It turns out diamonds actually aren’t forever — at least when it comes to the leaderboard of Minecraft material awesomeness. With the Nether update came a boatload of new Nether content in the way of novel biomes, blocks, items, an enchantment, and a new strongest material: Netherite.
What is Netherite?
That’s right, move aside diamond, there’s a new material-boss in town, and Netherite anything is way better than its more glittery counterpart. The new Netherite weapon(s), tools, and armor not only hit harder, farm faster, and provide better defense, but are so badass that they refuse to burn in lava. Indeed, Netherite items are the only ones in the game capable of such Chris Hemsworth-levels of manliness.
How to Make Netherite Scraps and Ingots
The path to Netherite glory is pretty straightforward, if not somewhat demanding one. To create those Netherite nuggets of pure awesomeness, you’ll first need to smelt an intermediate material, Netherite Scraps, out of the new Ancient Debris ore.
You’re going to need four of those scraps alongside four gold ingots, arranged like so, to create a single Netherite Ingot.
How to get Ancient Debris, Netherite Scraps
In order to get your hands on some of those delicious Netherite Ingots, you’ll first need to acquire Netherite Scraps, and before that some good ol’ Ancient Debris ore. There are a couple of ways to find/acquire each of these, but they all start with, fittingly, The Nether.
Mining Ancient Debris
The most straightforward way to get Ancient Debris is to mine it. Obviously. For that you will need a Diamond Pickaxe — nothing lesser will do. Then you must descend to at least Y7 in the Nether, where Ancient Debris starts to generate.
The thing about Ancient Debris is it’s annoyingly rare. Each chunk can only generate one or two veins, and unlike Diamond veins which can grow up to 8 blocks, Ancient Debris only spawns in veins of 1 to 3. Yeah. So get ready to dig, because Ancient Debris never spawns exposed to air. The average occurrence of Ancient Debris, per chunk, is a disconcerting 1.7 — up to a maximum of 13 made possible by conjoined veins on the borders of adjacent chunks.
You should concentrate your search between levels Y7 to Y21 where Ancient Debris’s spawn rate is highest — Y15 being, on average, the layer of highest Ancient Debris concentration. Players can take advantage of this distribution by mining down to Y15 — preferably not straight down with all the lava around — and then working from chunk to chunk without leaving the layer.
Looting Ancient Debris, Netherite Scraps, Netherite Ingots
Bastion Remnant chests are the only place you can find Netherite Scraps and Netherite ingots without crafting them. Unfortunately, Hoglin Stable Chests and Generic chests have a pretty low chance with a roughly 2% of dropping either in both Java and Bedrock editions. Treasure Chests, on the other hand, have a roughly 1 in 6 chance of dropping 1-2 Netherite Scraps or a Netherite Ingot. Still not great, but a heck of a lot better.
The BEST way to get Ancient Debris
Yeah that’s right. Or did you forget that beds explode — like really explode — in the Nether? Yes, they still do and they’re stronger than TNT. The thing is, as we mentioned earlier, Ancient Debris never spawns exposed to air. You have to mine some blocks in order to get to it. Normally. So you can head to layer 15 and start combing X and Y for Ancient Debris, or…
You can take a page out of the book of real life strip-mining and start blowing up huge chunks of Netherrack. Ancient Debris has extremely high blast resistance, so you don’t have to worry about sending it up in smoke and beds, in the Nether, are super-duper cheap explosives at just 3 wool + 3 planks. The best way to do this is find a cave, drop a bed, run away, and let the thing obliterate its surrounding environment. Repeat this over and over — it wouldn’t be impossible to get all the Ancient Debris needed for a full set of Netherite Armor and Netherite tools in a single sitting.
And that’s about it! You are now freshly acquainted with the sheer awesomeness that is the new strongest material, how to craft it, where to get it — and how to save yourself some time. Now go, get digging and adventuring across the brand new Nether!
Image Credits: Gamepedia
