What was monolith in Minecraft?

Monoliths were glitched areas of terrain that could take up massive amounts of an otherwise amazing Minecraft seed. This makes them one of the most unique terrain bugs out there since they weren't small pockets of strange terrain, but could be huge potions of a world. But there's actually a lot more to these strange features than there might seem on the surface.

Detailed below is everything a player might ever need to know about monoliths, including the versions of the game they were found in, and how to recreate them in a modern world, for use as the backdrop of a super cool Minecraft mega base.

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What were Minecraft's monoliths?

Monolith in a infdev world I generated (inf-20100615 to be exact) seed + world download in comments byu/Sylomer2 inminecraftseeds

As mentioned previously, monoliths were massive terrain generation bugs. They would result in terrain that abruptly generated upwards infinitely, only stopped by the Minecraft world height limit. They were caused by an error in the game's old Perlin noise generator, which would result in huge spikes in terrain change under certain circumstances.

The area below these monoliths was actually completely hollow, only filled with water and bedrock at the respective levels, although it was also possible to find small pockets of regular terrain within monoliths.

They are listed as a structure in documentation around the game, strangely enough, making them one of Minecraft's forgotten structures.

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How long were they in the game?

Monoliths were removed in the same version that ghasts, zombie pigmen, and the Nether were added (Image via Mojang)

The original monolith was actually in the game for a very brief time. The first version they could appear in was Java Edition Infdev 20100611, which was released on June 11, 2010. And they were officially removed in Java Edition Alpha v1.2.0, which was released on October 30, 2010. This means this terrain bug was only around for a few months.

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Can they be replicated in modern versions?

A monolith in a more modern version of the game (Image via Mojang)

Unfortunately, the most modern version of the game has no official way to replicate any terrain even close to monoliths. The most similar thing the modern version has is the amplified world type, which causes huge mountain ranges naturally, but they don't have the same harsh edges most of the time.

However, by temporarily going back to any version of the game with the customized world type and setting "Biome Scale Weight" to negative values, the terrain can be recreated. These more modern worlds should be recent enough to survive an update to the most modern versions of the game, allowing for monoliths to be seen in survival.

Additionally, monoliths can be recreated in 1.19 using customized worlds that multiply the terrain density function by a negative number. Interestingly, caves that generate through the hollow bit of the monolith are inverted, becoming blocks of stone or deepslate in cave shapes. Combined with Minecraft's new ore generation, having so much stone near the top of the world might actually be useful.