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4

You can create an infinite well using two buckets of water and a hole that is one block deep and two blocks by two blocks wide. I'm wondering if it's possible to do a similar thing with lava, now that obsidian is so valuable for making portals. I have an idea for making it easier for creating portals, but it's dependent on having an effectively infinite source of lava very close to where I want to create the portal. So is this possible? If so, how?

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Possibly related: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/8295/… – Raven Dreamer♦ Oct 31 '10 at 20:55
@ Raven Dreamer Yeah, I saw that, but since that's multiplayer, it isn't relevant. I probably should have mentioned this was alpha single player. – MBraedley Oct 31 '10 at 22:04
FYI: You might need to change the accepted answer again - the behavior espoused by Fredley has been confirmed to be a bug. – Raven Dreamer♦ Nov 2 '11 at 21:39
1  
Will there ever be an acceptable answer? I, for one, would like to see this bug become a feature. – MBraedley Nov 3 '11 at 2:16
One can hope! :) – Raven Dreamer♦ Nov 3 '11 at 2:53

4 Answers

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+50

No, lava can't replicate, but you can create unlimited obsidian from one lava block using a glitch involving lava flow onto redstone wire:

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Whoa, that's a neat tileset. Any idea what it is? – Raven Dreamer♦ Sep 2 '11 at 16:04
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Gerudoku. – Jonathan Drain Sep 3 '11 at 22:27
Thanks, mate. I really like the water textures. Might have to steal that and hack it into my currently used texture pack. – Raven Dreamer♦ Sep 3 '11 at 22:30
up vote 4 down vote

Yes

(for now)

In Minecraft Beta 1.9 pre-5, you can make infinite quantities of lava by placing 4 lava sources around a central block as so:

As pointed out by Ben Blank, this behaviour will be reverted in future releases.

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1  
Jeb has announced plans to revert changes to water physics to pre4 behavior. Water and lava share almost all their code, so it's possible this will get reverted as well. (Though I really hope not!) – Ben Blank Oct 30 '11 at 15:58
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Here's a Tweet announcing that this is a bug and is already fixed.Link – Raven Dreamer♦ Nov 2 '11 at 17:46
@RavenDreamer :-( – fredley Nov 2 '11 at 21:08
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Fixed in 1.0.0 :( – Poma Jan 4 '12 at 6:31
up vote 0 down vote

I'm playing the newest update in multiplayer and I've noticed that while farming cobblestone, sometimes a lava flow block turns into a source block when the surrounding flow blocks turn into cobblestone.

My hypothesis is that this has something to due with the lag (I play on a very busy server). I play on a Skyblock server so being able to duplicate lava source blocks (even if the result is uncommon and unpredictable) is very useful because of the limited resource availability. I'll try to make a diagram of my cobblestone farm:

Top view: 

OOOXOOO   
OXX#XXO     
XxOOOxX       
XxOOOxX   
OXX@XXO     
OOOXOOO

Key: O - Open space; x - 1 stone block; X - 2 stone blocks (stacked);
------@ - Water placed on a stone block (after farm is filled with lava flow;
------ # - Lava source placed on a stone block

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I forgot to mention something. The lava source block turns up in the O space just below the Lava space. If you try it out, that space normally has a cobblestone block on top of nothing (air) after you add the water, but every-so-often the empty space under the cobblestone block will instead be a lava source block. – MinorCrafter Apr 26 at 5:09
up vote -1 down vote

I have just tested and lava does replicate in the Nether but not in the same way water does; lava sort of spreads out to take over the world.

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8  
Hello, Final_Ninja, and welcome to the site. Would you mind expanding upon your answer a little? For example, how did you go about testing this? (A picture would be excellent!) – Raven Dreamer♦ Sep 2 '11 at 16:44
They mean it spreads farther. In the nether, lava flow blocks will be created farther from a source than in the overworld. However, source blocks will still not replicate, so this doesn't answer the question. – SevenSidedDie Apr 1 at 17:03

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