Best Java Seed for the Nether: The Obsidian Route Nobody Records

Obsidian is the gate, and it is the one thing nobody writes down

Guides treat the Nether portal as a milestone you reach once the island is working. On an island it runs the other way round: the portal is what you build so that the island can work, because an island cannot restock itself. One tester put it plainly while playing -706198004: “You cannot sleep on the ocean. Supplies are difficult to restock. Perhaps getting obsidian and going to the Nether is the better choice.”

That makes obsidian the gate on the whole run. You cannot cut it without a diamond pickaxe, you cannot light a portal without ten blocks of it, and you cannot reach the End without the Nether. What happens after day ten is measured in Nether blocks rather than overworld blocks for exactly this reason.

And yet it is the least recorded field in seed lists. Ours included. Every row in our table has a description of the island, most have coordinates to something, and almost none says where the obsidian came from — which means a list can hand you eight structure coordinates and still leave you standing on a beach with no way through the gate.

The four rows in our record that say anything about obsidian

Out of twenty seeds, these are the only rows where the record contains a route to obsidian. The tag column is the tester’s own conclusion, not a score — we do not rank seeds, and nothing on this page is a rating.

Two things stand out in that table, and neither is flattering to us. All four rows are missing something: three carry no version number at all, and the one that does carries three obsidian rather than ten. And the single most valuable row in it — the only place where a portal was built end to end on the island — is on an edition that the same row says does not run the Java seed you asked about.

Zero of fifteen Java rows has a ruined portal. Three of ten Bedrock rows do.

This is the number that decides the answer to the target question, so it is worth putting on its own. We counted the twenty rows twice, once per edition — 2016000 appears as two rows because it was recorded on both — and this is what the count gives.

Read that as a statement about our own testing, because that is what it is. We are not claiming Java worlds generate fewer ruined portals, and we are not claiming Bedrock islands are easier to leave. We are saying that in twenty records of island seeds, the cheapest obsidian route available — the one where the game has already placed the blocks for you — appears three times, and every one of those three times it was written down on a Bedrock world.

The Java side of the same table is not empty by accident either. It is where the mapping work happened: the Java rows are the ones carrying eight and nine structure coordinates, the Nether fortress positions, the bastion positions. The Bedrock rows are the ones carrying the portal. Two different kinds of note-taking, made by two different testers, and the gap between them is the whole of this page.

Seven Java rows map the Nether and none of them records the door

Here is the clearest version of the problem. Seven Java rows in our table carry the coordinates of Nether structures — every one of them records a bastion, and four also record a Nether fortress. Not one of those seven says how the portal was built.

The four rejected rows at the bottom make the point sharper. Each one was turned down on a named line — distance, no dual monument, a crossroads too far, a bastion too far — and every one of those is a judgement about the Nether that assumes you already got in. The rejection criteria and the door are two separate things, and only the first was written down. The four that cleared the same standard are on the server-grade page, and the four that did not are on the rejected page.

Three ways past the wall, ranked by what each one costs

These are not equivalent routes. They are ranked by how much of the island you have to spend to walk them, and the ranking is the reason the order rule below exists.

Class A and class B are the two worth caring about, and the record holds an asymmetry between them that no seed list mentions: the cheap route is only written down on Bedrock, and the expensive route is only written down on a seed that will not run on Java. If you are a Java player, our record hands you neither. It hands you three obsidian in a chest and a stronghold under a well.

The order rule: chest, then count, then mine

This is the part of the record that is easy to read past, because it looks like a preference and it is actually a sequence. The tester on -706198004 wrote the order down while playing, and the order was: portal chest first, then mining along the sandbar, then the shipwreck further out.

That order is not politeness. Run it backwards and here is what happens: you spend the day getting iron, then diamonds, then a pickaxe good enough to cut obsidian, then you cut your ten blocks — and then you walk past a ruined portal that already had most of a frame standing on it. Every block you mined was free on the island the whole time. On an island with one tree, that costs you more than obsidian, because the thing you cannot restock on an island is daylight.

Step three is the fork, and it is the same fork that appears on the Java checklist: a seed you can measure is worth more than a seed that sounds good. If your island has no portal, no diamond and no lava pool, the record’s own advice is to go and find obsidian elsewhere rather than try to make a barren island self-sufficient.

The five seeds, and what each one is for

What to do in the first ten minutes once it loads

The order below is the order in our testing notes, and it is built around one idea: do the free things before the expensive ones. On an island that rule is not a preference, because you cannot restock the daylight you spend.

1. Count the trees, then chop most of them and keep one standing. One tree means one plank budget and one sapling you cannot afford to lose. To get rich, first chop trees — that is the rule these notes are built on.
2. Loot any ruined portal chest before you touch the frame, and before you mine anything. The chest is free and it is the only part of a ruined portal the record guarantees. On -706198004 the tester found useful items in it.
3. Count the obsidian still standing in the frame. Ten is what a frame needs. If most of it survived you are completing a portal; if none of it did, you are building one, and that is a different plan with a different price.
4. Only then start the iron to diamond to pickaxe chain. This is the route that costs the most and it is the one people start first. Starting it first is how you mine ten blocks you already had.
5. Walk the shoreline rather than inland. Both wrecks on -1463564255 are in the water, at 120, 54, -202 and 393, 56, 25. On island seeds the structures sit in the ocean more often than on the land.
6. Write down the count, the coordinates and the version. Three of our four obsidian rows carry no version at all, and sixteen of twenty carry no route. Do not add to either count.

Step four is the fork. If the island has produced a portal by the end of day one, the island is a launch point and everything after day ten opens up. If it has not, the recorded advice is to go and get obsidian rather than try to make a barren island feed itself.

After the portal, and what changes on a shared world

Once a portal pair exists, distance stops being the constraint it was. That is what makes a distant structure an errand rather than a project, and it is why the seven Java rows above bother to record fortress and bastion positions at all — those coordinates only matter once you are through the gate.

What does not collapse is the edition question, and on this page it is the live one. Three of the ten Bedrock rows in our table have a ruined portal and zero of the fifteen Java rows do. If you are choosing a seed for a shared world, every player has to be on the same edition and the same release, because a version difference produces the same mismatch you get between Java and Bedrock: same code, different terrain, and a complaint that the seed does not work. With three of the four obsidian rows carrying no version number at all, that is not a theoretical risk.

And if you want the full coordinate set for any of these codes rather than the obsidian story alone, the coordinate table carries all twenty rows with every number that was recorded, including the ones where nothing was.

A good seed is better with people on it. If you want to host one and run these islands together, Java or Bedrock, Shockbyte is a low-cost host that sets up in minutes. Use code LAUNCH for 25% off your first month. If you sign up through that link, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change what you pay.