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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
Transporting items, mobs, and yourself long distances is a central challenge of Minecraft.
Using the Nether is a popular way to augment the other methods of travel, as 1 block travelled in the Nether equals 8 blocks travelled in the Overworld.
Some reasons not to use the Nether:
The following table demonstrates the effect of Nether shortcuts.
| Method | Overworld | Via Nether |
|---|---|---|
| Boat | 8 m/s | |
| Minecart | 8 m/s | 64 m/s |
| Minecart diagonally | 11.314 m/s | 90.512 m/s |
| Horse | 14.57 m/s | 116.56 m/s |
| Elytra rocket-boosting | 33.5 m/s | 268 m/s |
| Dolphin | 36.75 m/s | |
| Ice boat | 40 m/s | 320 m/s |
| Blue ice boat | 72.73 m/s | 581.84 m/s |
| Dolphin Tunnel | 96 m/s |
Below are options for transporting a single player, roughly ordered by amount of effort to set up. Please also see § Item transport for transporting more than a player.
Boats travel at 8 m/s in water, which is faster than sprint-jumping. They are also very cheap and don't consume hunger.
Wild horses spawn with random speeds up to 14.57 m/s. Save the two fastest horses you find (from plains and savannas), then ride their expendable children. Mules and donkeys can offer similar speeds[Java Edition only] after many generations of selective breeding.
These mounts make it easy to explore in any direction without laying down tracks beforehand. They handle rough terrain well, but struggle with some common forest biomes. To get through a forest, birch forest or taiga, you can bring a hoe to cut the leaves in your way, or simply ride around it, tracing the biome edges, which happens to be a good strategy even on foot to avoid getting lost.
To get through a jungle or bamboo jungle, definitely just go around it. They are hard to explore even with a hoe, but can be traversed after burning a corridor with flint and steel. Note that fire spreads better on Hard difficulty.
Snowy mountains carry the danger of sinking into powder snow, but equipping leather boots will protect both you and the horse you're riding.
To cross the sea, you do not need to leave the horse behind. It will float on water while you drag it with a lead. Later on, you can make it trivial to cross seas by building portals.
Sprint-swimming with a dolphin boosts your speed to 9.8 m/s, or 18.78 m/s with just Depth Strider I, which is not so hard to get. With Depth Strider III, it is 36.75 m/s.
Dolphins are easy to find with some patience - you're rarely far from an ocean, and if that happens to be a frozen or warm ocean, it's not a long boat ride to a regular ocean, where they spawn best. Boats attract dolphins, by the way. Use leads to bring a few home and park them at a fence next to deep water. Beware that they easily suffocate if parked wrong - be prepared to lose a few dolphins.
While swimming long distances, you'll have to break the water like a dolphin every now and then for oxygen (and the dolphin needs this too, but can hold its breath for four minutes which is probably longer than you).
To maximize the practicality of this mode of travel, you can try to let the oceans be the only way you scope out new base sites, as described in § Fleets of boats.
Elytra are treasure loot that allow the player to glide in the air with variable speed based on momentum. This can be further enhanced with firework rockets to boost players forward and extend flight time. Continuous rocket boosting results in around 33 m/s (see table on the Transportation page).
It is recommended to carry ample fireworks to avoid being stranded far away, with many players choosing to have a dedicated shulker box for rockets, produced with the help of sugar cane farms and creeper farms.
Do note that elytra lose durability while flying. The Unbreaking and Mending enchantments help here. Unlike most items, elytra do not break when the durability reaches 0, but simply become nonfunctional until repaired. If you play without Mending, you can still repair it endlessly with phantom membrane if you use a grindstone to reset the repair cost every so often.
Typically combined with the elytra, a "cannon" can launch a player to extremely high speeds by using propellants such as the push[Java Edition only] from boats, the death of wind charged mobs, or the explosion of wind charges.
Given how boats have no air resistance on Bedrock Edition, boat cannons are the best long-distance transportation method. While the video[more information needed] shows the usage of wind charges to propel the boat, a similar feat can be achieved via the Wind Charged effect, which has the advantage of being far cheaper, given how splash potions can affect an unlimited amount of mobs, and how a large amount of mobs can be fairly swiftly amassed using chicken farms or silverfish farms.
Minecarts allow the player to be transported along rails at 8 m/s with no input from the player (or 11.314 m/s diagonally), with the downside of having to build rail systems to any desired destinations. It can also be quite expensive to build longer rail lines.
While slower than some other methods, the fact that minecarts can keep rolling without player input is worth thinking about:
Also of note is that minecarts can transport boats, horses, mules, donkeys and, surprisingly, happy ghasts, and that they do this without involving lead mechanics and are the only entity that do so. Thus it is possible to include rail in a multi-modal transport network, and a focus on rail may be a viable alternative if a laggy server gives you issues with lead mechanics.
It is possible to make a 1 x 1 tunnel of water with soul soil on the bottom to travel through quickly. With Respiration, Depth Strider and Soul Speed, and strategically placed dolphins providing Dolphin's Grace, it is possible to travel at speeds of 96 m/s. This is slower than ice boat highways (top speed of 581.84 m/s when accounting for the Nether), but requires no acceleration, and may allow 90-degree turns without slowing down.
Boats move faster on ice than on water: while their speed is 8 m/s on water, it is 40 m/s on ice and packed ice, and 72.73 m/s on blue ice. However, boats on ice need to travel thousands of blocks to accelerate to their maximum speed.
A "blue ice highway" is possibly the most resource- and time-demanding transportation method in game, due to the immense effort required to gather and place all the ice. The reward, however, for such a highway in the Nether is an effective Overworld speed of 581.84 m/s.
Colliding with mobs can be a hazard, especially in crimson forests and basalt deltas where mobs frequently spawn even at light level 15 (same goes rarely for nether wastes). This is resolved by additional spawn-proofing if packed or blue ice is used, or by using only normal ice, which is spawn-proof due to its transparency (unless you are doing this in a frozen biome, in which case prepare to collide with a polar bear). When using normal ice for a Nether highway, care needs to be taken not to accidentally melt sections of a bridge over a lava sea, and it is likely a bad choice in multiplayer.
Projectiles such as ender pearls are affected by bubble columns. In Java Edition, an ender pearl can remain afloat on top of an upward bubble column, allowing it to be stored indefinitely. In Bedrock Edition, it has to be into an upward bubble column thrown between two honey blocks that are orthogonally touching.[more information needed] A mechanism can then be triggered to make the ender pearl hit a solid surface (e.g. by closing a trapdoor), teleporting the thrower back to the setup wherever they are.
These options are better for moving items across long distances, such as from one home to another.
You can reliably tie many boats with chests to each other with some leads, then pull them all with a single lead.
Optionally, tie a dolphin to yourself and sprint-swim. The whole fleet will obediently move with you at up to 36.75 m/s (over 1 nautical mile per minute, or 60 knot). This works best on single-player, since server lag may snap the leads.
This is a high speed at which to transport functionally limitless quantities of items, villagers, pets and livestock, since oceans need no preparation (just planks and string to make the fleet; you can get Depth Strider later).
The primary drawback is you don't get to choose travel direction much. That is, from the perspective of someone looking at a zoomed-out map wanting to travel some 10,000 blocks to a specific destination, it'll require choosing a series of interconnected oceans (possibly digging canals) and won't result in a straight route. You can avoid putting yourself in this situation by simply not having any destinations you didn't find via ocean in the first place - in other words, use the ocean for scoping out new base sites as well as for travelling between them.
Also note that with bases all around an ocean, there are significant time savings by short-cutting across it instead of following familiar coastlines, so you may want to bring named compasses attuned to a lodestone at each base, or else write down all coordinates in a book and quill and rely on mental math. See also Tutorial:Navigation.
The 10 different boat colors can help categorize items, if you use the fleet as a permanent storehouse. You can also rename each boat in an anvil. Place a chicken or other small mob in the front seat so that the chest can be opened like a normal chest without having to sneak.
When you come to a stop anywhere, beware trident-wielding drowned destroying boats while they're gunning for you. A way to minimize this risk on the open sea is to avoid standing on any chest boat and instead use a separate boat as a dinghy to access chests at a distance.
The above boat fleets follow if you dive, which could be useful for docking at an underwater base. However, it constrains the layout and placement of that underwater base, and makes it difficult to bring mobs. A simple alternative is to just park on the surface above any underwater base.
The above boat fleets follow if you ascend into the air using happy ghasts, which could be useful for docking at an inland base or floating sky island. This is simple enough with a small fleet, but a large fleet requires a clever "airship harbor" to let you conveniently access all chests, and makes it finicky to land the boats back onto the sea. A workaround is to bring only a subset of your boats when flying.
Bees can be a way to chunk the fleet into sections (by leashing boats to bees, and bees to each other, with one unused bee between each), in preparation for detaching some and going airborne, or simply for maintaining a familiar organization on land as well as at sea.
Riding a single donkey or mule can give you 15 extra inventory slots. However, the real potential is using leads to make a whole caravan of donkeys, mules or llamas. This became more practical in 1.21.6, because leads no longer break so easily.
If they are castaways from your breeding process, i.e. not your best donkeys/llamas, you can slaughter them in a pit of hoppers upon arrival, letting the loot spill out to be sorted by Copper Golem or alike.
To actually use them for permanent storage and not just for delivery to a copper golem as above, a drawback that may not be obvious is that you have to sneak to open their inventories, which can be tiresome.
For use as a pack animal, the bred llama has some advantages over donkeys and mules that may not be obvious.
An ender chest is a variant of chest with the unique ability to share its inventory with all ender chests across the world (specific to each player). It can be used as a "bank vault" of sorts where all of your most important items are kept, as its contents are completely safe from being stolen. Alternatively, it can be used to deposit items from one location and have those items be immediately accessible from any distance in another ender chest. Furthermore, if a silk touch pick is kept on hand, the ender chest can be picked up freely, allowing for a makeshift extra inventory to carry around.
Shulker boxes allow for the most efficient storage in the game that is robust to server lag (which can break leads and mess with minecart trains). The size of a single chest, each box retains its contents when broken, allowing for a backpack of sorts. While shulker boxes cannot be placed inside other shulker boxes, just a few shulker boxes in a player's inventory can allow for a small storage room's worth of items to be in the player's hands at any given moment. They can additionally be dyed and named to create catalogs of what items they contain.
Note that shulker boxes can be put inside ender chests, meaning by combining the carry-on ender chest's inventory space with the player's inventory (excluding the hotbar) to fill with shulker boxes, the player would have a total of 1458 inventory spaces for carrying items.
Minecarts with chests can be used as an autonomous method of item transportation.
A primary issue with using them for long-distance transport: you cannot just send some chest minecarts on their own way, a player must be sent along with them to keep chunks loaded. The fact that every cart needs to stay within simulation distance at all times (regardless of server lag) causes all kinds of complications to automated rail design, since it must ensure that the train stays under a fixed maximum length (each minecart not gliding apart over time) and at the same time avoid causing any of the strange behaviors that can show up when two minecarts touch.
Minecarts may touch for many reasons, e.g. a minecart in the front beginning to ascend a slope or turn a corner, or just slowing down relative to the one behind it because it is fuller, or because it was paused at the edge of render/simulation distance and some carts behind it could catch up in the meantime.
You will also note that many tutorials for automating a rail network do dual tracks, because a bidirectional single track is more difficult to automate, and that's without involving any chest minecarts, just a single minecart for the player.
A manual workaround to most problems can be to "babysit" the train: follow with a fast horse whenever sending two or more minecarts, so you can respond effectively to problems like carts randomly stopping and rear-ending each other and shooting off in the reverse direction.
These methods are best used around small areas, such as transporting item drops from a mob farm into adjacent chests.
A chain of hoppers is the simplest method, however the 5 iron per hopper makes it become very expensive very quickly, even with an iron farm.
Water pipes are the second simplest method, and are faster and cheaper than hopper lines, however since the items are transported as entities, they will despawn after spending 5 minutes traveling.
The player can transport villagers and other mobs to new locations (for the purpose of starting new villages or baiting mob traps) using a variety of techniques:
