How to drain an ocean in Minecraft

There are many reasons a player could have for wanting to drain an ocean in Minecraft. Perhaps the player spawned inside of a mostly water world and wants some land to build on. Other players may be looking to drain the ocean around an ocean monument to create an automatic farm. Others may simply be bored in their world and looking for things to do.

These ocean haters should be happy to know there are multitudes of ways to drain oceans in Minecraft. Some methods take much longer and require many more resources, and others are relatively for draining an entire biome.

Regardless of the reason for draining the ocean, here are some methods players can use to accomplish their ocean dreams in the game.

Different ways to drain an ocean in Minecraft (2022)

Sand or Gravel

Filling in an ocean with sand (Image via Reddit)

This one is a classic way to get rid of water in Minecraft. But it requires massive amounts of sand or gravel.

Sand and gravel are both blocks that are affected by gravity. This means these blocks will fall until they land on a solid block or surface. If players wish to drain an ocean they could potentially drop sand or gravel into the ocean and then dig it up by hand after all the water is gone.

Not only does this method take massive amounts of gravel and sand to get started, but it also takes an insane amount of shovels as well. Not to mention how long the player will have to spend placing and digging up each block.

Unfortunately for ocean draining enthusiasts, this may be the best way to drain an ocean in vanilla Minecraft.

World Edit and other editor services

World Edit (Image via minecraftsix)

For players on Bukkit servers or those who have access to World Edit, this may be the best option to remove water. Using the World Edit program, players will be able to easily and quickly remove water from their oceans without having to interact with the ocean directly in-game.

There are other Minecraft editor services for players to use as well. One such is MC Edit which will allow the player to highlight an area of water and replace it with air. There are a few other Minecraft editor services players can use as well such as Tynker, Universal Edit, and Voxel Sniper.

Commands

For players who don't have access or prefer not to use world editing services and don't have the time or resources to be placing and digging thousands of sand blocks, commands will come in handy.

Commands may be the easiest way to drain an ocean in Minecraft. They are a middle ground between direct placing and digging work and using out-of-game Minecraft services.

The best command players can use to drain an ocean is:

/setblock ~ ~ ~ repeating_command_block{auto:1,Command:"execute at @p run fill ~-15 ~-15 ~-15 ~15 ~15 ~15 air replace water"}

This command will effectively drain the ocean or chunk of water the player desires.