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There are a lot of questions about Nether portals moving around here, but nothing that I can find that directly answers this conundrum (or I just don't know what to search for). I have a nether portal that just decided to move it's exit, AFTER it had already been used successfully for travel in both ways.

The details:

I am playing a normal single player game (so no other players are creating portals in the world), my only mod being a texture pack. I created a nether portal a little while back (just a few weeks, no new releases since then that I know of) and used it to go gather some nether quartz and some other stuff. It all worked fine and I got in to the nether and back several times without problem.

Then today I went in to try and find a fortress. I went quite deep into the nether before I found one, and I proceded to grab all the loot I could carry and then run on home. Except, as you might have guessed by now, this time the portal didn't take me home. It took me to some other unexplored cave in the vicinity of my home (150-ish blocks away from the original portal).

Does anyone know why this might have happened? I have read that the first time you use a portal the exit portal might be forced to move out of a big chunk of solid matter and therefore get pushed "out of range" from your overworld portal, and so spawning a new overworld portal when used. But my portal had already been used successfully to travel both ways, two or three times.

The only difference this time is that I left the immediate area of the portal in the nether which I had not done before. If an exit portal has been pushed out of its intended location, does a chunk have to unload before it "loses track" of the overworld portal?

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  • Ive had this happen as well. I'm not sure why it happened, but after dismantling the new portal that was made, I started to return to my original.
    – Ender
    Mar 10, 2014 at 23:13
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    Could you post the coordinates of the three portals?
    – Kcats
    Mar 11, 2014 at 13:08
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    Possible duplicate of Why won't my nether portal bring me back where I left?
    – John
    Mar 12, 2014 at 18:20
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    @John: Not a dupe, as this one worked successfully several times before the problem occured Dec 4, 2014 at 19:55
  • What exact version are you running? In the pre-releases for 1.9 the portals worked a bit funky and I have had some portal experiences myself in 1.8, but none so far in 1.9.
    – Thorsal
    Apr 7, 2016 at 7:18

1 Answer 1

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Minecraft uses some basic math to determine what nether portals should link with each other. In the overworld, a portal will check if there is a portal in the nether near its coordinates divided by 8. This is to make the nether feel smaller than the overworld. I do not know why your portal suddenly isn't working, but I bet your problem would be solved if you went to your portal in the overworld, divided it's X and Z coordinates by 8, and built a portal in the nether at that location.

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    A combination of this, and finding a portal closer to the "proper" location (that is divide by 8 and so on) or in rare cases (considered a bug, I think it's fixed now) portals are forgotten and a new one is generated. After which it is closer to the "proper" location causing you to teleport to it instead of the one you expected to go to.
    – Brandon
    May 20, 2016 at 4:18

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