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Not my nether portals


I am a new player, only 6 months in. Has anyone ever had this happen?

I built my portal on a stone beach, went into the nether. When I came back to the overworld I came out of a portal in a cave with a broken portal next to it. I did not build either portal and had never been in this cave system.

by Appropriate_Rice_523

View 6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. MassivePersonality61 on

    Coordinate incompatibility. Your portal is searching for an appropriate place to spawn you in the overworld. Try linking the overworld portal to the appropriate nether coordinates.

  2. cipheron on

    There’s a reason this happens, it’s to do with imperfect placement and the rules for portal generation, combined with the fact that coordinates in the Nether get squished compared to the Overworld.

    Basically, any time you step through a portal, it calculates the matching coordinates in the other dimension, and looks for a portal close by. If it doesn’t find one close enough, it then looks for a spot to make a new portal.

    The problem comes when it can’t place the portal in the Nether close enough to where it **should** be, this is often when the exit location would be in the lava ocean or in a solid wall.

    That can shift the Nether-side portal over a bit, but because space is compressed in the Nether, it means when you go back through that portal the “a bit” it got shifted turns into “a lot” – far enough away that it’s not in range of the original portal, so it has to make a new one.

    —

    Now for the actual numbers, i left this to last to make it easier to comprehend what’s going on.

    “Portal Scan Range” is basically 128 blocks. So when you go through the portal it scans 128 blocks in any direction. If it doesn’t find a nearby portal, it makes one.

    However, say that this location in the Nether was blocked, so instead, it makes a new portal 20 blocks from the perfect location – you end up with a “one way” portal. Basically the Overworld one links to the Nether one, because in the Nether, they’re only misaligned by 20 blocks, which is less than the 128 block scan range, but that doesn’t work going the other way, because 20 blocks in the Nether becomes 160 blocks in the Overworld, and 160 is more than 128.

    The solution to the problem is to manual place matching portals. The one in the Nether is too misaligned to go back to your base, so you need to work out where it SHOULD be, then make a portal there. Write down the exact coordinates of the one in the Overworld, divide X and Z by 8, and that will tell you where to make a new Nether-side portal.

  4. Mocha_is_me on

    Is it possible you have been in this cave system before but don’t remember it?