Minecraft has a lot of travel methods. It feels like every other update we get a new feature that lets us move faster, and people love to test and see which method is the best. The problem, is all these videos are wrong. Yes! even my own. Seriously, and I know this is gonna Sound really confusing at first, but just bare with me. Typically these tests are done using a strip of blocks, and you just see how fast you can go that distance. After, the scores are ranked and it’s pretty simple right -whichever method has the highest blocks per second, wins. Here’s where I want to introduce something that often gets forgotten about – the nether portal. So you might say okay, if every block in the nether is equal to eight blocks in the overworld then fair enough I’ll just always take the fastest method and do it in the nether. Enough said. But let me ask you this: you need to travel 100 blocks. You can use any method you want, as long as it’s in survival. What do you do? Well, with what I just said, you might grab some obsidian, light it, make another portal in the nether, and… meet me already there? Yep. Okay, so how did I pull off this little trick? The key, is that the race is rigged. Nether portals take four seconds to load in, And another four seconds to take you back to the overworld. Meaning that you spent a total of eight seconds on this screen alone! Okay I know I still haven’t made my big point yet, but here it goes: Nether portals, are not always worth it. You see, up until this point it’s always just Been assumed that whatever has the highest blocks per second speed is the best option, and most of the time you’d be right. But! Because nether portals have the 8 second penalty, it doesn’t always work out that way. To an extent there’s a certain range of distances That would actually be slower to travel if you involve a nether portal. Starting with the basics, let’s say you have access to an elytra. On average you can move at around 40 blocks a second. So, In order to find how much time it takes for us to travel, we just take our distance and divide it by 40. So 100 blocks takes 2.5 seconds, 200 takes five seconds and so on. Now I know that was Some pretty advanced math, but I promise we’re almost there. In the nether we already travel at eight times the speed, meaning that with an elytra we really travel at 320 blocks a second! But like many things, there’s a catch. Remember that eight second load time? add it on. So let’s Run some tests. First up, 100 block sprint. In trial 1 I’ll be flying in the overworld, and in trial 2 I’ll be flying in the nether. As you see, I completely beat out my nether time. In fact, by the time I finish in the overworld I haven’t even entered the nether! Even with spamming my rockets I still end up being a full 10 seconds behind my overworld time. Let’s try again, but this time let’s bump the distance up to 300 blocks. The elytra still wins, but you’ll notice that the time difference is a lot smaller now. If we increase it to 400 blocks, You’ll notice that it switches! The nether portal is now faster than flying in the overworld. So, what exactly is happening here? Essentially, nether portals have two unique things about their timings: they let you travel 8 times as fast, but they also always add on 8 seconds. At really Small distances, the ability to travel at 8 times speed doesn’t really play a huge role – however, those 8 seconds have a massive effect at smaller distances. The good news however, is the more we increase the distance the negative 8 second penalty doesn’t matter as much, But the 8 times speed becomes more and more effective. I should also note that these numbers are just from using the formulas from before, which doesn’t take any lag into account. In a real scenario you can expect the switching point to be a little bit higher because of portal lag. And so, this is the revolutionary idea. It’s that if we can determine our distance and our travel methods available, we can determine exactly which one will be the fastest. And it’s not always the same! For example, traveling two blocks? Just run. 350? Use elytra. 2000? Hyper fast dolphin tunnels. So how exactly am I doing this, and how can you do it too? Essentially, we just take those formulas from earlier and chart them out. Again, I’m gonna show some math here but I promise I’ll Keep it simple and It’ll be worth it in the end. I’ll do an example: dolphin tunnels versus elytra in the nether. If each of these formulas gives us the times for each method, we want to figure out Which distance they’ll have the same time because that’s the distance when we should switch. You can see as the distance gets bigger the nether portal gets faster and faster until we reach 800 blocks, where it finally becomes faster than the dolphins. Meaning that if you need to travel Less than 800 blocks, it would be faster to make a dolphin tunnel instead of using the nether. Here’s a little chart I put together – it shows the most common travel methods available, and at what distances you should switch between each one. Now I know some of you might still be confused, And are wondering if this actually makes a difference, and let me bring up some valid points. Case number one: Convenience. I love dolphin tunnels. They’re my absolute favorite thing in the world, and they are so fun to use. They are also incredibly annoying and painful to make: first You gotta dig the tunnel, then you gotta move dolphins, then you gotta collect 27 stacks of soul soil, and then after all of that, you still gotta make sure that your boots don’t break! My point is Sometimes it’s better just to suck it up and spend a few extra seconds in the nether portal. Case number two: Cost. Some of these methods are really cheap: once you set up a nether portal, that’s it. It doesn’t charge you a fee to use. An elytra however, costs rockets – which if you don’t have a gunpowder farm, adds up really fast. Case number three: Lag. Nether portals may be laggy, and if you’re playing on a large server it probably won’t take you exactly eight seconds to travel. Like I said earlier, this data assumes that you’re playing on a perfect world with no lag, but we all know that’s rarely the case. With that being said though, on average the numbers should still be roughly within the ballpark. Case number four: Chunk loading, or lack of, I guess? This is A big one. As mentioned before, I love dolphin tunnels. They work by combining dolphin’s grace, depth strider, and soul speed, and if you want to go even faster you can use a beacon to get speed too. This is great, but they have this problem where you can actually go so fast, the World can’t load in fast enough. If you’ve ever been flying with an elytra and stop mid-flight, it’s the same thing. This is important, because even though this method is technically the fastest with an astounding 144 blocks a second, the occasional lag spike brings down its actual speed. Case number five: Ender pearls. In my own video, I said that ender pearl chambers are the fastest way to travel – and yes, that’s a little bit of click bait, but they are. However, the chunk has to be loaded, meaning that past a certain point the system runs out of range. So Yes, if you play on an active multiplayer server, then ender pearl chambers are still the way to go. But if you play on single player, you would have to link multiple of these systems together, and Honestly it would just be less effort to make an ice boat path, and even less effort just to make a nether portal. So with all that being said, why bother? I mean will a few seconds really matter? To most people, no. If you only play on your worlds for a week before you get rid of them, just make a nether portal. But if you plan on playing on a world for months, or maybe even years, You might want to consider a construction plan to sketch out where your dolphin tunnels will be. Alright I’ll shut up about the dolphins. In the description I also put a link to the spreadsheet We made for this video, so you can put in any distance you want and wow look at that it does cool spreadsheet stuff. Also big thanks to 4square for helping me put that together, it was very helpful in making this video. The reason why I’m so excited about this Is because I looked and I couldn’t find anything on this type of research, so hopefully this new information can change the way people travel in their worlds. Hopefully this video was clear enough, and if you have any questions you can leave Them below and I’ll do my best to answer them. Anyways, that’s about it, thanks for watching:) Video Information
This video, titled ‘You’re using Nether Portals Wrong’, was uploaded by ntader on 2022-07-04 14:10:38. It has garnered 25406 views and 595 likes. The duration of the video is 00:08:02 or 482 seconds.
Nether Portals let you move at 8x the speed, so doing the fastest travel method in the nether should be the fastest way to travel…right?
In this video we discuss possible optimizations for traveling in Minecraft that although simple, I haven’t seen anyone take advantage of.
Spreadsheet for compairing distances: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vtgbAOGEd_FHwa6Z2eX64x_UhqRJL5UqBfJiukoNgeE/edit?usp=sharing
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