The Bug:
Shipwrecks and ocean ruins can generate with empty buried treasure maps.
Here is an example:
Version: 24w34a
Seed: -3841550492582472260
Coordinates: /execute in minecraft:overworld run tp @s -1812.76 40.00 990.41 27.92 22.60
Steps to Reproduce:
Generate a world with the seed provided above and teleport to the given coordinates.
Open the chest that's in front of you and look at the buried treasure map.
Observed Behavior:
Empty buried treasure maps can generate.
Expected Behavior:
Buried treasure maps would not be empty.
Linked issues
is duplicated by 57
Attachments
Comments 71


If the world cannot have buried treasure at all (e.g. a single biome Warm Ocean world) the buried treasure map will also be replaced with an empty map. I suspect the cause in your normal world is that the game could not find a buried treasure for the map to point to.

The world can have buried treasure, though, there are just none nearby.
I'm having this issue in a 1.18.2 newly generated world. Seed is 250425787207038274, spawn is near a shipwreck with a treasure map that turns into a regular map. There's also an underwater ruin to the north with a treasure map that also turns into a regular map.

I wonder if the empty maps are an intended feature in case of failing to find a treasure chest close enough, such as in cases where there are no buried treasure like in single biome ocean worlds, though it seems to be triggering even when this is not the case. I can't imagine the maps still being named 'Buried Treasure Map' is intentional however, and occurs in said types of single biome worlds as well. These may be two seperate bugs.
playing version 1.21.4 on pc with Java survival. and still having the same problem today at 5th February 2025. I am now on a new world since start of 2025, but in december 2024 i had the same problem with different world. That world was really messed up thats why i made a new one. mobs kept attacking my house specialy creepers and i was mostly restoring then exploring . but the world i am in now is so nice everything is on a nice distant and even rare blocks are more often. like i already found deepslate emerald. or like cobbelstone diamond. because the world i am in now has full of cracks in the ground that goes very deep in a straight line. sorry for my long message, but i read that the empty maps are because the treasure is to far away. what if we kept the map and the treasure is more uplcose. could to map turn back to a treasure map or is there no way to make it appear. what i also noticed is that some suncken ships also share same treasure maps. could it be that the treasure was already found and even chest destroyed which make the treasure map turn into normal ???? just my thoughts of it, but for the main time i dont use them and just store them away untill i see apearing myself. then i would have the answer myself but maybe someone tried those tricks already.

Confirming the same issue in snapshot 25w09b.

started a world on 2-2-25 world seed 108991737, i am 548 MC days into this world and have raided quite a few ship wrecks and haven't found a single working buried treasure map. I thought maybe it was a mod i am using causing the issue till i read this bug report, please fix this bug asap, thanks i really need the maps to work. Mods i use are all for game optimizations so my potato pc can run the game efficiently.

I confirm. This error has occurred to me several times in version 1.21.4
☝️ I want to mention that this doesn't happen in all cases, that is, it has generally only happened to me in those chests (with a treasure map inside) that are located relatively far from land biomes, and I suspect that the map is blank because it is generally surrounded by deep sea and doesn't detect land area in order to generate the treasure chest, and if that were the case, it doesn't make sense for a treasure map to be blank

Can confirm this error in 1.21.5
This error happened to me in this seed:
-3802117286153447881 (39, 65, -172)
Can confirm.
Edit: There are no buried treasure for several hundred blocks around it, which may be the cause.
At 330, -330, I had the same problem in the same seed except it did generate a map but it just took really long to load.