We went to the Nether, how did it go? Day 9 of Minecraft

This day in Minecraft took a few weird turns, and instead of explaining it away let’s get started, shall we?

Today Loa and I decided to finally go to the Nether, it was supposed to happen a few episodes ago, but we never actually got around to it, mostly because of the heatwave, and tiredness. So instead, we decided that today was going to be the day. I honestly don’t know WHY I wanted to do this without finishing writing episode 8 first, but here we are, we’re ready to embark on another adventure.

First things first, we need to build our portal, out of Obsidian, close to the house, I wanted it to be within visual distance, so up on the hill felt like a perfect place for it. Loa is standing in the spot we wanted it.

Behind some trees, up on the hill across the pond Loa stands indicating where we're planning to put our portal. His head is also barely visible on the edge of the mini map
Loa: Here? Me: Yeah, that looks like a good spot!

I had learnt from a friend’s recent video that you could sink your portal into the ground, something I probably wouldn’t have thought about on my own. So we decided to do that. Loa explained to me that this also makes it a lot easier to go through it. Which makes sense, and is also kinda cool.

4 blocks of obsidian laid into the ground, between grass and stone.
Foundation laid

We quickly realized that we were slightly short of blocks, but luckily the missing blocks were in the house, so we didn’t have to go digging for anything, it was just fine to go down the hill and fetch them.

Loa running back up the hill
Got the mats?

This wasn’t a huge building project or anything, you just need the inside of it needs to be 2 wide and 3 high, which is about 14 blocks in total, if you include the corners. Which you apparently can skip too. Not important, but just tidbits I’ve caught here and there. And this is the minimal size, so apparently you can just make it a lot of different shapes and stuff, which I thought was pretty cool, but nothing we tried today.

An almost complete portal, but too close picture to see that it's not complete on the top.
Just about finished

Capturing things in still photos isn’t nearly as easy as capturing them in in recorded footage, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying thus far. So I tried to take a photo of the grand opening of the portal, when I used the flint and steel to spark it.

The black obsidian portal is now filled with a purple moving surface, indicating an entrance to another world
Purple goo

And I missed it, it all happened to fast! I used the steel and flint, saw the spark, got super excited, and then POOF the portal was a portal, and it was too late to capture anything. I kind of wish it was a slightly slower animation, to really relish the moment.

The world wobbles as I stand inside the portal
Let’s go!

And as I’m editing this I realized that there are no photos from the Nether. There must’ve been a disturbance between the Overworld and Nether world, so no images were saved. Fear not, for I am a wordsmith! And I shall forge a beautiful story of the anxious adventure we went on!

Going in we were both donning at least one piece of golden armor, looking incredibly stylish with pink and purple armor mixed together, as the gold and iron armors were both enchanted. The golden armor’s main purpose was to to let us safely pass any Piglins we’d meet. Damn, it was lucky that we were wearing that as we stepped through, because our portal put us right at an area teeming with zombie piglins and piglins. Actually think it’s worth mentioning that I didn’t look too closely if it was both piglins and zombie piglins or only zombie piglins, but for the sake of this story it was both!

The piglins weren’t the only swine like things in the nether, there were also hoglins… many many hoglins ready to eat us for breakfast. No, but seriously the piglins were fine, the hoglins not so much. They were a real pita. Any time we got too close they’d charge at us and knock us around. Made it really hard to make progress. Occasionally they would corner us and body blocking us so we couldn’t escape them. And then we also had to avoid friendly fire while fighting them which wasn’t the easiest!

And as if that wasn’t enough, this particular area that we spawned in to was also ripe with Ghasts, I don’t know how many showed up in the first 5 minutes… To say the least, it was rough, and we wasted a lot of our arrows on them, because it’d be really hard to gauge how far away they were, and sometimes it felt like the arrows just went straight through them (and not in the piercing sense!) We soon began fretting about the number of arrows we had left, even though we both had piercing arrows on our crossbows, if we shoot it too far away or into the lava being able to pick them up won’t actually help us very much.

I definitely did not expect ghasts to be something we’d run into so quickly, I thought this was more of a “you’ll run into it later” thing. But then I also learned that where you are in the nether has a correlation to where the portal is in the real (over) world, and that was something I found very interesting. So we were probably just very unlucky with where we ended up spawning in the beginning.

While I was trying to take it all in, this new place I had never experienced before, something had already caught Loa’s eye. Something I can only describe as a Bastion, even though couldn’t see it clearly yet, just indications of it on the map. It was high high up, we were not. So we decided to slowly make our way in it’s direction and see if we could find any good paths up there, while still allowing me to explore and chop down random wood, and look for netherquartz and glowstone etc.

Loa was excited about the amounts of glowstone, and I didn’t know where to look, so I was trying to ask him to point it out to me, and I still wasn’t looking in the right direction, so he had to help me by directing my sight up, and it was kind of amazing. Some of it was just hanging over lava beds, did I mention that there’s lava in the nether? Yeah, there’s lava in the nether. A lot of lava, like everywhere. And if it’s not lava it’s fire blossoms, which spoiler alert, will catch you on fire when you step over them. Also, some thorny types of bushes, which… made some of the adventuring even more difficult.

As we were trying to find our way up there, after pathing around some obstacles, working on getting altitude, I was trying really hard to keep the coordinates correctly in my head as I walked around and took new turns, I found myself thinking “the best way to get up there is to dig here”, so I started to dig a stair. In the meanwhile, Loa was digging up more netherquartz and glowstone where he could find it, I informed him that we had a safe space within the stairs if he wanted to close it behind us, as we by this point had struggled a lot with skeletons and hoglins catching us off guard and spawning in behind us. And ofc the ghasts chirping at us, in a cute yet chilling way.

For some reason, and I’m not sure why, it was probably just one of those days, I got really confused. As I just kept digging up and eventually hit bedrock, I was sure there should be an opening somewhere. So I tried backtracking and digging somewhere else, and then I realized, that I had dug in the entirely wrong direction. So we tried to backtrack and see where we’d last seen the path we wanted to take.

Me and Loa borked around for a bit, still very confused about where we were, slightly upset about fiery flowers that kept catching me on fire, and that together with a combination of Skeletons, Hoglins and Ghasts completely messed with us, and in that flurry of a mess Loa died, while I was still alive. I kept running around trying to deal with the hoglin that had killed Loa, and did my best to stay alive while getting his stuff off his corpse, so he could get back into the zone with all his gear.

Luckily, and something I’ve not really been mentioning much in recent episodes, we had our magical backpack. Our backpack wasn’t only a backpack each, it had been accidentally duped on day 3-4 when I was trying to recover my corpse, but couldn’t find it, but used creative game mechanics to recover my items (this was before I discovered the level zero fuckery of the Corpse mod). Basically, we had more than one backpack, that could access the same inventory, as a shared inventory. And thanks to the corpse mod, I could also pick up his stuff, use the backpack to send it back home to him (because we had additional 2 in a chest which were our backup emergency ones), and I was able to send him back all his stuff.

After I sent his stuff through, and while he was taking his time to get organized and prepared to come back into the nether, I ended up dying as well. At this point I was mad and sad because of that. And damn did I blame him for it! I just needed a moment to be mad, and then was like “okay let’s get ready and go back and fetch my stuff this time.” and at least I knew how to get back there, mostly.

So we both went back in, and while adventuring there, finding our way the best we could, I said that I didn’t want to stay after we found my body, I wanted to just get my stuff and get out of there. I didn’t feel like our gear accommodated for our different play-styles at this particular moment in this particular place, so I needed out.

I definitely have thoughts about why I felt like I had had enough, so let me elaborate.

My thoughts about the Nether

After we left the Nether, and decided to not go back, Loa asked me if the Nether scared me. And scared isn’t the word I’d use to describe it, however going into the Nether with Loa at this time was incredibly stressful to me, probably similar to the mineshaft yesterday, because it was entirely new to me, and a lot going on all the time. I’d hear the ghasts make a sound, every few minutes, and I knew they were baddies, and they usually had you in their sight when they chirped. Like, from others playing I’d seen it as that they weren’t that abundant, but maybe it’s just different areas… Or editing…

I also noticed that we weren’t doing anything like we would in the overworld, in tunnels and caves, putting torches down to make areas safe, like I don’t even know if that works in the nether I didn’t get a chance to ask Loa about it (don’t answer this!), and we both only had iron and gold gear. And Iron weapons. Which is like, it’s probably doable, but it wasn’t great. We were wasting a lot of our arrows, and our food on silly things. Neither of us had fire-protection on our gear (this is an afterthought, because I’m not even sure I knew it was a thing at this point in time).

Loa really just wanted to get to the bastion asap because “good loot”, but I was like “this is entirely new to me, and I want to experience it, I want to explore it with that awe of a first time”, and I honestly don’t think it’d be possible with someone who’s a lot more familiar with it and comfortable in that environment. And I think that ended up turning me off of this specific place, on this particular night.

I think adventuring together with someone you love, in a game they love, can be a fantastic experience, and it definitely has been at times, but it can also have very frustrating elements in it, like when your playstyles are completely different, which they were this day and in this case.

I feel like I need to clarify, and I guess this connects a lot with my “let new players be noobs” post I posted recently, that I am not talking about any of this in a hateful manner, I understand his excitement of going into a “cooler” place of the game, to go get “good shit”, but I was still in that exploration and awe phase, just enjoying the overworld a lot. Not looking to progress by going to the Nether. I still wanted to go there, that’s why we did it, but I didn’t have a specific goal in mind other than maybe picking up some glowstone. Unfortunately, us doing it together at this specific time wasn’t the right time.

As it stands right now we’ve set another plan for possibly going to the nether again together, and I’ll tell you more about it when / if that happens. There’s still a lot more adventures as well as chill gaming ahead in the days to come. Speaking of chill gaming:

A chill night ensued

So, I continued the night with some more chill adventures, I asked Loa if he wanted to go on another adventure, because I saw something on the map that looked like it could be another village in a different biome that was still fairly close to us, but I think he didn’t quite hear me. So I’ve saved that adventure for another day.

We both started doing other things, I just headed out to dig up some gravel because we needed more flint. For arrows. So many arrows.

At the bottom of the river by our house (indicated by the minimap) digging up gravel.
Need more flint for arrows please.

I’m very much in love with my neptunium armor, so I can breath under water. I’m very spoiled by it.

More gravel, this time in a cave. Some blocks are on the ground.
Dig dig dig

Putting gravel blocks back so we could dig it up again at some other point.

Putting pieces of gravel back into the big hole digging it out in the first place created.
I’m weird okay, don’t worry about it

I know it’s weird to put the gravel back, but I keep thinking “I’d fill this up with stone anyways, and this way when someone else comes through they may be like “oh gravel, let me just dig this out” because they too need flint. That’s actually pretty neat, that you can just keep placing the same gravel block to get more flint out of it. Which I think I only learnt by accident, or asked Loa about.

I also went deeper into the mines, just going digging for more ores. I was mainly hunting for diamonds so we could get better gear and prepare for another big adventure and make sure all our tools were diamond and enchanted.

Gold ore among the stone, in between a lot of moss and green.
A little bit of gold
Lots of iron nodes in the stone wall of a tunnel
And a little bit of iron
4 visible diamond blocks next to a little bit of water in a dark cave
And a lot of diamonds
Mined out 2 blocks of Diamond, uncovering another 2 blocks of diamond.
Underneath 2 more blocks
All in all there were 8 blocks of diamond here.
Jackpot! 8 all in all

We also figured out if we tame our own llama, if we could put stuff on it. Loa started with the one we already had at home, and was only able to put 3 item slots on it. Neither of us could figure out why.

A llama on a hill in the dark rainy night. I'm holding a lead in my hand.
Wanna be friends little llama?

After he logged out I tamed another one, and brought it back home. And I managed to figure out how we could get better llamas. Apparently they have a strength stat, and a 3 strength Llama gave 9 inventory slots. Which I thought was pretty neat. I still need to go see if I can get any more and better ones.

Me sitting on the back of the llama at home, in order to tame it.
Are we friends now?
The llama now has a cloth on it's back, and a storage box for carrying stuff
Friends!

A lot of this day didn’t quite go as intended, but there were still enjoyable moments. And yes, those gold pants did break before I managed to repair them.

I’ll see you again soon.


If you’re enjoying reading these little articles or stories, consider throwing some support my way: via ko-fi or alternatives. I’m currently trying to cover my student loan debt payments and that will be my goal going forward too.

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