The Secret History Of Minecraft’s Nether

Minecraft went from having an after-fought biome called hell to having six yes six different biomes in their own dimension in modern Minecraft a dimension which by the way was added in a secret update this is the journey from a throwaway feature made by Notch to its recently on our future that comes

Straight from modern Minecraft developers welcome to the history of the never the scariest strangest and most iconic dimension in a video game by the way I would never stop telling you that greater than 99.9 of house fires happen to people who aren’t subscribed to The ibx Click Out YouTube channel and you

Can begin your subscription over there meanwhile the Nevers beginning was in Java Edition Alpha 1.2 on Halloween of 2010 prior to release it was actually called the slip a reference to its ability to travel quickly across the Overworld by using it every one block in the nether was represented by eight

Blocks in the Overworld which means if you need to travel say 2 000 blocks instead of going 2 000 Overworld blocks you simply put two nether portals to 250 blocks apart in the Nether and now you can do the journey with 1 8 of the distance however the trade-off there

Obviously being this is the hell Dimension and so you are going to go through a lot more risk this was the first time that a new dimension had ever been added to Minecraft and it was smart because it did Grant access to glowstone and these two mobs in survival for the

First time as well as a new use to obsidian and the bonus feature of being able to travel quickly this ghoulish high risk High reward Dimension was a really great gameplay mechanic but it wasn’t actually the start of the Never the real beginnings of the nether were

In this the hell biome and yes there really were trees in the original help I’m and this first released as a world option back in Minecraft in Dev when you could select your own world type you also spawned in a mossy cobblestone house and this is weird Enough by itself

But what really gets to me is the item stacking because as we all know Minecraft is famous for one thing and that is going up to 64 except not in this version stacks of 99 of everything by the way in this Chestnut spawn this wasn’t carefully put together by a

Player you just had access to all the blocks in Minecraft in a big old chest there Minecraft in Dev was a really strange time but it is the time where the never begun and the reason for it is that if you have a limited sized world

You’re gonna run out of fun things to do with it eventually so why not have a crazy different world type and that world type was fulfilled by a world of trees and lava apparently which is interesting enough to say however how did this become this and the answer was

Secret Friday updates early Minecraft was crazy the team was literally 100 times smaller than it is now but they managed to push out weekly updates anyway the content of these updates was not known nor was the release time a secret update indeed although later people worked out they were coming out

On Fridays making them the secret Friday updates these hidden updates included mechanics that would later fundamentally Define the game like Minecarts Dungeons and honestly most true to the name of these updates sneaking all of these secret updates were important to Minecraft’s history and one of these sad

Truths about them is the fact that the updates were done so early on in Minecraft’s history that the original files for all but the first are lost to time an important reminder that even the biggest game of all time isn’t perfectly preserved and although there’d be no

Good reason to go back to most of these the fact that they’re missing is still tragically sad anyway the last of these updates was the Halloween update like I previously mentioned coming out on the 30th of October 2010 but actually this is a bit of a misconception this was not

A secret Friday update if you check that date it will actually released on a Saturday also interestingly this update was actually known ahead of time being announced as early as October the 10th this is the first ever screenshot of the never update and first of all it’s crazy

That you know back then official marketing and screenshots and hints were just oh yeah this is not clearly playing Minecraft he’s got a diamond pickaxe there but also fascinating is the look at this Dimension wow imagine seeing this for the first time when all you’ve seen for Minecraft generation is this

It’s an absolutely wild difference and just looking at this screenshot already I’m like wow the glowstone and the gravel and the Nev reckon it’s not really that much by itself but it is a entirely revolutionary way to play Minecraft you might start assuming and sadly uh the truth behind that is that

Although this seemed like the really promising start of a new dimension it actually languished untouched for a really long time just being the way to get a few blocks as well as to faster travel the Overworld this was of course a valid use but it got a lot better after

The official release of Minecraft was the first time they gave an explicit purpose to the players they had to go and kill the ender dragon and it’s interesting because this was the first time they updated the never to try and tie these two old Dimensions to the

Third one you needed ender pearls and blaze rods blaze rods exclusively coming from the Nether and ender pearls exclusively coming from the Overworld at least at that time this was before all of these updates because between the 30th of October 2010 and the full release of Minecraft the never was

Untouched there were many other things they were focused on and so it was wild to say that this was the first time in a very long time that they actually had updated the never and so obviously the release of the game came with a never Fortress but this wasn’t the existing

Never Fortress this was one designed in 2011 by a programmer and if you want to see what it looks like well oh right that’s just the current never Fortress isn’t it oh the one they revealed in these early screenshots is the same one that exists 11 years later so well I

Guess that’s the never for you however they also at the same time as hinting this Jeb actually was the one uh talking about this Jeb Was An Architect for a lot of 1.0 uh he also hinted they would double the number of mobs in the nether

Which sounds like it’s kind of big Until you realize one of them was going to be a retexturing attempt and therefore you’re actually adding two new Mobs to the game one of which is retextured by the way what do you assume the retexture mob will be I’ll give you three seconds to guess

Yeah it has to be said this is one of the laziest mob designs on paper I mean in Minecraft though because there aren’t so many of these outside of the trillion zombie variants that exist it doesn’t actually feel that lazy they do feel like they have distinct purposes and

Uses and I think that’s a great example of how a retextured mob can be something and so to summarize the Magma Cube and the blazeworthy Brand’s new mobs and the Never Fortress was the Brand’s new structure giving purpose to this Dimension however they were all developed with the Java Edition

Specifically in mind this is not a criticism to be clear the Java Edition was the only edition of the game that existed and the console edition would not come out until the next year and this meant that when the console edition came out it had to work out a lot of

Questions about the never and because of its limited World size answering those questions about the nether made answering questions about the never fortresses even harder because the Minecraft console edition World size at launch of the Xbox 360 because it’s a console platform release it has to run at specified frame rates and resolutions

Uh because of that it was a 864 by 864 limited world it’s kind of funny how Minecraft went from this big development to go from these weird limited worlds to these infinite worlds and then when it came to console it went back to limited worlds but 4J Studios the developers

Made the best of it and they made a never which was one to three scaled with this Overworld there was still a reason to use it to cross the world it was just slightly less you might say and so this never was a great fun thing by itself

But how would you solve the problem of putting a new structure which was meant to be hard to find into a very tiny never I really can’t stress enough how 286 by 286 blocks is not enough but I also can’t stress enough that people would have already explored their Nevers

Some amount of the way before the update came out so the problem was that they had tiny Nevers 286 by 286 blocks where people needed a rare structure that otherwise wouldn’t spawn if they ported it from java because they were much rarer than that sort of coordinates and

Also there are rare things inside the never Fortress The Blaze mob being one and the neverwort being the other which were required for other game mechanics namely potion brewing you wouldn’t be able to brew potions if they ported the nether over from the Java and you

Wouldn’t be able to beat the game on a Brand’s new world and so how do you possibly solve that the answer is two clever Simple Solutions one is making Nether fortresses a guaranteed spawn in your world now everyone can have access to never fortresses but then they even

Looked out for existing players where if you’d already explored your never partially or fully they added a Brand’s new biome so that even if you’d explode the chunks where your never Fortress should be you could still find the never what that’s right the neverwart valley was an exclusive and fun biome they

Added to the console edition and honestly you might not have ever known that it was a brand new biome or even that this wasn’t normal Minecraft generation but it doesn’t exist on any other version of Minecraft and so it is to this day still a console edition exclusive

By the way this is actually gameplay of me walking around the neverwart valleys in my world it’s a pretty empty biome besides my Blackstone desert well and desert temple yeah the nether was pretty empty just like the change logs until 1.4 and 1.5 when wither skeletons and

Never courts were added 1.6 was also when they added the chests to the nether fortress wait for real seriously the never fortresses before 1.6 didn’t have any chests that’s that’s got to be wrong that’s a mistake in the in the change logs and what the was the point of these

Areas was the never Fortress seriously a structure you would go to to kill Blazers and then never need to go again this entire thing the one piece of actual content and the never had one purpose and that was it that is crazy man that seriously free updates in a row

Of making the nether slightly better but they were needed how how did they do nothing before this I really am confused by that if there’s one thing we actually can learn from the never it’s that Minecraft has a long and proud tradition of adding things and then them being

Useless for years until they work out the reason obsidian with the never portal the never itself and never fortresses are prime examples but it’s something they’ve done with many aspects of the game which honestly makes me more you know less disappointed with certain features people like to point at the

Foxes they like to point at Sweet berries or glow Berry or you know their next point of things and say so where do these things go and ultimately the answer is like well not somewhere right now but hopefully having more content in the game means they have more things to

Tie into later that’s why even though copper is the most disappointing ore by such a long stretch when you compare it to the other Roars it’s not so bad you look at lapis lazuli and it was just blue dye you had to mine for until it became the enchanting ingredient wow

That is a lot better you look at gold and it’s like this was currency before currency existed and now it’s useful for all sorts of applications I mean power rails were just the beginning golden apples and golden carrots are valuable and you know like though it can be

Farmed it can it they extend on the feature as they get added and that is definitely what they did with the never 2010 is when they added it and it wasn’t until 1.6 you know they were just adding horses at this point in time uh that they finally got around to saying what

If there was a real reward for going here which is crazy just to say but we need to move into the modern never now after finally getting on the wagon of updating their previous features you might wonder what happened in 1.7 and 1.8 two of the better Minecraft Java

Updates of this era and the answer is nothing Well 1.9 which entirely overhauled the end surely made some change and no the answer is they didn’t do that either however 1.10 was the next update they approached to actually improve the never and in terms of the breadth of the content it was probably

The best update yeah it had red never brick it had never warts and magma blocks which were all interesting additions by themselves if I said all I meant just magma by the way which was a fascinating new block not just in terms of its texture but also in terms of the

Functionality it would hurt you for standing on it unless you had a fire protection potion or unless you were crouching it is a block which theoretically could be used to make all sorts of interesting builds and traps where people would fall onto magma and have to know how to escape it however

Even though having a fire protection potion or having the boots or whatever would be quite the challenge to get on top of the fact that you can simply sneak on it means that it was never really explored in that much depth until 1.13 came out funnily enough The Aquatic

Update these exact opposite of magma but when they added the ability to make these bubbles appear outfit which would drag people down that at least was enough of the use to have people enjoy magma however they then made Magma not a never block and so the most exciting

Thing they added in the biggest never update yet was a feature that got exciting when they added it to the Overworld and gave it a real use in the Overworld which is not the best thing to say yet I think the never at this point clearly had gone through a lot of

Changes they were updating Minecraft in massive ways in the Overworld but trying to find the exact fit of what you do with this hellish Dimension is not something they could easily do which is why they tried rather than these small piecemeal updates they’d done forever for something dedicated to just the

Never imagine that an update for just the never what would they call that this update is one of the most fondly Remembered in Minecraft history it added four new biomes dozens of new blocks a new structure and seven new Mobs also a friend in the form of The Strider I mean

He’s a mob but I mean look at this guy isn’t he adorable this update was so big and so focused on the nether that they actually had to add more clues for players to actually go here because Minecraft is famously the game without an instruction guide unless you’re

Playing console edition or Bedrock which is actually two-thirds of the editions but Minecraft famously doesn’t tell you what to do but now they’ve added a way to hint that you should maybe make a portal by having some incomplete ones spawn around the world this Edition and the entire theme of the update meant

That many players would start to experience this entire dimension for the first time and instead of getting a bland world of just endless Red Blocks they instead got a much more interesting world with variety texture and depth because different biomes had different benefits do you want to avoid gas they

Don’t spawn in the two types of forests do you want to find food there is a type of that that exists in the Nether and uh you know it looks like it’s a mob but you can totally just eat it you’re not a vegan in Minecraft you can even pre-cook

It first so you get cooked pork chops um which is a really fun little uh snack however uh the never update is where this story logically might come to an end you think like wow the never is good now there’s lots of biomes but actually the never update had a very troubled

Development tale something we learned from King B dogs who revealed this on a podcast recently the first mob that I ever worked on was the Strader and that was an interesting experience because uh everyone in the studio or at least in the vanilla team was like we don’t want

To touch this mob it looks uh ugly um we don’t feel it looks vanilla can you believe that there were people against The Strider how did anyone hate this guy it’s it’s funny that one of the features that feels like the worst bit for an update is maybe one of the most

Loved things I mean you could also argue this exact same feature has the problem if it has one purpose and not many people you use it for that and no one uses it for anything else but there is a much bigger Point here because he revealed something huge while talking

About this and the Never update you know this is something that I think people don’t understand a lot of people say that another update was like a really big update and they wish that we would do big updates like that again um the thing is the nether update we

Intended it like at least in terms of the the planned features we had of like okay at some point we’re going to stop here but this is all the cool ideas we have you know it was like probably six or eight times the size of what we

Actually released we had so so so many ideas wait did he really just confirm the never update was going to have six to eight times more content than the actual release one of the biggest and most lauded by the community updates in history was going to be multiple times

Bigger I’ve heard this off the record from a few Mojang developers and you know honestly it just sounded like a nice thing to say I’ve heard all these Amazing Ideas that were going to be in there but this is public confirmation that their could have been more biomes

More mobs and more that just didn’t make the cut for the final update imagine a mob that swims through the lava Imagine a Dragon or some form of seasonal event that’s flying through the nether imagine a new tool that is specifically for never caving I mean if you imagine a 3X3

Pickaxe that mines nine blocks at a time but takes 10 times as long it wouldn’t be useful for lots of scenarios but it would be great for the never where you can instant mine and there would be so many great ideas I mean imagine adding a

New structure to the base salt Delta to actually make it tolerable imagine adding more biomes so you had to see fewer of these things because they were diluted there are so many great ideas that I can imagine and I imagine that Mojang did a much better job than some

Guy on YouTube and uh yeah it is a little bit sad to hear that they didn’t make it but I think it also shows the ambition of an update is a powerful thing I mean uh even though he almost said it as a bad thing that there was

Five to seven times more content that we didn’t get to see than what we did get to see it sounds like they want curated a lot of really good stuff and that high ambition led to a higher output I mean think about it this way they deliver just about everything they said they

Would deliver with the Wild update and some people are left disappointed um and that is something that proves that you need to have lots of ideas that you can cut there’s this famous uh phrase when it comes to editing that you actually want to over record so you can

Cut down later down there is always another 10 you can remove from a script or a cut or a direction I think Star Wars is famously a movie that was going to suck really early on until someone went and edited it to make it actually flow together correctly uh because if

You take away lots of scenes that people really put a lot of effort into filming if you take away content that people put time into working on the ideas for you get good results and uh honestly it’s kind of crazy because these ideas which were conceived honestly uh did take up a

Lot of development Time Minecraft have said before the reason it takes so long to make updates is partially implementing on bedrock and Java partially you know it’s like having lots of people coordinate and having all these high quality texture assets and audio assets Etc but a part of it is

Just making good game design they only want to add good things in the first place so having added a list of ideas that is eight times longer than what you eventually add to an update that is something that clearly worked out here and uh yeah this was an incredible

Revelation I can’t stop thinking about how astoundingly amazing a never-up day could have been if it even took 50 more features uh from that backlog I’ve even just took a few extra and I think that is a great thing because it means that although the current uh you know never

Is probably expected to say roughly the same for some time you might assume I think that Mojang put a lot of time into working on a lot of you know feature ideas you know seven times more than we have on the game potentially and if they’ve done that that makes me think

They’re not going to ignore these ideas forever in fact it’s been confirmed since the LA’s release that there actually was a plan to add that mob as part of the never update I mean the reason it clearly was Head and Shoulders above the other two mobs that were voted

For at that same year as Minecraft live is clearly that this was a well-planned well-designed feature that people really wanted and although it might have been more interesting and than ever some might say is a weird never based mob they worked on it really well and they

Made something better imagine an ally in the nether it has all of the same functions and purpose except it doesn’t have the law that eventually turns into the Vex that makes Minecrafts Overworld in its Pillager system much more fascinating all of these other ideas which were great for the never update

Might just make their way into the game but not in that Dimension and there’s the fun question that brings us full circle where we started with an Overworld biome that eventually became its fullone Dimension and now we have a full Dimension that is so just shocked with features that are so chocked with

Content they want to add to it that they’re adding that back to the Overworld and I think that’s beautiful and really only leaves us with one question will the nether always be the most iconic additional dimension in Minecraft right now there isn’t very Fierce competition we have an end which

Is mostly Barren outside of the mainlands if you don’t count that one city and we have a dimension just filled with features and more that they want to add that are potentially even on the way and so the question is will the never always be a special place and I think it

Will because something that can be dogs has actually touched on himself and many Minecraft developers have admitted is the never is wonderful not just because it’s a new place filled with scary creatures and the ability to beat Minecraft but also because the rules of that Dimension are entirely different

The Overworld is different to the never not only because of its generation I mean the never is very cave-like and closed off the Overworld is opened up and even has a height limit of 320 blocks versus the Nevers 128 so there are differences in the generation but what really makes the biome interesting

Is how it interacts uh with you the player compared to the Overworld so water cannot be placed anywhere in the Nether and that means you have to really change how you do things in this Dimension another example would be how lava Works lava flows faster more dangerously and caves are entirely

Different you know there’s only single blocks of lava just waiting there to kind of trap you up there are lots of additional dangers in the generation there’s lots of different fundamental rules that mean even if you destroyed the entire never and started again it would give you different functions as a

Player whereas the only real different function to the end is the fact that there’s a void underneath it and uh that’s kind of the big one and so if they ever do add another dimension will they be able to make something which has as fun rules maybe they will maybe they

Won’t but what I think really brings the never apart is that one to eight travel thing you can forget about it when talking about the three dimensions in Minecraft that you know like that you might think they’re all equal but the Overworld has so much more content than

The other two and there never has a real interaction with the Overworld which makes me think if they ever were going to add another dimension they could learn a lot from this place this has been the history of the never in Minecraft I hope you have all enjoyed it

If you did don’t forget to like or subscribe or whatever YouTubers tell you to do I would really appreciate it and if you like this sort of Deep dive let me know in the comments and maybe it’d be fun to do another one for that other dimension in the future huh anyway thank

You for watching and I’ll see you next time bye