Building Blocks: Ruined Portal

As you’re traversing the Overworld you’ll sometimes come across remnants of past explorers, and even sometimes past civilizations. Last month, we talked about finding evidence of an ancient mining industry, but today we’re going extradimensional. Our structure of the month is the Ruined Portal.

Ruined Portals, not to be confused with Ruined Portatols, started showing up following the Nether Update in June 2020. They’re the only structure that appears in more than one dimension at the same time – which makes sense as they were originally a portal between those dimensions.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You’ll recognise a ruined portal when you come across one because it consists of a frame of obsidian, often augmented with decorative blocks, and usually surrounded by netherrack. Sometimes they’ll be partially buried in the ground, so you might need to dig a little to make the portal usable.

In every circumstance, the frame will be incomplete – you’ll need to add additional obsidian blocks to activate it. That’s a pain, but if you ask me it’s better than having piglins wandering into the Overworld through an already-active portal. If it’s any consolation, you’ll tend to find a chest next to a ruined portal, which sometimes contains some obsidian as well as golden goodies.

Occasionally, you’ll find a huge ruined portal, many blocks larger than a standard one. These seem to have once served some kind of ceremonial purpose, though it’s hard to say what that might have been. They’re big enough to fit a ghast through, which raises all kinds of terrifying questions.

In the real world, we’ve not identified any portals between dimensions. Yet. But that isn't for want of trying. There’s a long history in fiction and folklore of parallel worlds and people moving between them through the aid of magical portals.

The concepts of Heaven and Hell, as well as Olympus and Valhalla from Greek and Norse cosmology, are all examples of alternate universes that are different in some way from the material plane. The philosopher Plato spent quite a lot of time thinking about parallel realities, developing the idea of an “upper reality” that was perfect – in contrast to an imperfect “lower reality” that we all live in.

In fiction there are loads of examples – including Narnia, Oz, the islands of Gulliver’s Travels, Alice’s Wonderland and the multiverse of D&D. But one thing that is consistent across almost all of these examples is that travelling between worlds isn’t easy. In Narnia, the portal is an ancient wardrobe. In the Wizard of Oz it’s a tornado. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it’s a rabbit hole.

By those standards, Minecraft’s obsidian portals are much easier to deal with. So consider yourself lucky, pull out your diamond pickaxe, and get mining. We’ll see you on the other side.