Minecraft Forums

Alright ya'll, here's a guide for the newbies. Click spoiler tags to see images.

So let's say your stingy with diamonds. Like, really stingy. As in, the thought of using 3 diamonds to make a pickaxe to harvest 14 pieces of obsidian to go to the nether for the first time makes your skin crawl.

Is it because you're saving every last diamond to make blocks for a huge building project? Do you farm mobs the manly way with actual combat and chew through diamond armor? Whatever the reason, we all know there are only so many diamonds on our little Xbox 864x864 worlds, so what's a diamond Scrooge to do?

Fortunately, you can build a portal without the use of diamonds at all!

At the very least, you will need:

4 Iron ingots, but you can use more to craft several buckets if you're not stingy with iron.
1 piece of flint
1 Stone pickaxe
1 Lava Lake, and an open room dug near it. Preferably a nice 5x9 space, with at least 5 height. Your lava lake must be deep and/or wide enough to extract at most 14 buckets of lava from it.
A small stack of cobblestone or dirt.

Start by crafting a bucket and a flint and steel. Fill your bucket (or buckets, having 2 will save a trip for this step) with water and haul your supplies down to your lava lake.

Away from where you will construct the portal, create an infinity pool of water. If you've never done this before, this consists of digging a 2x2 hole, one block deep, and emptying 2 buckets of water into opposite corners of the hole. This will create a never ending water supply.

Now you're going to create a waterfall against the wall. Dig out a 6x2 space against the wall in one block deep, then dig a 4x1 strip one more block deep against the wall in the center of the pit.

Above the 4x1 rut, count up 6 blocks. Mentally mark a 4x1 strip on the wall, and place a dirt or cobblestone blocks on either side of it, so that a 2-block long 'peg' of dirt or cobblestone is stickng out of the wall with 4 blocks of space between them. Starting from the second block out, fill the space between the pegs with more blocks, but leave the space in the 4x1 strip against the wall you noted before. You will now have a dirt/cobblestone scaffolding lined up perfectly with the rut you made in the floor.

Draw water from your infinty pool and fill in the scaffolding to make a waterfall. The waterfall should be 4 blocks wide and 6 blocks high. One block taller than a nether portal.



Now, start drawing lava from the lava lake. one at a time, empty the lava out into the rut where the water is pouring, until you have a 4x1 strip of obsidian. The water will start pouring into the rest of the space around it.

Continue pulling lava from the lake in your bucket, and empty the lava on top of the obsidian base on both ends as the water flows over it, continuing to build obsidian up. Take care to not accidentally empty the lava bucket into the middle of the frame, this will take 4 minutes (?) per block to clear with your non-diamond pickaxe. Continue this until you have a hollow 4x5 obsidian frame that's missing the top row.

To create the final two block for the top row, place dirt or cobblestone across the frame one block below the top row, then empty out your final 2 lava buckets on top of these.

Voila! You now have a 4x5 obsidian frame. Remove the waterfall using either blocks to fill in the source of the waterfall, or the buckets to clear the source blocks out, then light your freshly made portal.

You can do this anywhere, if you make the trips to haul enough buckets of lava to your water fall.
It might be a measly 3 diamonds you saved, but every diamond counts to some of us!

Quote from maces006

this is old new, i've known this since beta 1.2 last year, and there are hundreds of videos of it

Not old news to a newbie, which there are plenty of on the xbox ;D Heck, I only just thought of this myself now.
This is what I think of at 5 am when I've got bad insomnia and can't sleep.

Quote from maces006

lol, yeah well i created a nether portal without diamonds during my lets play during the xbox versions first week of release

Good job man, I'm really proud of you

Quote from Awesomer6

You should put pictures showing teh steps to help the new people. Show them how its done

Definitely planning to!

Quote from maces006

these two video are my lets play of me building my nether portal without diamonds ( the first video doesn't have me building the portal till a bit later on)

also i lost the world becuase at the time becuase i thought the chest in the corner was an autosave lol

Skipped ahead to the building part. Nice tutorial, shame about the level xD

Added images to the guide!

Quote from Princess_Zoe

You'd probably find yourself 20 diamonds by the time you did all that to avoid spending 3 diamonds...

Probably! Seems like an added bonus to me, not only did you save dimonds, but you found a bunch more!
Though some people have the worst luck. I didn't find my first diamond until after several weeks of gameplay, and I'd been digging around the right height for them for some time.