The Mossy Temple is the Legendary Monsters miniboss lair you’ll run into in the Jungle, a single overgrown ruin with an Overgrown Colossus asleep on a mound in the middle of it. There’s no door to open and no 
Chest to find anywhere inside, which makes it one of the more straightforward trips in the mod.
What you’re going for is the 
Nature Crystal, as the Colossus drops one when it dies and the 
Mossy Hammer, the 
Mossy Chestplate and the 
Totem Of Moss are all built from it. The floor pays as well, since the 
Gravel is laced with 
Suspicious Gravel that hides Diamonds and Emerald Blocks, so you’ll want a 
Brush in the bag alongside the Sword.
Finding the Structure
The Mossy Temple only generates in the Overworld, in Jungle and Sparse Jungle. A few modded biomes are listed as optional extras, so Biomes O’ Plenty’s Rain Forest and a handful of Oh The Biomes We’ve Gone jungles will hold one if you’re running those. Bamboo Jungle is not on the list, which catches people out, as it looks like exactly the right place for it.
Temples sit about 35 chunks apart, so they’re spread fairly thin across a world. The temple is a surface structure that sits on top of the ground rather than under it, and once you’re within a few hundred blocks you’ll usually spot the mossy rocks breaking the treeline.
The 
Eye Of Moss is what actually finds it. Four 
Moss Block around one 
Ender Pearl makes one, and throwing it sends it off toward the nearest Mossy Temple exactly like an 
Eye of Ender does.
Each eye searches about 100 chunks, so if there’s no temple in range it simply won’t throw and you keep the item. The three steps below are the whole search, and on a Jungle expedition it’s rarely more than a couple of throws.
Craft a Few Eyes
Moss Block and Ender Pearls
Every throw has the same chance to shatter that a normal Eye of Ender does, so three or four is a safer number to set out with than one. Moss Block spreads from 
Bone Meal on a single one, which leaves the Ender Pearls as the part you’re likely to be short of.
Throw and Follow
It runs ahead before it settles
Keep throwing and walking until the eye stops traveling. While the temple is still far off it climbs and runs ahead of you, and it only drops toward the real spot once you’re nearly standing on it.
Walk In Ready
The Colossus wakes at 15 blocks
There’s no entrance to hunt for, you just walk into the clearing. The Colossus wakes as soon as it can see a player within roughly 15 blocks of the center, so you’ll want to be geared before you cross that line rather than after it.
Two vanilla biomes generate it and the rest of the list only exists if you have the mod that adds them. So in a plain game it’s Jungle or Sparse Jungle, and nothing else will do.
If you’re standing in a Bamboo Jungle and the eye won’t throw, that’s why. Head for ordinary Jungle instead, and the search will start working again once a temple comes inside that 100 chunk range.
Layout
The temple is built from one single piece, so every Mossy Temple in your world is laid out the same way. It measures 47 blocks on each side and stands 22 blocks tall, which makes it a wide, low ruin rather than a tower. 
Mossy Cobblestone, Stone, 
Andesite and 
Stone Bricks make up the bones of it, with Moss Block laid over nearly everything.
The ground floor is the part that matters to you. It’s a flat sheet of Gravel and Stone with patches of Suspicious Gravel set into it, and rounded mossy outcrops rise out of it. 
Bamboo, 
Azalea Leaves, Cave Vines, 
Ferns and 
Lily of the Valley grow over all of it, so from a distance it reads as a Jungle hill rather than a building.
The Overgrown Colossus sleeps on a raised mossy mound right in the center, and that mound is sitting on something. An Emerald Block is buried in the floor layer directly under the center block with an 
Emerald Ore right beside it, which you’ll only find if you dig the mound out once the fight is over.
Three braziers are dotted through the ruin, each a short pillar with a 
Campfire on top framed by 
Iron Trapdoors and a 
Hopper tucked under the flame. A 
Dispenser sits at the foot of each one with 
Stone Pressure Plates beside it, though every Dispenser and Hopper ships empty, so they’re decoration rather than a trap.
Waxed Weathered Copper and 
Waxed Oxidized Copper turn up through the ruin along with a few bits of Dripstone. There’s no gate, no hidden room and no Chest at all, so once you’ve seen the clearing you’ve seen the whole temple.
Mobs
The structure places exactly one creature, the Overgrown Colossus, and it’s already asleep when the chunk generates. There are no spawners, so anything else you meet wandered in on its own, which in a Jungle after dark means the usual 
Zombies, 
Skeletons, 
Spiders and 
Creepers. Nothing gets summoned during the fight either.
While it’s asleep the Colossus takes no damage and won’t accept a potion effect, so there’s no chipping it down before it stands up. It wakes once it can see a player within about 15 blocks and is on its feet a second later, and with the mound dead center there’s very little of the clearing outside that range.
The Mossy Golem you might have heard of isn’t found here at all. That one is summoned with a Totem Of Moss and fights on your side, so the only golem you’ll meet in the temple is the one trying to flatten you.
Projectile immunity is on by default, so every 
Arrow is ignored outright and a thrown 
Trident goes the same way. Standing 4 or more blocks above or below the Colossus also makes it take nothing, which rules out pillaring up as well.
Its defenses are what decide the shape of the fight, and most of them can’t be worked around. Read the list before you pick a weapon, as several of the usual answers do nothing here and you’ll want to know that before the fight rather than halfway through it.
- Damage is capped at 21 per hit, so a big one-shot build is wasted and steady swings do the same work.
- Thrown Potions and Lingering Clouds are ignored along with the Arrows, which takes Splash Harming off the table too.
- Knockback won’t move it, as its knockback resistance is sat at the maximum.
- It regenerates 1 health roughly every second and a quarter, right through the fight, so a slow damage race goes its way rather than yours.
- Lose its attention for about 3 seconds and it heals 20 health at a time, and if it has wandered more than 15 blocks from where it woke it teleports back there.
- Every second hit you land on it, it breaks the blocks around itself, so boxing it in isn’t going to hold.
What’s left is melee, which is what this fight was built around anyway. A Diamond or 
Netherite Sword with Sharpness is the whole plan, and the Mossy Hammer works well enough once you’ve already beaten one Colossus to make it.
Loot
There isn’t a single Chest in the temple, so everything you carry out comes off the floor or off the Colossus. The floor half is the Suspicious Gravel, which is dotted every few blocks across the whole clearing and needs a Brush to open.
Suspicious Gravel Finds
Diamond 
Block of Emerald Moss Block 
String Brushing is the only way to get any of that, as breaking a Suspicious Gravel block loses whatever was inside it. The patches set up in the rock faces above the floor are all empty, so ignore those and work the ground instead, though a couple down there will still come up with nothing.
The Emerald Block and Emerald Ore buried under the boss mound are worth the couple of minutes it takes to dig them out. Moss Block, Bamboo, Azalea Leaves and the Waxed Copper from the pillars are all yours to mine as well, which is a decent haul for a builder before the fight is even counted.
Grab extra Moss Block while you’re down there, since the Mossy Hammer and the Mossy Chestplate both call for it alongside Chiseled Stone Bricks. The temple has far more of it lying around than one crafting run will use.
The Colossus itself drops one item, with no rolls, no rare tier and no Looting scaling, plus 100 experience. That item is the Nature Crystal, and it is the only reason the temple is on anyone’s list.
Overgrown Colossus Drops
That one Nature Crystal is what the whole Mossy Temple set is built on. The Mossy Hammer serves as a pickaxe and a weapon, and right-clicking a block with it damages and poisons everything close to you on a 3 second cooldown. The Mossy Chestplate gives 8 armor and halves the knockback you take, with an R key ability that throws Poison clouds out around you.
The Totem Of Moss summons a tamed Mossy Golem that fights alongside you and speeds up crops it stands near. It can be switched between following you and holding its ground, so it’s just as useful stationed beside a crop field as it is in a fight.
Each of those three costs one Nature Crystal, and a Colossus only ever drops one, so the full set takes three separate temples. Nothing here respawns either, as the Colossus is placed once when the chunk generates and doesn’t come back.
The Boss
There’s no summoning block and no ritual, the Overgrown Colossus is lying on its mound and walking up to it starts the fight. It has no boss bar over the screen, so you’re judging its health by how long you’ve been swinging, which is another reason not to let it slip out of your sight and heal.
Up close it swings its arms in wide arcs, lunges to close the gap and slams with both arms, and the heavier hits knock a raised 
Shield out of action for several seconds. Most of those swings throw you several blocks back as well, so blocking buys you one hit and then leaves you without the Shield and out of reach.
The Poison is the other half. It plants its arms and sends rings of shockwaves racing outward to about 6 blocks, each hit applying Poison III and healing the Colossus a little, and it can charge through blocks leaving Poison clouds behind. Moving out of the rings and clouds matters far more than blocking them.
A shockwave won’t kill you outright, as Poison stops at half a heart, though the direct damage will happily finish the job while you’re down there. The full attack by attack breakdown, with every damage number, cooldown and timing, lives on the Overgrown Colossus page.
Exploration & Strategy
The temple is open ground and the fight is short if you turn up with the right kit, so the list below is mostly about the Poison and about not being shoved around. The 
Milk Bucket is the item most people forget.
Milk clears the Poison in one drink and a 
Honey Bottle does it as well, which matters because the shockwave rings stack Poison III on you over and over. It’s a surface structure, so a Bed set at the edge of the clearing is all the respawn point you need, and dying without one means a long walk back to a Colossus that has healed to full.
Fight it on the flat Gravel and keep it there. Climbing 4 blocks up makes it immune, it smashes whatever you pillar with anyway, and the open floor gives you room to walk out of the Poison rings rather than through them. Circling the mound works better than backing away in a straight line, since the arm swings only cover an arc in front of it.
If you’re coming back for a second Nature Crystal, bring a Mossy Golem along. The Colossus skips Mossy Golems entirely when it swings, so yours can hold its attention and take nothing for it, though the Poison clouds still hurt it. A Mossy Chestplate from the first trip helps too, as it strips Poison off you as fast as it lands.
Once it’s down, that’s the whole temple safe. Brush the floor, dig out the mound for the Emerald Block underneath, and take the Moss and Bamboo on the way out, as there’s nothing left in here that can hurt you.
FAQ
It’s an Overworld surface structure that only appears in Jungle and Sparse Jungle, plus a few optional biomes from Biomes O’ Plenty and Oh The Biomes We’ve Gone if you have them installed. Bamboo Jungle is not included, so an Eye Of Moss thrown there will look past it. They sit about 35 chunks apart, which is over 500 blocks between one temple and the next.
There are three reasons it ignores you. It takes nothing at all while it’s still asleep, it ignores Arrows and Tridents because projectile immunity is on by default, and it takes nothing while you’re 4 or more blocks above or below it. Thrown Potions and Lingering Clouds are ignored as well, so the fight comes down to melee on level ground.
You do, as the temple has no Chests and the Suspicious Gravel in the floor is where all the material loot sits. One temple holds 9 Diamond and 3 Emerald Block between the patches, and breaking the Gravel instead of brushing it loses whatever was inside. A Brush is a 
Feather, a 
Copper Ingot and a 
Stick, so it’s cheap to bring a spare.
Three, since the Mossy Hammer, the Mossy Chestplate and the Totem Of Moss each want a Nature Crystal and one Colossus drops exactly one. The Colossus doesn’t respawn and spawns nowhere else, so a second crystal means a second Mossy Temple. The Totem is the exception, as killing the Mossy Golem it summons drops the Totem back.
