Jazz Up Your Nether Portal

Tutorial Difficulty: 3/10

Perhaps I'm only speaking for myself here, but most of us Minecraft players probably have a Portal Of Shame somewhere. You know the one I mean: it's your standard two-by-three portal in a four-by-five rectangle, and maybe you've even cut off the corners to save on Obsidian. It's okay. We understand. At the start of the game, Obsidian is hard to get and a pain to mine, and you just want to get into the Nether already – but once you've been in Minecraft for a while, don't you deserve a fancy Nether Portal?

Of course you do, pal! If your house is beautiful, you need to have a Nether portal to match. There are a ton of designs out there, from colossal mountain-sized portals (the portal can be up to 23 blocks wide, you know!) to beautifully decorated ones that stand out from the landscape, like this Nether sword design. The Nether sword is intense, though, and requires rare materials like blackstone and warped wood, so we're going to keep things a little simpler with Foxel's gorgeous Nether tower design for now... and when we feel brave, maybe we'll attempt the sword, too!

This portal has been prettied up with the use of easy-to-get blocks like spruce, cobblestone, and redstone lamps, as well as a few slightly more tricky ones like vines, mossy stone, and redstone blocks. Of course, if you're building this in Creative, it doesn't matter, but Survival players may want to build the whole thing in stone and upgrade when they have mossy stone at their disposal!

The design starts with a lovely circular hedge and continues with a concentric circular pattern on the inside, too. The portal itself is in the center, looking pleasantly overgrown with a combination of moss and vines, and Foxel uses my favorite technique of varying the blocks to make it look textured and weathered.

Finally, the roof is added, using spruce blocks – I really like the combination of spruce and stone, as it makes me feel like I'm in a woodland cottage – with glowstone underneath to keep the mobs at bay. You could probably use any lighting block, though! Foxel achieves a lovely tower roof by varying the types of block, using fences as the corners and cobblestone walls for the very tippy-top of the peak.

Then, it's just a matter of making the surrounding area pretty with paths – add flowers and trees if you want or keep it relatively bare to make it look like a sacred grove in the woods! Either way, you'll now have a gorgeous Nether portal that's quite a lot nicer than the embarrassingly boring one I have in my basement. Maybe I should follow this tutorial, too!