What is a Minecraft seed?

A seed is the number Minecraft uses to build a world. The same seed in the same game version gives the same mountains, villages and caves, which is why players share seeds for a good spawn or a speedrun. If you typed words when you created the world, the game turned them into a number, and that number is what it saves.

The seed is stored in the world's files. In game, Java Edition shows it with the /seed command and Bedrock Edition shows it in the world settings. That doesn't help with an old backup, a world a friend sent you, or a server where you aren't an operator.

Tool description

Open a world and its seed appears, ready to copy, along with the world name, the edition and the game version that last saved it. Pick the world's level.dat file, its whole folder, or a .zip or .mcworld backup. Everything runs in your browser, so the world never leaves your device.

Features

  • Java worlds of any age, including 26.1 and newer, and Bedrock worlds
  • Large backups open quickly, since only two small files inside them are read
  • World name, edition and version shown next to the seed, so you know you opened the right world

Where to find your world

  • Java Edition: the saves folder in .minecraft, which is %appdata%\.minecraft\saves on Windows and ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves on macOS. Launchers like Prism Launcher and CurseForge have their own saves folder in each instance.
  • Bedrock Edition: the com.mojang/minecraftWorlds folder. The world folders there have random names, and the levelname.txt inside each one shows the world's name. On a phone, use Export World in the world's settings to save a .mcworld file.
  • Servers: the world folder sits next to server.properties and is usually called world.

Good to know

  • Java Edition 26.1 moved the seed out of level.dat into data/minecraft/world_gen_settings.dat. Open the whole world folder or its zip and the tool finds both files. If you open level.dat alone, it asks for the second one.
  • Java seeds are often negative. The minus sign is part of the seed, so keep it when you copy it.
  • The level-seed line in server.properties is empty when the server picked a random seed. The level.dat has the real one.
  • A seed can build different terrain in another game version, because big updates change how worlds are generated.