At the risk of sounding like a complete a**hat, I'm still bummed that, 2-3 updates after Halloween, the portal system is still pretty broken. Why I care: for me, I play singleplayer and minecraft is relaxing, stimulating, and fun just to wander around and build stuff. The only thing missing was a way to really explore without worrying that you'd get way too far away from your home base and never find a way back since walking is SO SLOW. I know the world is vast (limitless?) and I wanted to see what kind of weird crap the world generator spewed. Especially now that biomes are out there, I can't wait to go wandering off and exploring.
So portals are going to be AWESOME. I can wander around, find an awesome lake/mountain/cave/forest, plop down a portal, warp into the nether, stroll leisurely to my home portal, and find my way back if something happens. Or I can explore the nether and see how far away I can warp to see what weird place I end up. Either is going to be awesome.
But portals are broken.
With the first update, when you went through to the nether and turned around and came back, you ended up somewhere else. There were workaround's, but it was annoying. I want real-world portals to be where I WANT them to be, somewhere decorative, preferably, not randomly on some hill.
Next, we discovered that when you died in the nether, it created a new portal in the real world, thus creating portalspam. Given the Ghast's deadliness, I ended up with 10 portals all over my landscape, which took 5 minutes each to remove. Annoying. (also, obsidian takes way too long to mine. It's illogical, especially since diamond itself is easy to mine)
Finally, Notch fixed those with the next bugfix update, but the fix broke it in a different way. Now, no more spam portals when you die, no more coming back somewhere else, but it is broken in the opposite direction. Now it seems that once you have one portal in the nether, almost all other portals you make in the real world tend to attach you back to that same portal in the nether. So now portals are useless for travel, unless you just want to take them to warp home, but you can't get back other than slow walking to a place you probably can't find again anyway. Arggg.
Sooo, risking community abuse (i know its alpha, i know notch is god, i know i should be grateful for anything at all, etc), I want to have a thread where the community can keep an eye on whether Notch has finally fixed the portals so we can use it the way he said we could way back before Halloween and to figure out workarounds until then, if ever, they get fixed right. Right now, portals are basically unusable for anything but getting into the Nether to mess around. Or maybe its just me, whatever.
My hope is that he'll set it so every portal you make creates ONE and ONLY ONE unique portal in the other realm, so that you can use it reliably to go from place to place. If you make one in the nether, one appears in the real world (maybe somewhere random). If you make one in the real world, one appears in the nether. No double-linking, no portal spam, no more weirdness, just simple one to one link. That's all we need and the vast world will be ours. Here's hoping it comes soon.
But MATHEMATICALLY, Notch's current programming is CORRECT. It just doesn't acurately convey what we hoped it would.
This is because of the 8:1 ratio. It messes everything up. If you have two portals right next to each other in the Nether, chances are they're going to go to the same block in the Overworld.
Actually, if you build a portal up to eight blocks away from another portal, chances are...
So unless he tore apart and rebuilt the Portal/Nether system, that's how it is.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
GENERATION ∞: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.
Quote from Dark_One2012 »
Someone once told me you could actually use the eggs and bucket of milk to make a cake. Turns out it was just a lie...
But this poses a technical question. If I build 2 portals that are too close in the Overworld, what would they link to in the Nether, since the Nether space is condensed?
Well, just as his current system seeks out a suitable spot for a portal to go (not in water, lava, etc) he would have to implement rules about portal density and locations. In other words, if you build two real world portals 5 blocks apart, the program should move them in the nether a 'reasonable' distance apart, say 10-20 blocks, regardless of where the mathematical 'matching' spot is. Even though geometrically it may not 'match', um, who cares? As long as it warps correctly, it's still useable. That's what little signs are for. There obviously would be a density problem in hell if you build 100 portals in the surface, but at some point, the 'portal placing' code could reduce the minimum distance to say, 5 or 10 blocks once hell became chock full of them. That's not usually going to happen anyway. Heck, he could even implement a system where portals can spawn in a 'room' within rock, by hollowing out a space, thus giving him 3 dimensions in hell to find room to put the portals. That might be fun to have to tunnel to the surface to find the rest of the portal network. Notch is a genius - this is a completely solvable coding problem I would think (I am a casual programmer btw).
@vgxmaster
Quote from vgxmaster »
But MATHEMATICALLY, Notch's current programming is CORRECT. It just doesn't acurately convey what we hoped it would.
This is because of the 8:1 ratio. It messes everything up. If you have two portals right next to each other in the Nether, chances are they're going to go to the same block in the Overworld.
Actually, if you build a portal up to eight blocks away from another portal, chances are...
So unless he tore apart and rebuilt the Portal/Nether system, that's how it is.
I agree that the 8:1 ratio theoretically messes things up, but the Real portals I'm having trouble with are WAY farther away than that - there should be plenty of room. I've heard of people walking a minecraft day apart on the surface and their portals STILL link up. Mine were hundreds of blocks apart and literally at the top of the mountain. So it is definitely a coding bug, even given the 8:1.
Like I wrote above, though, even if the coding bug were fixed, there still should be a way to code around the 8:1 issue by just having a good 'open space' algorithm. Just DO NOT under ANY circumstances let 2 portals link to the same one period and do what you have to do to separate them in hell by placing them farther apart, underground, etc. automatically.
As an aside, I've been thinking about the whole concept of portal travel as it works now, and I'm kind of 50/50 on whether I'd prefer just a simple portal-to-portal link in the real world, without the nether at all. There would be lots of opportunity for cool stuff, like each portal could have its own 'code', maybe with cool runes that you could craft, and then you'd need to craft the runes and activate them with redstone in order to set the destination to another portal on the surface, kind of like Stargate. I half think that would be easier than trying to fix the kind of weird portal/nether/portal two-step, where your game has to save and load twice to go from one place in the real to another. But... I'm ok with it as is as well, if it would just work.
Actually, I disagree - I'm loving the new portal system, I hope it is never established as a 1-to-1 gate system.
I've explored portals in my current homeworld and once I figured out how the connections work, I used them to great effect!It's actually the very fact that portals will connect to the "nearest" safe portal (within a certain distance limit) that makes them so useful.
* Vertical insensitivity. This is the single most useful aspect I've discovered about portals. I have a tall tower/castle, with a mineshaft down the center of it. On ground level, there's a portal that connects me through a few steps in the Nether to a gate at the very top of my tower: no more endless stairs/ladders to the top! No more fiddly boatavators! When I go down to bedrock to mine, no need to climb back up (or establish another boat elevator): just walk through a third gate at bedrock level, and in a few seconds I'm back at the top of my tower. Notch - thank you, thank you, thank you.
* Local shortcuts. I have several gates within visual distance of my tower. I can go out and hunt/fish/chop, and when I'm done, pop through the nearest local gate and I'm back home in seconds because they connect to the same one in Nether.
* Dynamic connections. I have a giant pyramid in a desert biome. There's a cool portal in the center of it, only after you go through many winding corridors. But... the obsidian entranceway to the pyramid conceals a potential shortcut. (The priests knew about this :smile.gif: If you ignite the door portal, it takes over for the one buried in the center, both ways... it's as if the center one does not exist (although it connects you to the same Nether portal the doorway shortcut does). But as soon as the doorway portal is extinguished, the center portal reverts back to the primary connection without a hiccup. This was just a test, but it has potential!
* "Lobby" entrances to sealed locations. I have an enclosed glass dome under the sea, no airlock or anything. You can only portal in or out. This is cool enough, but I have a ocean-level dock a little ways away from the dome, with a portal on it. Sail up to the dock, go through the portal, a few steps in Nether and you are undah the sea... portal back out and sail away again.
Not all your portals connect to your first one - just explore a bit more with them. Portals get created on the nearest dry ground within a certain distance of the proper origin, on both the Nether and main world sides. That said, there is a distance limit - I've had two portals spawn 50 blocks over the ocean, hanging in mid air. (One has now been refashioned into an "unfortunate portal accident" that pulled a huge chunk of Nether into the real world... picture a hanging hunk of burning, lava-spewing nightmare floating in the sky.)
Next to explore - ignited portals at the bottom of the sea as a walkway under frozen ice... each time you walk through an arch, your air is refreshed! Will be a bit of a pain to build enclosures underwater to initially light the gates up, but once lit, they stay lit underwater...
I'll post later with a link to a download of my map, if anyone wants to fool around with it.
Actually, I disagree - I'm loving the new portal system, I hope it is never established as a 1-to-1 gate system.
First, you are creative and awesome! You clearly take advantage of the only good that the current broken system does, which is to make it easy to 'get home' from multiple real world portals. BUT, I think you practically get the same effect if you have CLOSE portals in the nether rather than the exact same one, with the positive of being able to go the other direction. So, instead of exiting into the nether, turning around and entering again, you exit to the nether, walk a few feet, and enter portal 2, it really takes barely any longer. Keep in mind that with the 8:1 ratio, if your real world portal spots aren't far apart, your nether ones should be basically side-by-side. The downside of the current system is that you can go home, but nowhere else - you can't travel TO a new place on the surface, just the primary link. So consider supporting our cause!! At least we should have the option to turn the double-linking off somehow if that's not what we want. I personally think its an bug that you have used to your advantage because you are smart.
I agree about vertical INsensitivity, though. I like the idea that if at all possible, your portals in the nether should be on the SAME vertical level, so you can go from the bottom of your mine to the top in two quick hops. Again, the nether portals should be really close if you are only vertically separated, so really quick travel will still be there. In my experience, my first portal (under the first buggy update) was built at bedrock level and so my nether portal was also in a cave 80 blocks down and I had to tunnel up to find the main HELL cavern. I do NOT like that. Nether portals should be at the same level and only different levels if there's no room left for more.
I think your other two positives are both still possible under a 1 to 1 system. I'm partly doing this thread to make sure Notch notices us (and to balance out the 5 trillion people screaming for him to spend time implementing damage in multiplayer, which I don't play, i'd rather he got the basic singleplayer experience usable first, since that's where most people start)
Not all your portals connect to your first one - just explore a bit more with them. Portals get created on the nearest dry ground within a certain distance of the proper origin, on both the Nether and main world sides.
Really, it doesn't look that way. As I said, I've created the first portal in my 'base', and the second one very far away from it. For the first one, a portal appeared in the Nether, but not for the second one. For some reason, the second one led to the same portal as the first one. Seems like no new portal was created in the Nether.
Just make a god damned portal in the nether yourself. It'll link to the closest portal in the nether so just make and activate one.
Really, it doesn't look that way. As I said, I've created the first portal in my 'base', and the second one very far away from it. For the first one, a portal appeared in the Nether, but not for the second one. For some reason, the second one led to the same portal as the first one. Seems like no new portal was created in the Nether.
I've experienced this, but found I could correct it by making a portal from the Nether side, as another user just posted. Maybe it is a bug, but I thought it had to do with the big lava lakes/solid Netherstone... I've had to build bridges & tunnels in Nether to get to a new area in the "real world."
It is true that I have not tested from the real world side by going really, really far and trying to reconnect to the Nether, since I could accomplish the same thing easier by going a little ways in the Nether and creating a portal there. Mind you, what an awesome bug - forget about 8:1 travel, that figure could be much, much higher if you really are connected home from no matter where you are in the real world!
It's also true as another person pointed out, that 1:1 portals could likely be used for the cool things that the current portal system does. Still, I kinda like the discharge-through-the-nearest-feasible-portal thing, maybe it's the Stargate influence. :smile.gif:
One thing I wish for portals is that they be powered instead of lit on fire. This would connect portals to existing mechanics like buttons, switches, and pressure pads. Not to mention the output of computation, or timers. How about a portal that only activates at night? Or is made safe from real-world Ghast spawning by turning it off?
Anyhow - now that I'm thinking with portals, I am happy. They are an awesome game mechanic and they will only get better!
I guess this is already reported.. I have two portals in my main world that are almost 500 blocks apart from each other. They go to the same portal in Nether, and I can only get back to the original portal in my world from Nether.
I guess they would be 62 or so blocks apart..
I have an idea for a fix...
1 build your first portal in normal space and visit Nether
2 When you build your 2nd portal and use it to travel to Nether you come out the first nether portal, but you have
a portal "Block" in your inventory (Looks like a little portal..) You plant that in Nether and that links it your your new
portal in the "real" world. When you place the portal block it become the lower left obsidian stone - dig a hole and place it in there and it will place the opening at ground level. The new portal faces the user.
Now you have two portals in nether and you control how far apart they are.
GPS and Chunk values from Mincraft GPS v1.0.0.0:
GPS Location Chunk
NS EW Alt X Z
Beta Gate 142 -525 71 8 -34
Alpha Gate 122 -32 37 7 -2
Deltas 400 243049 1156
My first portal is deep in my mine, and is deep underground in Nether.. Is that to be expected?
I can confirm it is not true that your second Earth portal always connects with your first Nether portal.
Created a fresh world. Used magic to give myself some, uh, scientific instruments such as diamond armor and of course, a whackload of obsidian. Established the first Earth portal, and took a peek in Nether to let it spawn and form some initial terrain. I was on the steep verge of a huge lava lake.
Back on Earth, thanks to MinecraftGPS, I took a few minutes and got exactly 1600 blocks due north of my first portal - that should be 200 Nethersteps. Made a second Earth portal, went through - and found myself in a different location in Nether.
Last step was to walk in Nether from one portal to another, as a sanity check (it does all kinda look the same). After tunnelling about 40 blocks Netherhomeward, I broke through overlooking a giant lava lake, but the portal was not in sight; I had a ways to go. Built a walkway over megalake, and counted distance as I went. After roasting myself a few times in lava like a lobster in a diamond shell and starting from the other direction, sure enough around the right block count (200ish) there was my other walkway, about 60 blocks up.
Looking around... that lava lake was huge. It was easily 250 blocks across by itself... along just one axis. If it were 8 times larger, in the real-world mapping - I'd have to go very, very far to have my next Nether portal not appear above lava.
Although I'll concede there may be something buggy going on here, my money is still on the logistics of compatible terrain. I'm pretty sure that both on Earth and in Nether, there is a distance past which it will create a new portal whether it can find safe/convenient terrain or not. That's when you get those floating-air portals. Less than that distance, if there's nothing safe it will connect to the nearest gate.
There's a thought - maybe that distance is 50 blocks or something on Earth, and 50 blocks in Nether. But since 50 blocks in Nether is 400 blocks in Earth distance, you really do have to go quite a ways in the real world to ensure you get past the Nether limit...
I encourage others to experiment and post results!
The portals suck. So does The Nether. I decided to go for a long portal walk today. Mined around The Nether until I was pretty far, made a portal and stepped through. I appeared in mid air over an ocean. Kinda lame but whatever. Built walkways down and to land, found some stuff and went back through. The damn portal glitch put me somewhere I have no idea where I am in The Nether. It would take me hours to find my way back to my portal. I'd probably have better luck walking back in the real world.
I was so disgusted I threw myself into lava. Not sure if and when I'll turn Minecraft back on again.
This is how Notch described portals, and this is how I want them to work:
I want to build a portal at my spawn site in the overworld. I want to go through this portal into the Nether. I want to walk 60 blocks in the Nether and create another portal. I want to walk through this portal and end up somehwere around 480 blocks away from my original overworld portal (1 block travelled in the Nether = 8 blocks travelled in the overworld).
This way, I can go through my spawn point portal, travel 60 blocks in the Nether, exit, and be out 480 blocks in the overworld. Then I can explore around there, go back through the overworld portal, walk back 60 blocks in the Nether, go through the portal, and be back at my overworld spawn portal.
From what I've read and the limited testing I have done, portals do not work this way.
This is how Notch described portals, and this is how I want them to work:
I want to build a portal at my spawn site in the overworld. I want to go through this portal into the Nether. I want to walk 60 blocks in the Nether and create another portal. I want to walk through this portal and end up somehwere around 480 blocks away from my original overworld portal (1 block travelled in the Nether = 8 blocks travelled in the overworld).
This way, I can go through my spawn point portal, travel 60 blocks in the Nether, exit, and be out 480 blocks in the overworld. Then I can explore around there, go back through the overworld portal, walk back 60 blocks in the Nether, go through the portal, and be back at my overworld spawn portal.
From what I've read and the limited testing I have done, portals do not work this way.
Yes they do.
I've placed over a dozen portals, i had to fix 8 of them but they all work perfectly now and this is exactly how portals work.
I figured out that you can't "play it safe" and build two portals in the overworld and expect the equivalent portals to get made in the Nether.
I made a portal next to my Overworld spawn point. I went back to the Overworld from the Nether and walked out to where my second camp is. I counted it off and it was approximately 300 blocks away.
I walked all the way back to my Overworld spawn point portal and went into the Nether. I then moved in the direction of my camp in the Overworld through the Nether. I counted out 48 bricks (I had to build a sky tunnel while avoiding ghasts. Took me about an hour and it was the scariest experience of my Minecraft gaming so far) and I created a portal chamber. I then built the portal in the Nether, and walked through it.
My exit portal in the Overworld was about 35 blocks away from my second camp! Success!
The key is to find out how many blocks away from the first overworld portal you want the second portal to appear, divide by 8, build your first overworld portal, go into the Nether, count out the number of bricks in the direction you want the portal to appear in the overworld, build your second portal in the overworld, and activate it.
Now to find out if I can do that a second time!
I believe you need to go a certain distance away from the portal in the Nether before you build a new one. If you're too close, it will link back to the same Overworld portal you went through to get to the Nether. I don't know if there is a certain distance away, but it might be worth building a bunch of portals at 5-10 block increments to find out which one takes you to a new Overworld portal.
Some further experimenting with my homeworld and portals.
I was surprised to find that portals I created in one direction would zap me back to my home portal, even 827 Earth blocks away... that's over 100 Netherblocks. Surely the snap-to limit for portals has be less than 100, or that's just kooky.
So I attacked it from the Nether side, tunneling in the same direction to see why new portals wouldn't appear in that heading. After tunnelling through solid Netherstone for ages, I never did break through to any free space. When I created room for a portal midway down my tunnel, I found that some of the Earth portals that were zapping me all the way back home now connected to the new portal - the remaining Earth portals brought me home.
I expect if I experimented further, I'd see that if I cleared all the Netherstone away, my Earth portals would map nicely to their 8:1 Nether counterparts. I believe portals are working exactly as intended - but the reality of Nether is that there are few safe places to land. Maybe TNT will become a big thing in Netherland.
Whether this can be considered a "bug", I'm not sure. One programmatic thing that could be changed is for portals to just damn well appear where they're supposed to, by hollowing out a small space in solid rock or making portals hanging in the air, be it over water or lava. But that will have people quailing too - "I appeared in solid rock underground and had to tunnel to the surface"... "I have to constantly build bridges in Nether to get from my floating portals to solid ground." I think the terrain of Nether would have to change dramatically for portals to make sense to people - less solid rock, smaller lava lakes, more of an Earthlike flat plain than hollowed-out caverns. It would be more boring, certainly.
If this really is a terrain thing and not a simple program bug, then Notch has a challenge on his hands. How can these two worlds be feasibly linked together with portals in a way that works well?
So portals are going to be AWESOME. I can wander around, find an awesome lake/mountain/cave/forest, plop down a portal, warp into the nether, stroll leisurely to my home portal, and find my way back if something happens. Or I can explore the nether and see how far away I can warp to see what weird place I end up. Either is going to be awesome.
But portals are broken.
With the first update, when you went through to the nether and turned around and came back, you ended up somewhere else. There were workaround's, but it was annoying. I want real-world portals to be where I WANT them to be, somewhere decorative, preferably, not randomly on some hill.
Next, we discovered that when you died in the nether, it created a new portal in the real world, thus creating portalspam. Given the Ghast's deadliness, I ended up with 10 portals all over my landscape, which took 5 minutes each to remove. Annoying. (also, obsidian takes way too long to mine. It's illogical, especially since diamond itself is easy to mine)
Finally, Notch fixed those with the next bugfix update, but the fix broke it in a different way. Now, no more spam portals when you die, no more coming back somewhere else, but it is broken in the opposite direction. Now it seems that once you have one portal in the nether, almost all other portals you make in the real world tend to attach you back to that same portal in the nether. So now portals are useless for travel, unless you just want to take them to warp home, but you can't get back other than slow walking to a place you probably can't find again anyway. Arggg.
Sooo, risking community abuse (i know its alpha, i know notch is god, i know i should be grateful for anything at all, etc), I want to have a thread where the community can keep an eye on whether Notch has finally fixed the portals so we can use it the way he said we could way back before Halloween and to figure out workarounds until then, if ever, they get fixed right. Right now, portals are basically unusable for anything but getting into the Nether to mess around. Or maybe its just me, whatever.
My hope is that he'll set it so every portal you make creates ONE and ONLY ONE unique portal in the other realm, so that you can use it reliably to go from place to place. If you make one in the nether, one appears in the real world (maybe somewhere random). If you make one in the real world, one appears in the nether. No double-linking, no portal spam, no more weirdness, just simple one to one link. That's all we need and the vast world will be ours. Here's hoping it comes soon.
I support. I'm not really a big fan of exploring though. xD
Yes, I agree and support. Good ideas.
But MATHEMATICALLY, Notch's current programming is CORRECT. It just doesn't acurately convey what we hoped it would.
This is because of the 8:1 ratio. It messes everything up. If you have two portals right next to each other in the Nether, chances are they're going to go to the same block in the Overworld.
Actually, if you build a portal up to eight blocks away from another portal, chances are...
So unless he tore apart and rebuilt the Portal/Nether system, that's how it is.
Well, just as his current system seeks out a suitable spot for a portal to go (not in water, lava, etc) he would have to implement rules about portal density and locations. In other words, if you build two real world portals 5 blocks apart, the program should move them in the nether a 'reasonable' distance apart, say 10-20 blocks, regardless of where the mathematical 'matching' spot is. Even though geometrically it may not 'match', um, who cares? As long as it warps correctly, it's still useable. That's what little signs are for. There obviously would be a density problem in hell if you build 100 portals in the surface, but at some point, the 'portal placing' code could reduce the minimum distance to say, 5 or 10 blocks once hell became chock full of them. That's not usually going to happen anyway. Heck, he could even implement a system where portals can spawn in a 'room' within rock, by hollowing out a space, thus giving him 3 dimensions in hell to find room to put the portals. That might be fun to have to tunnel to the surface to find the rest of the portal network. Notch is a genius - this is a completely solvable coding problem I would think (I am a casual programmer btw).
@vgxmaster
I agree that the 8:1 ratio theoretically messes things up, but the Real portals I'm having trouble with are WAY farther away than that - there should be plenty of room. I've heard of people walking a minecraft day apart on the surface and their portals STILL link up. Mine were hundreds of blocks apart and literally at the top of the mountain. So it is definitely a coding bug, even given the 8:1.
Like I wrote above, though, even if the coding bug were fixed, there still should be a way to code around the 8:1 issue by just having a good 'open space' algorithm. Just DO NOT under ANY circumstances let 2 portals link to the same one period and do what you have to do to separate them in hell by placing them farther apart, underground, etc. automatically.
As an aside, I've been thinking about the whole concept of portal travel as it works now, and I'm kind of 50/50 on whether I'd prefer just a simple portal-to-portal link in the real world, without the nether at all. There would be lots of opportunity for cool stuff, like each portal could have its own 'code', maybe with cool runes that you could craft, and then you'd need to craft the runes and activate them with redstone in order to set the destination to another portal on the surface, kind of like Stargate. I half think that would be easier than trying to fix the kind of weird portal/nether/portal two-step, where your game has to save and load twice to go from one place in the real to another. But... I'm ok with it as is as well, if it would just work.
I've explored portals in my current homeworld and once I figured out how the connections work, I used them to great effect!It's actually the very fact that portals will connect to the "nearest" safe portal (within a certain distance limit) that makes them so useful.
* Vertical insensitivity. This is the single most useful aspect I've discovered about portals. I have a tall tower/castle, with a mineshaft down the center of it. On ground level, there's a portal that connects me through a few steps in the Nether to a gate at the very top of my tower: no more endless stairs/ladders to the top! No more fiddly boatavators! When I go down to bedrock to mine, no need to climb back up (or establish another boat elevator): just walk through a third gate at bedrock level, and in a few seconds I'm back at the top of my tower. Notch - thank you, thank you, thank you.
* Local shortcuts. I have several gates within visual distance of my tower. I can go out and hunt/fish/chop, and when I'm done, pop through the nearest local gate and I'm back home in seconds because they connect to the same one in Nether.
* Dynamic connections. I have a giant pyramid in a desert biome. There's a cool portal in the center of it, only after you go through many winding corridors. But... the obsidian entranceway to the pyramid conceals a potential shortcut. (The priests knew about this :smile.gif: If you ignite the door portal, it takes over for the one buried in the center, both ways... it's as if the center one does not exist (although it connects you to the same Nether portal the doorway shortcut does). But as soon as the doorway portal is extinguished, the center portal reverts back to the primary connection without a hiccup. This was just a test, but it has potential!
* "Lobby" entrances to sealed locations. I have an enclosed glass dome under the sea, no airlock or anything. You can only portal in or out. This is cool enough, but I have a ocean-level dock a little ways away from the dome, with a portal on it. Sail up to the dock, go through the portal, a few steps in Nether and you are undah the sea... portal back out and sail away again.
Not all your portals connect to your first one - just explore a bit more with them. Portals get created on the nearest dry ground within a certain distance of the proper origin, on both the Nether and main world sides. That said, there is a distance limit - I've had two portals spawn 50 blocks over the ocean, hanging in mid air. (One has now been refashioned into an "unfortunate portal accident" that pulled a huge chunk of Nether into the real world... picture a hanging hunk of burning, lava-spewing nightmare floating in the sky.)
Next to explore - ignited portals at the bottom of the sea as a walkway under frozen ice... each time you walk through an arch, your air is refreshed! Will be a bit of a pain to build enclosures underwater to initially light the gates up, but once lit, they stay lit underwater...
I'll post later with a link to a download of my map, if anyone wants to fool around with it.
Cheers,
First, you are creative and awesome! You clearly take advantage of the only good that the current broken system does, which is to make it easy to 'get home' from multiple real world portals. BUT, I think you practically get the same effect if you have CLOSE portals in the nether rather than the exact same one, with the positive of being able to go the other direction. So, instead of exiting into the nether, turning around and entering again, you exit to the nether, walk a few feet, and enter portal 2, it really takes barely any longer. Keep in mind that with the 8:1 ratio, if your real world portal spots aren't far apart, your nether ones should be basically side-by-side. The downside of the current system is that you can go home, but nowhere else - you can't travel TO a new place on the surface, just the primary link. So consider supporting our cause!! At least we should have the option to turn the double-linking off somehow if that's not what we want. I personally think its an bug that you have used to your advantage because you are smart.
I agree about vertical INsensitivity, though. I like the idea that if at all possible, your portals in the nether should be on the SAME vertical level, so you can go from the bottom of your mine to the top in two quick hops. Again, the nether portals should be really close if you are only vertically separated, so really quick travel will still be there. In my experience, my first portal (under the first buggy update) was built at bedrock level and so my nether portal was also in a cave 80 blocks down and I had to tunnel up to find the main HELL cavern. I do NOT like that. Nether portals should be at the same level and only different levels if there's no room left for more.
I think your other two positives are both still possible under a 1 to 1 system. I'm partly doing this thread to make sure Notch notices us (and to balance out the 5 trillion people screaming for him to spend time implementing damage in multiplayer, which I don't play, i'd rather he got the basic singleplayer experience usable first, since that's where most people start)
Just make a god damned portal in the nether yourself. It'll link to the closest portal in the nether so just make and activate one.
I've experienced this, but found I could correct it by making a portal from the Nether side, as another user just posted. Maybe it is a bug, but I thought it had to do with the big lava lakes/solid Netherstone... I've had to build bridges & tunnels in Nether to get to a new area in the "real world."
It is true that I have not tested from the real world side by going really, really far and trying to reconnect to the Nether, since I could accomplish the same thing easier by going a little ways in the Nether and creating a portal there. Mind you, what an awesome bug - forget about 8:1 travel, that figure could be much, much higher if you really are connected home from no matter where you are in the real world!
It's also true as another person pointed out, that 1:1 portals could likely be used for the cool things that the current portal system does. Still, I kinda like the discharge-through-the-nearest-feasible-portal thing, maybe it's the Stargate influence. :smile.gif:
One thing I wish for portals is that they be powered instead of lit on fire. This would connect portals to existing mechanics like buttons, switches, and pressure pads. Not to mention the output of computation, or timers. How about a portal that only activates at night? Or is made safe from real-world Ghast spawning by turning it off?
Anyhow - now that I'm thinking with portals, I am happy. They are an awesome game mechanic and they will only get better!
I guess they would be 62 or so blocks apart..
I have an idea for a fix...
1 build your first portal in normal space and visit Nether
2 When you build your 2nd portal and use it to travel to Nether you come out the first nether portal, but you have
a portal "Block" in your inventory (Looks like a little portal..) You plant that in Nether and that links it your your new
portal in the "real" world. When you place the portal block it become the lower left obsidian stone - dig a hole and place it in there and it will place the opening at ground level. The new portal faces the user.
Now you have two portals in nether and you control how far apart they are.
GPS and Chunk values from Mincraft GPS v1.0.0.0:
GPS Location Chunk
NS EW Alt X Z
Beta Gate 142 -525 71 8 -34
Alpha Gate 122 -32 37 7 -2
Deltas 400 243049 1156
My first portal is deep in my mine, and is deep underground in Nether.. Is that to be expected?
Thanks!
Pentalive
Distance 494.5755756
I can confirm it is not true that your second Earth portal always connects with your first Nether portal.
Created a fresh world. Used magic to give myself some, uh, scientific instruments such as diamond armor and of course, a whackload of obsidian. Established the first Earth portal, and took a peek in Nether to let it spawn and form some initial terrain. I was on the steep verge of a huge lava lake.
Back on Earth, thanks to MinecraftGPS, I took a few minutes and got exactly 1600 blocks due north of my first portal - that should be 200 Nethersteps. Made a second Earth portal, went through - and found myself in a different location in Nether.
Last step was to walk in Nether from one portal to another, as a sanity check (it does all kinda look the same). After tunnelling about 40 blocks Netherhomeward, I broke through overlooking a giant lava lake, but the portal was not in sight; I had a ways to go. Built a walkway over megalake, and counted distance as I went. After roasting myself a few times in lava like a lobster in a diamond shell and starting from the other direction, sure enough around the right block count (200ish) there was my other walkway, about 60 blocks up.
Looking around... that lava lake was huge. It was easily 250 blocks across by itself... along just one axis. If it were 8 times larger, in the real-world mapping - I'd have to go very, very far to have my next Nether portal not appear above lava.
Although I'll concede there may be something buggy going on here, my money is still on the logistics of compatible terrain. I'm pretty sure that both on Earth and in Nether, there is a distance past which it will create a new portal whether it can find safe/convenient terrain or not. That's when you get those floating-air portals. Less than that distance, if there's nothing safe it will connect to the nearest gate.
There's a thought - maybe that distance is 50 blocks or something on Earth, and 50 blocks in Nether. But since 50 blocks in Nether is 400 blocks in Earth distance, you really do have to go quite a ways in the real world to ensure you get past the Nether limit...
I encourage others to experiment and post results!
BRB, Nether.
I was so disgusted I threw myself into lava. Not sure if and when I'll turn Minecraft back on again.
I want to build a portal at my spawn site in the overworld. I want to go through this portal into the Nether. I want to walk 60 blocks in the Nether and create another portal. I want to walk through this portal and end up somehwere around 480 blocks away from my original overworld portal (1 block travelled in the Nether = 8 blocks travelled in the overworld).
This way, I can go through my spawn point portal, travel 60 blocks in the Nether, exit, and be out 480 blocks in the overworld. Then I can explore around there, go back through the overworld portal, walk back 60 blocks in the Nether, go through the portal, and be back at my overworld spawn portal.
From what I've read and the limited testing I have done, portals do not work this way.
Yes they do.
I've placed over a dozen portals, i had to fix 8 of them but they all work perfectly now and this is exactly how portals work.
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=93046&start=30
I did it! It worked!
I figured out that you can't "play it safe" and build two portals in the overworld and expect the equivalent portals to get made in the Nether.
I made a portal next to my Overworld spawn point. I went back to the Overworld from the Nether and walked out to where my second camp is. I counted it off and it was approximately 300 blocks away.
I walked all the way back to my Overworld spawn point portal and went into the Nether. I then moved in the direction of my camp in the Overworld through the Nether. I counted out 48 bricks (I had to build a sky tunnel while avoiding ghasts. Took me about an hour and it was the scariest experience of my Minecraft gaming so far) and I created a portal chamber. I then built the portal in the Nether, and walked through it.
My exit portal in the Overworld was about 35 blocks away from my second camp! Success!
The key is to find out how many blocks away from the first overworld portal you want the second portal to appear, divide by 8, build your first overworld portal, go into the Nether, count out the number of bricks in the direction you want the portal to appear in the overworld, build your second portal in the overworld, and activate it.
Now to find out if I can do that a second time!
I believe you need to go a certain distance away from the portal in the Nether before you build a new one. If you're too close, it will link back to the same Overworld portal you went through to get to the Nether. I don't know if there is a certain distance away, but it might be worth building a bunch of portals at 5-10 block increments to find out which one takes you to a new Overworld portal.
I was surprised to find that portals I created in one direction would zap me back to my home portal, even 827 Earth blocks away... that's over 100 Netherblocks. Surely the snap-to limit for portals has be less than 100, or that's just kooky.
So I attacked it from the Nether side, tunneling in the same direction to see why new portals wouldn't appear in that heading. After tunnelling through solid Netherstone for ages, I never did break through to any free space. When I created room for a portal midway down my tunnel, I found that some of the Earth portals that were zapping me all the way back home now connected to the new portal - the remaining Earth portals brought me home.
I expect if I experimented further, I'd see that if I cleared all the Netherstone away, my Earth portals would map nicely to their 8:1 Nether counterparts. I believe portals are working exactly as intended - but the reality of Nether is that there are few safe places to land. Maybe TNT will become a big thing in Netherland.
Whether this can be considered a "bug", I'm not sure. One programmatic thing that could be changed is for portals to just damn well appear where they're supposed to, by hollowing out a small space in solid rock or making portals hanging in the air, be it over water or lava. But that will have people quailing too - "I appeared in solid rock underground and had to tunnel to the surface"... "I have to constantly build bridges in Nether to get from my floating portals to solid ground." I think the terrain of Nether would have to change dramatically for portals to make sense to people - less solid rock, smaller lava lakes, more of an Earthlike flat plain than hollowed-out caverns. It would be more boring, certainly.
If this really is a terrain thing and not a simple program bug, then Notch has a challenge on his hands. How can these two worlds be feasibly linked together with portals in a way that works well?
What do you suggest?
Notch changed it just before the release of the patch on October 31st. It's 1:8.
Bummer, that cuts our fast travel in half. Although I guess on the bright side we now have double the nether.