Spawn-proofing a Nether Hub! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide (1.18 Tutorial Let’s Play) [S2 E58]

Hello everyone my name is pixelriffs and welcome back to the minecraft survival guide i hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we’re going back to the nether we’re going to do a bit more work on our nether hub and today’s episode is mostly going to focus on

Spawn proofing so i need to grab a couple of things from my storage system before we begin and with some of that stuff acquired i guess we can step through to the nether via the new portal that we made in the storage system so today now that we’ve established the

Paths to various nether portals here in our nether hub we’re going to focus on how we can prevent other mobs from entering the nether hub because right now i’m not wearing my gold helmet i can be attacked by piglens at any moment and there’s a chance that i’ll step through

Into the nether and forget my gold helmet in future there is also a bunch of other mobs that i need to be wary of that i cannot be protected from simply by putting on the right piece of armor there are hoglands basically everywhere in crimson forests and there is a chance

That if we widen out this space then hoglands might spawn inside the tunnels of our nether hub they only really need a two by two space to spawn and that means that several of our bridges several of our pathways here have ended up with hogland spawning on them which

Can be a disaster if they spawn at the right moment or the wrong moment i suppose so what we’re going to do is set up a system of pathways around here which are made out of materials that mobs cannot spawn on and it’s quite simple to determine what is a spawn

Proof block basically any block which is not solid let me quickly grab a piece of wood from the nearby nether so we can turn that into a crafting table because i neglected to bring one of those with me and we’ll go with the most basic example of a non-solid block a slab you

Can put these on the lower half of a block like so and lower half slabs are definitely not a solid block they are a half block and mobs will not spawn on them the thing to bear in mind is that if you place them on the top half of a

Block that’s still the upper solid surface of a block level with the solid blocks around it and that is a spawnable surface for mobs so if you’re slabbing a nether hub if you’re slabbing anything really for spawn proofing purposes you need to make sure the slabs are on the

Lower halves of the blocks there’s one of the offenders now there’s a hogland walking down the corridor menacingly towards us and it’s important to note that if they’ve spawned elsewhere mobs will still walk on slabs they just won’t spawn on them in the first place and so

If we paved the entire area around here with bottom half slabs we could be pretty certain that no mobs would spawn here i’ve just taken a quick trip back to my storage system for a couple of full blocks that don’t follow the same spawning rules as the other solid blocks

And those are things like glass and leaves effectively any block which is transparent they act differently to regular solid blocks and for the most part you will not find mobs spawning on transparent blocks like this glass is also a fun one to use if you want to

Have a floor laid down that is spawn proof but you want to decorate with solid blocks underneath it that can be used to great effect if you still want to decorate with whatever blocks you want you have the freedom to play with more or less anything but the glass will

Remain not spawnable likewise leaves can be an interesting touch here in the nether where they have such a high contrast with the natural terrain and i’ve seen some people even recreate aspects of the overworld in the nether with the exception of course of the sky which isn’t really possible to do

Without some artificial stuff like blue concrete or wool of course there are plenty of other materials that we can make non-solid blocks out of we could make slabs out of stone and cobblestone and cobble deep slate and various other bits and pieces if we wanted to and non-solid blocks don’t have to just

Include things like slabs they can include things which have just a tiny amount of the hitbox missing such as dirt path blocks as you can see from the y coordinate here if we step down from this full block of netherrack onto this dirt path we step down a fraction of a

Decimal point of a block and that is enough to prevent mob spawns i feel like there are some occasions of which dirt path actually feels more at home in the nether that kind of dull greenish brown that it’s got going on is actually quite a nice fit with the surroundings and of

Course when you’re dealing with stuff like stone or dirt path it’s going to be available to you in abundance if you wanted to do this with materials from the nether itself you could always grab some of the nearby crimson or warped wood and craft that into slabs which

Once again make for a good fit here in the environment of the nether the crimson wood will always feel like another material to me and even if your floor is made out of full blocks there are some things we can place on top of that which will make the block spawn

Proof fences for example because they have a hitbox it’s not possible for the game to spawn a mob in the area with a fence because that would obstruct the mob’s movement the majority of mobs including ones from the nether need full air blocks in order for them to spawn

And if it’s obstructed by something solid like a fence then that prevents the game from spawning a mob on that particular block fences aren’t all that convenient to walk around on though so it’s not exactly the best example for what we would use to spawn proof of

Nether hub just something to bear in mind when you’re spawn proofing other structures now there are some things that despite their reputation do not provide the right level of spawn proofing for a project like this or rather they provide spawn protection in the right conditions but these are not the conditions that

Allow us to do that take things like saplings and string as an example both of these occupy the block space above one of these blocks you can walk through them so they don’t have a solid hitbox but technically speaking they are occupying the space above a solid block

So why can’t we use these as spawn proofing methods well for a start if you plant enough saplings with enough light around them they’ll grow into trees which will be a pretty big obstruction for the player so we can remove stuff like that from the picture but string is

One of those things that people assume can be used for spawn proofing anywhere and it turns out the conditions for spawn proofing using string are very specific when the game attempts to spawn a mob it will look for valid spawning blocks in the area it will look for any

Solid block that it can spawn a mob on but it doesn’t necessarily choose to spawn the mob there once it’s determined that it’s possible for a mob to spawn there is a bit of random variation that’s introduced so if the game decides it can spawn a mob on this block of

Netherrack here it might choose to actually generate the mob here or here or any of the blocks around the outside so let’s say the dirt block here is our spawning block but we’ve covered every other block around the outside here in string the game will still notice that

This block here is valid for spawns and it will distribute those spawns amongst other solid blocks in the area which aren’t obstructed by anything which has collision a hitbox that you can actually be stopped by now imagine for a second that we’re up in the air and all that we

Have around us is a three by three platform there is no other terrain it’s just void or bedrock or non-spawnable blocks around here if we end up placing string on every single block of this platform then the game fails its initial check while looking for valid spawnable blocks because it detects that every

Block around here has some string on it and thinks okay there’s nothing there that’s a completely open block it needs to find one block that’s completely unobstructed before it will choose to spawn anything in this area but if one piece of string on that island is

Missing a single block is enough for the game to start spawning attempts and that will allow it to generate other mobs in this area that’s covered by string the main reason you will see people using string on say the roofs of houses for example is not for spawn proofing it’s

To prevent snow from falling if you’re building at a high enough elevation sometimes you end up with snow falling on your roof and string will occupy the block space above a solid block in your roof to make sure that snow doesn’t settle there and the same way string

Works we can’t use things like foliage for example the crimson roots that we find here in the nether biomes you can’t use those to spawn proof an area either if this area was completely covered in crimson roots it would still end up spawning these piglens who are very mad

At me so when we’re choosing what to spawn proof an area with it’s probably safer to default to non-solid blocks like slabs it just makes a little bit more sense and honestly is a little bit less of a grind but wait a second pixar if i hear you cry what about torches

What about light what about the spawn proofing methods we have been using in the overworld to make sure hostile mobs don’t spawn in certain areas at night well i’m glad you asked the simple answer to this is that nether mobs don’t have the same spawning rules that mobs

In the overworld do and this is really a reaction to the environment provided by the nether there are lava falls everywhere there is fire in a lot of places there are shroom lights in places like crimson forests and yet mobs like this will spawn in abundance the rules even change for mobs like

Enderman which can spawn in multiple dimensions in the overworld endermen require complete darkness to spawn just like most of the other hostile mobs however in the nether they still technically only require a light level of below 7. which is why while we’ve noticed that mob spawns are reduced in

Warped forests now they aren’t gone entirely the area is pretty well lit by the shroom lights hanging down from the warped trees yet you will still find enderman spawning in the darkest spaces so since we can’t rely on light entirely to block mob spawns in the nether we’re

Going to rely on a slightly more tactile method we’re going to slab the area of our nether hub and this is going to encourage us to think about the theme for the nether hub what exactly are we doing with this space do we want it to feel like an extension of the overworld

Do we want to feel like the inside of the geode that we just stepped through do we want it to feel like an alien landscape or something more futuristic do we want to keep some of the characteristics of the nether itself these are all choices we can make creatively that can inform what

Materials we end up using here in the floor of our nether hub and eventually the walls and the ceiling too but i don’t think we’re going to get that far quite yet and for shorter stretches like this one where we’re just going from my portal at the spawn house to my storage

System i don’t need to worry too much about building other things as part of this i don’t need to worry about whether we can fly between these two portals using a lytra or something like that i’m just going to run between the two of them it’s going to be very

Straightforward but as we carve out longer tunnels to further places like the one to the stronghold over here for example or the one that leads to the drip stone cave base we’re going to be thinking about transport options a little as well are we going to leave a

Path for rails for us to travel down and yes rails are one of those things which despite not having much of a hitbox in the same way that string does do spawn proof an area because the game recognizes that it’s probably not the best idea for mobs to spawn on an area

That you are traveling through on a minecart this is why mobs also avoid walking over the top of rails which is why you see creepers getting stuck behind rails in abandoned mine shafts a lot anyway we might leave a path for rails in a couple of these we might also

Leave parts for you know blocks of ice that can transport us really fast using a boat we might leave enough space in a tunnel that we can fly down it with a lytra without banging into the ceiling or the walls there are a lot of considerations to stuff like this and

I’m going to be spending a bit of time drafting ideas and figuring out what i want to do with the aesthetics of my nether hub as well as its function but hopefully if you’re thinking about making a nether hub like this yourself this has been a good enough primer for

Ways you can consider spawn proofing it now if you’ll excuse me i’m gonna head back to my storage system because i have a lot more material to grab hey folks welcome back so i have been a little bit busy working on some of this stuff it’s hard to get all of the

Materials right now because i still don’t have a huge amount of things but i’m kind of happy with this so far this is our spawn portal here in our starting point in the nether and i kind of like the oaks around this is all okay uh stripped oak you know stairs like planks

Logs that kind of stuff and a few note blocks a couple of pieces of azalea foliage here and there and of course things like flower pots will block mob spawns because they have a solid collision box there leaves like this transparent blocks so you can put those

On top of the note blocks as though there are little kind of potted plants around the place and i think it works out quite well all of the top of that is slapped so that it’s not going to spawn and the floor here is slabs as well

We’ve got a couple of stairs either side of the portal for a bit of variation and i might do something different with the floor but honestly i like oak in the nether oak in the overworld tends to look a little bit boring like it’s just the kind of default wood type that we

Tend to use but i think oak goes really well in the nether and a lot of that right now is about contrast so i want to keep some color in this place i want to throw in some red or maybe even go with green have a moss wall or something in

Here somewhere maybe a couple of copper accents or something like that i just want to vary things up a little bit and for the most part i think the vibe we’re going to go with is a series of connected rooms or tunnels in which the

Overall vibe of the area is what kind of indicates which portal you’re going through so right now this is just a fairly basic floor the one that we put together earlier in the video going straight to the storage area but maybe we put a couple of chests and barrels

And stuff around as long as we don’t end up opening them because the piglens will get mad but it’ll be about the aesthetics of the thing indicating that our storage room is through this portal and elsewhere over here in particular i’ve started to make a couple of changes

To that effect i am still having to fight off the occasional hoglands as they spawn on this bridge and make their way towards me but a couple of arrows and a well-placed swing of the sword usually deals with them and then over here this is where i’ve started to work

On the pathway out to both the savannah village and the drip stone cave base which are in a similar quadrant of the world you’ll notice here that the path transitions into granite and stone because unfortunately drip stone doesn’t have any kind of slabs we can make with

It but then the drip stone starts to appear right here where there is a transition point and i’ve actually blocked off the pathway this way that leads back to the nether fortress because we’re going to make a separate pathway to that at some stage we could always divert it off one of these

Diagonal paths but i feel like having a path that goes through the near the fortress to the savannah village doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense anymore so i’ve been blocking that off and we’re going to reroute that at some point later but i figured stone and granite

Were going to be the most sensible materials to work into this drip stone facade i feel like the granite sort of like has some stuff in common with drip stone in terms of the warmth and color of the texture and it also kind of alludes to the fact that there’s a lot

Of copper in the cave as well so i think that could work out pretty well that’s currently a work in progress because again it’s a lot of slabs of both types of material and i don’t have a huge amount of granite to work with quite yet

But as we head our way down here across the temporary netherrack bridge across the crimson forest we get to the portal for it and this is oh once again a hogland has wandered in off the solid blocks of this bridge but once this is all slabs that’s something we

Won’t need to worry about the portal here we can kind of surround by drip stone and i’ve actually put a couple of blocks of drip stone and the drip stone spike at the back here kind of prevents us from walking through the portal the only problem right now is that there are

Ghasts floating around in the soul sand valley beyond but a couple of well-placed arrows or just dodging behind a block to break their line of sight and we won’t have to worry about them this is what i mean by each of these areas taking on its own distinctive character kind of alluding

To what’s beyond the portal as we go back over here to the savannah village this is probably the most plain path out of all of them right now because it is literally just one block and it’s grass path grass path dirt path whatever you

Want to call it all the way down to the soul sand valley where our portal is and right now that portal doesn’t have anything surrounding it so it’s fairly exposed but maybe we’ll start to work in some of the accent colours that we might find from the savannah village a bit of

Acacia wood a bit of stripped acacia here and there maybe some stairs and slabs and that kind of thing maybe even if we wanted to put this on stilts have it raised up from a lower section of the soul sand valley and then just carve out the landscape around it to complete the

Effect the one thing we can’t really work with in the nether is water so we can’t put any rivers in here although you know a bit of blue wool and some blue glass might make for a nice artificial river if you want to give that same vibe the most important thing

Of course as you can see from the complete lack of spawns in this corridor is that we’re using non-solid blocks to achieve this kind of effect and right here where we have the turn off to the drip stone cave i’ve started to put in a few slabs in the floor as well

Transitioning into the theme for that area i think as a theme this works a lot better for me than just having uniform corridors everywhere and signposts leading you to the different stuff i think we could still throw in some signs here and there if something is a long

Way off or the corridor doesn’t change to that theme until a lot later but i’m starting to get a feel for navigating around this world and landmarks like this are really what helps me do that i also need to work a little bit more on

Lighting i want to have light in sort of recessed alcoves so the entire nether doesn’t seem completely dark but once again that is playing second fiddle to the spawn proofing we’re doing using non-solid blocks here even the solid blocks of drip stone around here aren’t going to spawn anything because the

Pointed drip stone is usually facing down into them or like this for example it looks like a solid block but that’s because the floor is made out of slabs it’s actually a top half slab with a bottom half slab on top nothing spawning on top of that speaking of the fact that

We can’t have water in the nether i just noticed this and this is something i’d never seen before because i haven’t used drip stone in the nether before if you place pointed drip stone in the nether it always drips with lava normally if you just put this anywhere in the world

It will drip with water regardless of what is above it but there are no lava sources above these you could tell if there were because they’d be dripping a whole lot more but see that one right there for example clearly has a drip stone block above it but this piece of

Pointed drip stone is still dripping particles of lava i like that it’s a neat aesthetic detail kind of adds to the vibe of this place and reminds us that we’re in the nether even if we end up completely surrounding all of this with different stone types and blocking

Off the netherrack entirely back in the day and by back in the day i mean before minecraft 1.16 when these nether biomes were added people didn’t tend to build with wood in the nether a whole bunch for a number of reasons the first of which of course being that it gets set

On fire very easily which is still true and i did remove the lava fall that was up here it kind of gets stopped off by some cobblestone blocks up there now instead of flowing all the way down here just in case i expand this wood facade out into something a little bit more

Substantial and it needs to come anywhere near the lava because fire spread would burn down the majority of this but the other reason people didn’t build with wood is that it’s not very blast resistant and one of the things you have to be concerned about when you’re here in the nether is ghast

Fireballs heading towards something that you have put a lot of time and effort into that is the reason you’ll find that a lot of people prefer to build their nether hubs or whatever structures they build in the nether out of more blast resistant materials like stone and

Cobblestone wood will still blow up if a gas fireball gets thrown at it but gas fireballs are relatively weak they’re not quite the same as your average creeper blast or tnt so most of the time you won’t end up with a great deal of your structure being destroyed of course

They do set fires around the area so that once again creates the fire problem with wooden constructions but if you’re looking at this kind of surrounding we’re in a crimson forest right now we’re not going to see a great deal of gas spawns here they’re certainly not

Going to spawn within our nether hub because nothing is but you won’t find them spawning very much in this biome at all you’ll find them mostly spawning in soul sand valleys near the wastes and other biomes where there is flatter larger sections of terrain for them to

Spawn on with the dense foliage of the crimson forest and the fact that there are so many other mobs around you really don’t tend to see ghasts spawning in this biome at all and the same goes for the warped forest where the only thing that spawns is enderman so as long as we

Are a little careful about where we build and we keep an ear out for concealed lava sources in some of the walls we can feel free to build with whatever types of materials we want and the only thing that’s really going to blow it up is if we wander into gas

Territory and we’re not prepared to defend ourselves not only that but of course once we end up with enclosed tunnels around some of this stuff we don’t need to worry about ghasts at all because they can’t see us through blocks even through glass and will be safe and

Sound inside our nether hub of course we do still have a great deal of other pathways to think about i’ve got this one that leads through the nether fortress currently out to the stronghold portal and there’s a couple of other portals out that way as well i believe

The one that leads to the jungle temple and the desert or maybe this one over this way leads to the desert because that kind of takes a left-hand fork from this area where we can go straight through to the nether fortress that way i think is where the desert is so i’m

Not entirely certain about some of the coordinates in the world i think the desert takes a diagonal out towards the south east but we clearly have a lot more paths and stuff to work on so we’re probably going to be tackling those on live streams and here and there in

Videos if i feel like there’s something important to teach about it if it becomes especially significant but expect to see bits and pieces of the nether hub moving and changing as we come to some conclusions about the themes we want to go with and how each

Of these tunnels is going to connect for now we’re going to sign out right here from in front of our brand new slightly more decorated nether portal thank you so much for watching this episode of the minecraft survival guide my name has been pixel riffs don’t forget to leave a

Like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now you