How to make a Nether Portal in Minecraft

The materials you will need in order to craft a nether portal are:

1. A minimum of 10 Obsidian
2. Flint and Steel

In a Nutshell:

To make a nether portal you will need 14 obsidian to build the frame. The base of the nether portal should be 4 obsidian wide, and the sides of the nether portal should be 5 obsidian high. This design will use 14 blocks of obsidian. Next, you need to activate the Nether Portal which can be accomplished by using flint and steel on the obsidian frame.

Here is the step-by-step pictorial guide you need to follow to make a nether portal in minecraft:

Step 1: Collect Obsidian

To make a nether portal, the first thing you will need to do is collect your obsidian.

Obsidian takes a while to collect, and can only be broken with a diamond or netherite pickaxe.

Obsidian can be created by pouring water over lava, but it can also be found naturally in caves below the surface.

Make sure you mine at least 10 pieces of obsidian, but 14 would be best to make the full portal.

Step 2: Make Flint and Steel

Once you have your obsidian, you need to make your flint and steel.

To make a flint and steel, you need both flint and a piece of iron.

Iron ore can be smelted down, as shown below, to make an iron ingot.

Flint can be collected through breaking gravel. Every few pieces of gravel broken will drop a flint.

Then, in your survival crafting inventory, you can make a flint and steel by placing the two ingredients diagonal from or next to each other in the 2x2 crafting grid. That will make the flint and steel you require to light the portal once constructed. You can also do this in a crafting table.

Step 3: Light your Portal

Now you have to make your portal. The portal shape can be shown below. If you do not have 14 pieces of obsidian, you can use substitute blocks to fill in the four corner pieces. This will still work.

Right click your portal with the flint and steel to light it.

It should start glowing purple, and then you can enter the new dimension.

Some players, especially speedrunners and experienced Minecraft players, will use the game’s mechanics to their advantage to make their nether portal in the fastest possible way.

They do this by using a bucket of skillfully placed water by a lava pool.

Lava pools can be found in desert and plains biomes, but are most common in desert biomes.

This technique is a bit tricky and takes a lot of practice, especially if players want to do it quickly as speedrunners do, but it’s completely worth it and cuts game time down significantly.

Given are the step-by-step instructions to follow to make a Nether Portal without obsidian in hand, or you can watch this video for a quick demo.

First, the player needs a bucket. You can make a bucket using three pieces of iron, and since you still need to collect the iron for a flint and steel.

If players spawn in a desert biome, they might be lucky enough to find a desert temple nearby with iron in it too!

First, to make the portal you must build out a block into the lava pool.

Now you have to place water beside the block as indicated. This will make the first bit of obsidian.

Now you can mine that block you placed to make the base of your portal.

Then make an upside down L-shape with more blocks as demonstrated.

Then you place two blocks horizontally as shown below:

Using the now empty bucket, you can start filling the portal shape block by block with the lava surrounding you. Make each of the sides 3 blocks high and the base and top of it 2 blocks wide.

After collecting the water with the bucket once again, you can light your portal with your flint and steel and enter the Nether.

As you explore throughout your world, you may encounter a ruined portal structure. These portals are often missing a few blocks of obsidian, but otherwise hold many of the required materials to jump-start your trip to the nether.

Chests can also spawn nearby ruined portals holding valuable gold blocks, or even a flint and steel that could light the portal. Other common blocks found in the nether can be found surrounding the ruined portal, such as netherrack, magma blocks, iron blocks, and many others.

If you would like to traverse the overworld quickly, or if you are playing in a survival multiplayer server, it can be beneficial to learn how to connect specific nether portals in the overworld to specific nether portals in the nether.

When there are multiple nether portals in the nether, it can be frustrating when the teleporting does not end where you expect it to. To solve this issue, you first need to understand how the blocks and coordinates line up between the overworld and the nether. Moving one block horizontally in the nether equals moving eight blocks horizontally in the overworld.

When a player teleports, the portal that is closest to the teleporting player will be selected as the destination. If you would like to link portals, take the coordinates of the portal in the nether and multiply it by eight to see where it should be built in the overworld. You can do this vice versa by dividing your overworld coordinates by eight and using those coordinates to build a portal in the nether.

Keep in mind that nether portal connection will ignore the “Y” coordinate. Once the portal is constructed in both dimensions and the coordinates are lined up, the destination portal should be connected properly.

To obtain advancements found in the nether, you will need to be able to access the nether. Simply building and successfully lighting a nether portal will grant you the “We Need to Go Deeper” Advancement. However, there are three more advancements to be obtained by gaining access to the nether dimension.

1. Nether: simply enter the nether dimension after constructing your portal to obtain this advancement.
2. Subspace Bubble: this advancement requires you to travel 875 blocks in the nether in a single direction to travel 7000 blocks in the overworld. Once you have traveled the total distance required in the nether, take a portal back to the overworld to get the advancement.
3. Uneasy Alliance: In order to obtain this advancement, you will need to kill a ghast while you are in the overworld. This can be done by dragging a ghast into the overworld and then killing the ghast. There is also a clever trick with delaying the kill of a ghast in the nether while you are teleporting back to the overworld. If you manage to teleport back to the overworld right before the ghast takes fatal damage, you will receive the advancement.

Credits: MCBasic

Q. Do nether portals have to be 4x5?

A. Nether portals have to be at least 4x5, but they can be bigger. They can actually go up to a size of 23x23 blocks. The one thing to keep in mind when making Nether Portals, however, is that they must be either rectangular or square. They do not work in any other shape.

Q. Can items travel through nether portals?

A. Yes they can! Almost every type of entity can travel through a nether portal, from players to mobs to dropped items. Even unoccupied minecarts (including storage, furnace, and hopper minecarts, too) and boats can travel through portals.

To read more about the nether, click here.

Congratulations! You have now succeeded in making a Nether Portal! There is so much to explore in the Nether, especially since the Minecraft 1.16 Update. The generated structures in the Nether are really interesting to discover and search around, but make sure you aren’t killed by any of the mobs, as it will be a struggle getting back to your belongings. A lot of the mobs in the Nether are fire-oriented, as well, so it’s quite easy to lose your dropped items to a rogue blaze fire.

Be careful, and happy exploring!