The Evolution of the Minecraft Nether

Since its introduction at the onset of 2010 the nether has been an integral part of minecraft not only providing a welcome change of pace in the form of an entirely new dimension but also extremely useful resources to continue progressing through your world with some of these even being required to complete the game

But over the past decade the nether has transformed from a basic primitive addition to an already primitive game to a fully fledged universe complete with its own ecosystem of monsters rare items and dangers around every turn in today’s episode of minecraft uncovered we explore the evolution of the minecraft nether

The oldest ancestor of the modern nether dimension was added very early and very abruptly without any form of teaser or plans that i can find announced before it was added it just sort of happened january 7th of 2010 brought version in dev 0.31 which has since been lost to time it was

This version that introduced the idea of some form of underworld with a hellish landscape included in the brand new map theme selector simply nicknamed hell a bit dark for such a lighthearted game so it’s good that this was changed at this point in development the nether was extremely bare bones

I’m talking fire didn’t exist yet levels of development essentially the health theme was just the normal world theme with slight changes all water was replaced with lava grass was replaced with dirt the sky was turned black the clouds turned red and the entire map was dim and gloomy

But not everything was negative to balance the dark dismal dangerous world healing was abundant in the form of mushrooms scattered across the surface which were much more common in hell-themed maps than in normal maps hell was removed at some point during imf dev which lasted from february 27th to june

30th of 2010 though the exact update it was lost is unknown a lot of fans were left displeased when the feature suddenly disappeared but it wasn’t gone for good in fact it would make its return just a few months later notch mentioned a potential reintroduction of the hell on

September 18th of 2010 on his tumblr blog but in a very different manner than before instead of a map theme that would be forced onto the entire world he wanted it to be a separate dimension from the rest of the world that would be accessed through a portal

Originally intending it to have the practical use of fast travel based on a book series known as wheel of time that he had been reading whilst working on the game details about this new dimension would slowly leak out throughout the month of october with portals soul sand ghasts and zombie pigmen all

Discussed in text and even published a development screenshot that showed netherrack and glowstone in the new terrain the name was changed several times over this period as well notch realized that hell was a bit too dark of a name and it didn’t accurately describe this new underworld dimension

Early on he considered calling it the nexus which was quickly replaced with the slip this name the slip it almost made it into the final cut of the game with other nether related terms being adapted like slip gate instead of nether portal we can actually see this version of the

Slip in a few online videos because notch sent exclusive pre-release versions to various gaming magazines like pc gamer on the day before release when the day finally came though he made a last minute decision to change the name to the nether where it stayed ever since until the official release of java

Edition the nether was scarcely updated it received support for multiplayer the infamous exploding bed mechanism was added and the distance of lava flow was increased compared to the overworld which i didn’t know until today but that was the extent of progress for nearly a year but come september of 2011 a very

Important month in minecraft history that i’ve mentioned on various other occasions nether development was back in business this time around it was being handled by jeb who had joined the team just over a month after the release of the original nether with this new development we also had

New teasers this time being on twitter jeb’s social media of choice he would feature two screenshots of the new nether fortress structures on the 16th and 19th as well as mentioning two new mobs on the 21st just one day later the beta 1.9 pre-release also known as the first official release

Of minecraft was sent out to the public among various features that have become staples of minecraft such as villagers snow golems mushrooms and strongholds this release would bring in the new updated nether complete with nether fortresses and the new blocks they were made of as well as netherwort blazes

Magma cubes gas tiers and gold nuggets setting the groundwork for brewing potions traveling to the end and more the nether had been transformed from a barren landscape with sparse resources to one that was budding with activity with fortresses providing infrastructure and new mobs to help defend them

Bringing a whole new world to explore the update was received incredibly well in the few parts of the nether that players thought of improving would receive player-made updates to add extra functionality with mods like the more than nether adding in tools exclusive to the nether corrupted blocks new crops and more

Minecraft had been ushered into a new era with the nether completely changing the way that the game was played whereas before minecraft was simply an open world sandbox with no final goal where you would just build and survive until you got bored now a story was forming and when the end

Was added just days later requiring you to go to the nether to gather the materials needed to visit it and complete the game players were ready to take on a whole new adventure the nether was now developed to a point that mojeng was happy with so development was slowed down quite a

Bit but the nether would continue to receive decently consistent updates over the next eight and a half years if i’m being completely honest though i did know how to structure this update section so i’ll just list off the changes as quickly as i can silk touch allowed

Water to be brought into the nether in the form of ice with the fourth beta 1.9 pre-release then got removed two weeks later 1.2.1 allowed the torture of snow golems in the nether so that’s great 1.3.1 allowed netherboard to be grown in all dimensions as well as adding an incredibly small chance of

Bringing zombie pigmen into the overworld through nether portals i was going to just gloss over the actual method the game uses to calculate when they’re spawned but to be honest i spend way too long trying to understand it to not mention it so i’ll just put a timestamp on screen

If you’re not interested in the nerd stuff if you do want to hear the numbers i will explain to the best of my ability so in single player worlds and any smoothly running multiplayer worlds the game runs at exactly 20 ticks per second or one tick every .05 seconds chunks

Which are pieces of the map with an area of 16 blocks wide 16 blocks long and 256 blocks tall also follow this rule as chunk ticks are part of the game tick at least most of the time there’s apparently some super complicated way to determine whether they’re measured together or

Separately and i don’t care enough to look into it not that i would understand it anyways each chunk has 16 sub chunks which are 16 block cubes every chunk tick each chunk section has a certain amount of blocks randomly chosen on java edition the default is 3 but the

Random tick speed game rule can change this then each one of those randomly chosen blocks is given a random tick in most cases the random tick doesn’t affect anything but certain blocks do use it for various block updates the most common implementation is in agriculture with crops mushrooms vines leaves farmland cacti

Sugarcane kelp bamboo coarse flowers saplings and sweet berry bushes all potentially growing uprooting or spreading if they receive a random tick also since when is there bamboo in minecraft however agriculture isn’t the only use for random ticks and among other mechanisms like fire and grass spreading these can

Also affect the obsidian blocks of a nether portal in easy mode there’s a one out of two thousand chance of a zombie pigmen spawning on one of these random ticks in normal the chance increases to 2 out of 2 000 and on hard the chance

Increases to 3 out of 2 000. that means if my math is correct which let’s be honest it probably isn’t the average chance of a zombie pig man spawning each tick from a basic 5×4 portal on all default settings is 0.00102539 meaning that it will take an average of

97 254 ticks or 4862 seconds or 81 minutes for just one zombie pig man to spawn okay now that nerd time is over let’s continue on to the other updates 1.4.2 added wither skeletons my personal favorite mob as well as armor and swords for zombie pigmen and nether travel for all entities 1.4.6

Brought nether brick slabs 1.5 added nether quartz ore 1.5.1 added faster lava and hidden lava which i don’t think i’ve ever noticed before 1.6.1 added chest to nether fortresses the music update which was a part of 1.7.4 but apparently wasn’t released at the same time added four songs exclusive to the nether

1.7.2 and 1.8 added commands allowing you to place water in the nether 1.9 removed netherfog and added it back two days later for no apparent reason as well as disabling nether travel for ender dragons and withers which was apparently possible and 1.10 added rare enderman spawns to

The nether as well as magma blocks nether wart blocks and red nether bricks but then mysteriously updates went silent until 1.13 the community mostly thought they were just busy on other parts of the game but behind the scenes minecraft was slowly inching closer to the famous nether update

1.13 technically isn’t where the nether update released in fact it wasn’t even close but it does seem that this is when they started to dedicate more effort to it releasing a few features early for whatever reason the biome name and id were changed from hell to nether a much needed change that

Somehow evaded notice for nearly a decade they also added what the wiki describes as vertical air cavities or what i and everyone else would call ravines which could sometimes be partially flooded with lava 1.14 added nether brick walls and red nether brick walls slabs and stairs and after 1.15 added

Bees and literally nothing else it was time for the big reveal 1.16 this update brought the dimension we all know and love today and by we all i mean just the people that aren’t staying on older versions for pvp or modding or servers wow mojing has done a really good job splitting their

Player base and then not fixing it even after they’ve had literally half a decade to do so but anyways this is by far the largest nether update in the game and easily one of if not the largest overhaul in the game’s history just to name the very basics there were

Crimson forest biomes warped forest biomes souls and valley biomes basalt delta biomes hoglands piglens striders four different types of bastions nether gold ore ancient debris or new music and even a material stronger than diamond known as netherrite the update drastically changed gameplay for the vast majority of both new and veteran players

For example minecraft speedrunning which i plan to cover in a future video switch from immediately rushing to the nether with next to nothing to grab your blaze rods and leave to deep breath first scrolling enough iron to grab an iron pickaxe along with the four iron needed for a bucket and

Flint and steel then rushing to the nether to mine nether gold ore to craft gold boots so that piglens don’t attack you when you trade with them and then you have to either scrounge up a ton of gold from goldor or find a bastion containing gold blocks because you need

This gold to attract piglets to drop random items for you which can sometimes contain ender pros which you need to combine with blaze rods to create eyes of ender which you can then finally use to return to the surface and search for then enter the end dimension to defeat

The ender dragon and complete the game and yet even with that sounding extremely convoluted and difficult because it is it also half the amount of time needed to run the game making it possible to start and finish a minecraft playthrough in under 15 minutes on a random seed or just two and

A half minutes on an optimized seed without the aid of any glitches it’s genuinely incredible how much that one community alone has benefited just from this one update not to mention the tens of millions of other players that have seen its effects firsthand this update absolutely revolutionized

The way that the nether was played and really the entire progression of minecraft survival in general in a way that had never been seen before and likely never will again now that’s where java edition’s story comes to an end but i feel like there’s something else related to the nether that needs

To be addressed coming from a very old version of a separate edition of minecraft one very close to my heart one that actually got me into the game in the first place it’s not bedrock edition that’s been pretty much on par with java as long as it’s existed

It’s not the console or handheld editions either which receives the nether upon release in each case no this change comes from pocket edition alpha released all the way back on august 16th of 2011 for the xperia play later extending to android ios windows and fire os

But back when it was released the nether was in a very rudimentary stage remember this was before jeb’s first big update the dimension was essentially in alpha 1.0.0 on java edition which was in and of itself quite early in development even if it was the most updated version of the game

At the time over the years java edition’s another would be updated but for various reasons it would be quite a struggle to migrate that into pocket edition so until september of 2015 with version 0.12.1 the nether didn’t exist and it supposedly wasn’t even in development until late april of 2015.

So what did we have for all those years well even back then pocket edition was the most popular version of the game so leaving out the nether entirely wasn’t an option the mobs and blocks that spawned from it were pretty essential to certain farms structures and so on

So in the place of the nether dimension a substitute was created known as the nether reactor a feature that was put in place for exactly three years from september 5th of 2012 to september 5th of 2015. never seen again in pocket edition and never seen whatsoever in any other version of minecraft

So for those that don’t have the incredible nostalgia of the springs for myself and many other og pocket edition players let me explain the construction concept and content of the nether reactor your quest began by sourcing the materials to craft the nether reactor core which was three diamonds sandwiched between six iron ingots

You then needed to scrounge up for all the gold you could find as you needed 36 ingots to turn into gold blocks as part of the base of the reactor and keep in mind this was all on the old world type of mcpe one that was just 256 blocks wide 256

Blocks long and 128 blocks tall having the height limit and completely doing away with the infinite borders that help add a feeling of never ending possibilities in the game it was very possible that you either couldn’t find the resources needed or had already mined and used every bit that there was

And if so that was it no netherreactor for you but assuming you did get the rare minerals required you still had to build a reactor something that required a youtube tutorial for pretty much every one of us 10 year olds trying to build it you started with a 3×3 layer of gold

Block corners with cobblestone filling in the remaining space you then stacked another reactor on top in the middle adding cobblestone diagonally from the block but never directly to the sides and finished it off with a cross of cobblestone centered in the middle the pattern wasn’t actually difficult to

Remember but it was never mentioned anywhere in the game how to actually make it once this was all finished you could finally activate your nether reactor or at least attempt to do so even if you built it correctly it would often just so happen that all the players in the world

Weren’t close enough to activate it making it next to impossible to use these on most smp servers or worse the nether reactor was built too high up and you had to move the entire structure down often losing your nether reactor core in the process but even once you did get it working

The struggles weren’t over upon tapping the nether reactor the core would begin to glow red morphing all the other blocks of the reactor into glowing obsidian so say goodbye to your gold a massive spiral of netherrack would then grow out of the ground and items would begin to rain from the

Ceilings not just those exclusive to the nether but also some that could have been already crafted in the overworld like bows or bowls you would then be surrounded by zombie pigmen and hope to god that you could take the heat because they started attacking you without any provocation and they did damage

Damage that even the most experienced pocket edition player would be scared of in an enclosed space like the netherspire after 45 seconds the reactor was destroyed the core would darken items would start to despawn in your world would fall into darkness for days the nether reactor is arguably one

Of the most unique artifacts from the early days of pocket edition and really the early days of minecraft entirely but for many its memory has been lost to time i hope to bring it back that’s it for the video guys hope you enjoyed i was actually just starting to

Work on the outline for this video when i saw that the mr epic made a video on it which has happened like five times now but i thought i could try to expand on it quite a bit seeing as i have the unique perspective of an og pocket edition player as well

And there were also some parts of the history that he didn’t really cover that much i plan to make a video on the evolution of the end soon as well so assuming nobody beats me to it expect that in the coming weeks also i just wanted to mention that i’m thinking

About streaming on twitch i set up everything there and i’m going to be doing a few tests over the next few weeks just to see how things go my name there is mcbyt live i’ll put a link on screen and in the description so go follow me there and i should be

Streaming soon but that’s about all i have to say so have a good one guys peace Foreign