YUNG’s Better Mineshafts mod is a great way to add some variety in your underground exploration. The mod adds thirteen new biomes to mineshafts alongside some major updates that give them more life or lack thereof in the case of them being essentially abandoned. The mod expands existing mineshafts to make them more interesting and adds more structures to make them more realistic. You will quickly notice the improvements with the way the vertical tunnel found in many real life mineshafts is now a practical staple of all the new designs and this well can go down an incredible distance. It’s pretty dizzying but at least there are mostly intact ladders to rely on and start exploring!

The shafts are much more detailed now and significantly larger than standard mineshafts. There has been a lot of care put into the details of these new shafts and they show more evidence that they were once occupied. With them being wider and taller there’s less of a claustrophobic feeling and there are many more artifacts and secrets to explore.

The new biomes underground now correlate to the biomes directly above them. So if you’re near a desert or tundra, the mineshaft could be made of sandstone or covered in snow and ice. This can also be a great way to know what biomes you’ve crossed into and if you’d want to venture above ground or not.

And jungle mineshafts are  no different than what you’d expect from other biomes as they will be full of vines crawling up the walls. You may also come across abandoned workstations and outposts that further expand the lore that these were indeed once occupied and operated in but now for whatever reason they’ve been abandoned. Workstations and workstation cellars are relatively common but still could be rare to find. Miners’ outposts are even rarer to find but that just makes it all the more interesting to try and find the remnants of a past civilization. There is even the much rarer chance to find actual surface openings that can give you a very accurate location of where a mineshaft will be but otherwise you’ll have to discover them naturally as you would before through standard mining practices.

This mod really improves the overall underground experience by giving the player so much more to explore. The addition of biomes to the underground areas breaks up the monotony that can sometimes happen with standard mining and you can certainly use these upgraded shafts as a base foundation for improving and getting back into working order. You could come up with interesting backstories with all of this new evidence of life especially when there are certain tunnels that end with very large veins of a variety of ores! Why would a mineshaft with so many resources still readily available suddenly go abandoned and end up with years or decades of disarray?

This mod does also require you to install an API, YUNG’s API found here in order to use it properly.