Wants to know how to make a portal in Minecraft without diamonds in Minecraft? The road to completing a nether portal in Minecraft is long and probably arduous. When playing survival mode, it’s not as easy as whipping out obsidian blocks and igniting them. It sometimes requires hours of preparation.
Finishing that nether portal implies gaining access to the hellish Nether, a place filled with hostile mobs, intimidating environments, and imposing nether fortresses. It’s also the only spot to get a wide variety of unique materials and crafting things, making it a valuable location to have entrance to.
How to Make a Portal in Minecraft without Diamonds in Minecraft?
Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to construct a functional nether portal without harvesting those elusive diamonds.
While it’s true that obsidian, the principal ingredient in building a nether portal, cannot be broken or mined by the player with anything but a diamond pickaxe, there are methods around that if you want a little shortcut. Bear in mind and there are some limitations to this method.
- A lava source: This one is a little harder to come by. You’ll have to find a natural reservoir of lava to draw from, and you can’t rely on having an infinite source. You can carry that lava from faraway places if you have a plethora of iron buckets, but you’ll want to have at least ten buckets of lava. Fortunately, lava is relatively common in Minecraft, both over and underground.
- A water source: Obsidian is formed when water comes in contact with a lava source block. That means you’ll need a replenishable source of water to complete this. You can create an infinite well by digging a four block by four block hole in the spot and emptying a water bucket into three corners. You’ll notice the final corner automatically fills up. As long as you only pluck water from one corner at a time, you now have an ever-full well!
- Extra building blocks. This can be anything you want, but I recommend cobblestone. It doesn’t burn, it’s easily accessible, and it isn’t affected by gravity (like sand or gravel.)
- Iron buckets: Buckets are handy for carrying liquid from one place to another. In this instance, from wherever you’re making the juice to your nether portal construction project. You can craft iron buckets with three iron ingots (smelted from iron ore.)
- Flint and steel: A fire starter is necessary for lighting a nether portal once it’s built, so you’ll need to have flint and steel handy. However, it’s effortless to craft, just requiring one piece of flint (found from gravel) and one iron ingot to get the job done.
- A pickaxe. Allowing you to pick cobblestone as your material of choice, you’ll need a pickaxe to mine it when you’re done. Iron or diamond is preferred.
Building Your Nether Portal in Minecraft
Once you’ve rounded up all your materials, it’s time to get started. First off, make sure you’re familiar with the basic build of a nether portal by referring to the section above. Once you have that out of the process, follow the moves below, and you’ll have a complete portal in no time.
The secret to building a nether portal without diamonds is relatively simple: Obsidian is created when water hits a lava source block. Just make a mold to make sure the obsidian happens to be created in the exact shape needed for a nether portal.
To build a nether portal without diamonds, do the following:
- Find a suitable place for your Nether portal. I recommend either building a closed space or keeping it separate from everything else since Nether mobs can occasionally travel through a portal.
- Start making your mold by putting your building blocks in a three-block by a six-block rectangle on the ground.
- Fill your mold with lava. You should have a single line of lava four blocks long. Each block of lava needs to be full, so you’ll need a bucket of lava for each spot.
- Go to one end of the mold and empty a bucket of water at the end. This will get a bit of a mess, but you can pick the water back up. The water should run over the lava blocks and turn each one into obsidian.
- On either end, build a column with a one-block opening directly over the obsidian blocks. This is how we make the sides of the nether portal.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4. There’s only one way to make obsidian, so you’ll be doing a lot of that.
- Repeat steps 5 and 6 on both sides two more times. Each side of the nether portal needs to be five obsidian blocks from top to bottom.
- Now the top! Make a little bridge one block down from the top of your obsidian pillars.
- Give the bridge railing. The rail should be even with the top of your obsidian pillars—no reason to let lava spill everywhere.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 one more time. Once the water is cleared away, you should have a fully functional nether portal!
- At least, under all that scaffolding. Clear away all your excess building materials to reveal your nether portal. Check to make sure your measurements are correct. If something’s not right, you may require to repeat these steps in a separate location.
- Lastly, take your flint and steel and light one of the bottom corners of the nether portal. If everything is correct, the nether portal should be filled with an ominous purple glow. That’s your cue to walk into it.
Keep in mind and there’s one major flaw with this approach. While you theoretically gain access quicker than other players, you cannot build another nether portal in the Nether. If you get lost and can’t find your way back to the original portal, you’re basically out of luck.
Without diamonds, you can’t stockpile obsidian, only make it as you need it. And that doesn’t work in the Nether. While you can get obsidian in the Nether by looting chests, you shouldn’t rely on this. Make sure you point where your portal is when you arrive.