We were setting up a new Minecraft server at HTG headquarters to play the awesome Captive Minecraft survival mode game (which uses vanilla Minecraft, no mods required), when we realized we didn't have an article about how to find your saved games folder.

There are tons of Minecraft worlds on the Internet that you can download, unzip, and then play on your local computer without having to join a server or set one up, but to do that, you'll need to know how to get to your saved games, and Minecraft doesn't put those worlds into a place you'd expect, like your Documents folder.

We do have an article about how to backup, sync, and store your Minecraft saves in Dropbox, so if you want to do that, make sure to read the article.

Finding Your Minecraft Saved Games on Windows

Your saved games are stored inside of the AppData folder, which isn't that easily to find or get to because the whole AppData folder is hidden. Which makes it more confusing why they decided to put all the saved games there.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft

Luckily there's an easy way to get to the Minecraft saved games folder. Just copy and paste this into the Search or Run box:

%appdata%\.minecraft

And hit the Enter key, of course.

Once you are there, you can browse down into the saves folder and copy, move, or do whatever you need to do.

That's all there is to it.

Finding Your Minecraft Saved Games on Mac OS X

On OS X, your saved games folder is located inside of the Library/Application Support directory inside of your user folder, but of course these folders aren't easy to find the normal way.

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/minecraft

The easy way to get there is to just paste this into the Spotlight search window and hit the enter key.

~/Library/Application Support/minecraft

From there you can browse into the saves folder, and you'll see all of them there.

Finding Your Minecraft Saved Games on Linux

We don't have screenshots for Linux, but it's all stored inside of the .minecraft directory inside of your user folder. The problem is that any directory that starts with a period is hidden in Linux.

/home/<username>/.minecraft

You can also get there by using the ~ shortcut which represents your user folder directory.

~/.minecraft

Loading Saved Games

Once you click to Single Player mode, you'll see the list of saved games. If you exit this screen and then click back in, you'll immediately see the new saved game that you unzipped or otherwise copied into this folder.