volcanic biomes: Volcano, Volcanic Peaks, Volcanic Crater and Stony Peaks.

Each set places one start per grid cell. The spacing is the grid cell size in chunks, and the separation is the minimum distance between starts of the same set. Watchtowers use a spacing of 138 chunks and a separation of 69 chunks. Guide posts use a spacing of 92 chunks and a separation of 28 chunks.

Rarity in practice is low. In a 26 km² sample of the world, a savanna watchtower and a taiga watchtower each appeared once. No plains watchtower and no guide post was found. The pack spreads out normal structures, and these two are not on the horror list, so they follow the lower density used for non-horror structures. Surface structures keep a 6-chunk buffer around Villages, and a smaller structure is skipped when its footprint overlaps a larger surface structure.

Layout

Watchtower

A watchtower is built from a base plate of grass blocks, a main house, an optional tower and small feature piles. The plains house is 9 by 25 by 9 blocks. It is built mostly from oak planks, oak logs, oak slabs, oak stairs and oak trapdoors. Inside are a chest, a furnace, a crafting table, two red beds, a lantern, wall torches and a torch. Each house has six cobwebs, and each cobweb has a 66% chance of being removed when the structure generates, so most houses have only a few left.

The tower is 11 by 15 by 11 blocks and is made of cobblestone walls and blocks with oak trim. It has a ladder, a torch, a lantern, a chest and a smoker. The tower is an optional piece and is rarely attached. Its template pool gives the empty option a weight of 48 against 1 for the tower.

The base plate can also hold feature piles: a log pile with a campfire, a hay bale pile, a coal pile, and a resource pile of raw iron and raw copper blocks.

The savanna and taiga watchtowers use the same set of pieces, with their own house and tower templates.

Guide Post

A guide post is an 11 by 25 by 11 block structure built mostly from cobblestone, with cobblestone stairs, cobblestone walls, stone bricks and chiseled stone bricks. The cold post uses spruce logs, spruce planks and spruce slabs for its wood trim. The warm post uses the same layout with jungle wood. Each post has 18 hay bale blocks and a cluster of five campfires near the middle, 16 blocks above the base.

Generation randomizes the blocks. Each cobblestone block has about a 30% chance of becoming andesite, about a 21% chance of becoming stone bricks, and a few percent chance of becoming mossy cobblestone. Each campfire has about a one-in-four chance of being removed, so a generated post often has fewer than five campfires.

Inhabitants

Neither structure places mobs or spawners. The usual mob spawns of the surrounding biome apply, and the structures themselves are not a source of hostile mobs.

Loot

Watchtower

Each watchtower has two chests: one in the house and one in the tower. Both use the vanilla village house loot table for their variant (village_plains_house, village_savanna_house or village_taiga_house). Emeralds are the most valuable item in all three tables, at 21% in the plains table, 26% in the savanna table and 19% in the taiga table. The plains table also has books and gold nuggets at 15% each, and the savanna table has saddles at 10%. The taiga table has pumpkin pie at 9%.

Guide Post

Guide posts have no chests, so they give no loot.

Guide Post Cold explorify:guide_post_cold

Biomes (28): Shield, Snowy Badlands, Cold Desert, Meadow, Rocky Mountains, Grove, Snowy Coniferous Forest, Auroral Garden, Snowy Slopes, Birch Taiga, Wintry Forest, Wisteria Grove, Snowy Fir Clearing, Highland Fields, Crag, Snowblossom Grove, Frozen Peaks, Jade Cliffs, Alpine Grove, Jagged Peaks, Pine Slopes, Snowy Shield, Snowy Cherry Grove, Scarlet Mountains, Snowy Maple Forest, Emerald Peaks, Siberian Grove, Caldera

Guide Post Warm explorify:guide_post_warm

Biomes (4): Volcanic Peaks, Volcano, Stony Peaks, Volcanic Crater

Plains explorify:watchtower/plains

Biomes (35): Plains, Brushland, Highlands, Clover Plains, Arid Highlands, Coniferous Forest, Prairie, Prairie, Alpine Highlands, Mediterranean Forest, Seasonal Forest, Lavender Field, Shrubland, Temperate Highlands, Steppe, Jacaranda Glade, Aspen Glade, Meadow, Shrubland, Fir Clearing, Grassland, Poppy Fields, Flower Fields, Wisteria Grove, Highland Fields, Old Growth Woodland, Pasture, Orchid Swamp, Blooming Plateau, Grassland, Snowy Shield, Snowy Maple Forest, Shield Clearing, Caldera, Rocky Meadow (Removed)

Chest loot: minecraft:chests/village/village_plains_house

Item	Chance	Avg. stack
Apple	75.7%	5.1
Potato	75.3%	6.9
Bread	72.3%	4.1
Tomato Seeds	71.7%	2.8
Onion	70.0%	2.8
Oak Sapling	49.3%	2.1
Dandelion	22.7%	1.2
Emerald	21.3%	2.9
Book	15.3%	1.0
Gold Nugget	14.7%	2.0
Feather	10.7%	1.1
Poppy	10.3%	1.1

Savanna explorify:watchtower/savanna

Biomes (17): Savanna, Arid Highlands, Prairie, Dry Bushland, Mediterranean Forest, Hot Shrubland, Scrubland, Dryland, Savanna Badlands, Outback, Baobab Savanna, Fractured Savanna, Ashen Savanna, White Mesa, Savanna Slopes, Basalt Cliffs, Steppe (Removed)

Chest loot: minecraft:chests/village/village_savanna_house

Item	Chance	Avg. stack
Wheat Seeds	73.7%	4.9
Cabbage Seeds	72.3%	3.3
Tomato Seeds	71.7%	2.8
Acacia Sapling	70.7%	2.5
Bread	70.7%	4.5
Short Grass	45.0%	1.2
Tall Grass	45.0%	1.3
Emerald	26.0%	2.7
Torch	13.7%	1.7
Bucket	13.3%	1.0
Gold Nugget	11.7%	1.8
Saddle	9.7%	1.0

Taiga explorify:watchtower/taiga

Biomes (52): Yellowstone, Blackwood Taiga, Coniferous Forest, Taiga, Forested Highlands, Shield, Alpine Highlands, Pine Taiga, Boreal Taiga, Shrubland, Maple Woods, Field, Snowy Taiga, Muskeg, Tundra, Cold Boreal Taiga, Old Growth Pine Taiga, Tundra, Frozen Pine Taiga, Snowy Coniferous Forest, Auroral Garden, Old Growth Spruce Taiga, Birch Taiga, Wintry Forest, Snowy Fir Clearing, Old Growth Dead Forest, Redwoods, Ice Marsh, Old Growth Golden Boreal Taiga, Glacial Chasm, Old Growth Boreal Taiga, Sparse Redwoods, Dead Forest, Siberian Taiga, Snowblossom Grove, Snowy Maple Woods, Forested Field, Wintry Lowlands, Alpine Grove, Spires, Snowy Shield, Moonlight Grove, Hot Springs, Lush Valley, White Cliffs, Snowy Maple Forest, Frozen Cliffs, Siberian Grove, Rocky Shrubland, Icy Heights, Lavender Forest, Golden Boreal Taiga (Removed)

Chest loot: minecraft:chests/village/village_taiga_house

Item	Chance	Avg. stack
Rice	69.7%	2.7
Cabbage Seeds	68.3%	2.7
Spruce Log	66.7%	4.5
Bread	66.3%	3.6
Potato	61.7%	6.1
Sweet Berries	42.7%	5.1
Pumpkin Seeds	41.3%	4.0
Spruce Sapling	40.7%	3.6
Fern	21.0%	1.2
Large Fern	20.7%	1.1
Emerald	19.0%	2.9
Pumpkin Pie	9.3%	1.1
Spruce Sign	8.3%	1.0
Iron Nugget	7.7%	2.8

Tips

• Search both chests in a watchtower. The house chest and the tower chest roll the same table for their variant, so each is a separate source of loot.
• Sleep in one of the two red beds in a watchtower house to set your respawn point there.
• In the 26 km² sample only savanna and taiga watchtowers turned up. Search those biomes first if you need one.
• Guide posts rise high above their biome and make useful landmarks. About a quarter of their campfires are usually missing, so do not count on them for light.
• Clear the cobwebs in a watchtower house before you walk through it. They block movement and are easy to break with a sword or shears.