How to Make a Nether Portal in Minecraft

The Nether is a hellish, otherworldly dimension fraught with environmental dangers and deadly monsters.

It’s also the only place to get some of the materials you need to enter The End (Minecraft’s other outside dimension), where players can fight the Ender Dragon in order to complete the game.

To access the Nether, you have to use a Nether Portal. Read on to learn all about how to make a Nether portal in Minecraft.

How to Make a Nether Portal in Minecraft

Unlike End Portals, players can freely construct Nether Portals wherever they want. With the right materials and a fair bit of courage, you, too, can go spelunking through Minecraft’s deadly infernal dimension. Here’s how:

1. Gather the Materials

In order to create your own Nether Portal, you’ll first need to gather all the right materials. The table below will give you a quick rundown of what you’ll need:

Ingredient	Total	Recipe
Obsidian	10
Flint and Steel	1	– 1 Iron Ingot – 1 Flint

Obsidian is the primary ingredient necessary to create a Nether Portal. Fortunately, this material isn’t that hard to find, but you’ll need a Diamond Pickaxe to mine obsidian. You can usually find obsidian near lava. It’s a black rock with purple veins.

Here are a few other places you can find obsidian:

Bastion remnant chest (24% chance)
Nether fortress chest (8%)
Ruined portal chest (46%)
Village weaponsmith’s chest (25%)

Another super-easy way to find obsidian is by pouring water over lava. With this method, you can turn entire pools of lava into obsidian.

Flint and Steel is a tool that makes it easy to start fires. You can craft a Flint and Steel by putting an Iron Ingot and a Flint in your Crafting menu.

To create Iron Ingots, just throw Iron Ore and some fuel into a furnace.

Flint is obtained by mining blocks of Gravel. Every block of Gravel mined has a 10% chance of dropping a piece of Flint.

You can also get 10 pieces of Flint from novice-level fletcher villagers in exchange for 10 blocks of Gravel and an Emerald.

2. Build Your Portal

Once you have the ingredients ready, it’s time to make a Nether Portal.

First, make a doorway with the obsidian blocks. The dimensions don’t matter, as long as you form a closed loop with a hole in the middle, you’ll be fine.

Yes, you can even create a gigantic, island-sized Nether Portal, if you really want to. Just be sure that the doorway is large enough for you to fit through!

Now use your Flint and Steel to start a fire in the center of the obsidian doorway. This will set the portal alight, activating it. Your Nether Portal is complete! Now all you have to do is step through the portal to be instantly transported to the Nether.

Linking Nether Portals

When you travel from the Overworld into the Nether, the game will attempt to spawn you in the Nether coordinates that correspond to the location of your Overworld Nether Portal.

This means that if you know the coordinates of your Overworld Nether Portal, you can estimate where you will spawn in the Nether. Here’s the formula for transposing Overworld coordinates to Nether coordinates:

Overworld (X, Y, Z) ⇔ Nether (X/8, Y, Z/8)

Before you arrive in the Nether from the Overworld, the game will calculate a viable spawn coordinate in the Nether, then it will check a 3×3 chunk area for any portals.

If it finds a portal in that chunk, the Overworld portal will “pair” or “link” with that Nether portal, allowing you to reliably move back and forth between the two portals.

So, if you want to make two Overworld and Nether portals that are directly linked to one another, do this:

Create a Nether Portal from the Overworld and memorize its coordinates
Step into the Nether Portal
Transpose the Overworld portal’s coordinates to Nether coordinates (X/8, Y, Z/8)
Build a Nether Portal at those coordinates

Quick Travel with Nether Portals

As explained earlier, coordinates in the Overworld have corresponding coordinates in the Nether. However, the two dimensions are not the same size.

The Nether is exactly one-eighth the size of the Overworld (hence the inter-world coordinate transposition formula requiring divisions by eight).

This means that every block you travel in the Nether is equivalent to eight blocks in the Overworld. You can exploit this mechanic to travel long distances very quickly.

If you’ve been playing your world for a while, you likely have multiple bases and farms spread out across numerous biomes.

For example, you may have a trident farm in a sea biome while your bee farm is churning out honey in a forest biome. In such cases, you probably travel thousands of blocks fairly regularly.

By using linked Nether Portals at both locations, you can move between the two places eight times faster!

Set up a Nether Portal at one location, and link it with another portal in the Nether. Then move to the Nether coordinates of your second location, place a Nether Portal there, then link it to its corresponding coordinates in the Overworld.

Now, you can reliably move between your two farms more quickly than ever!