Hellevator Pitch
Part 31 ~ 27 January 2026
Played: 18 May 2025
My nether travel experience thus far has been a bit up and down, so I thought I'd try and take it to the next level with one of Minecraft's classic pieces of transport infrastructure: the minecart elevator!
Today's journey starts at... the Minecraft Wiki, where I once again need to check the blast resistance values of blocks so I don't end up building something that the ghasts can blow up. I need to bookmark this page. Ghast bombs can break any block with a value of 3 or less. I'm hoping to use coloured terracotta which comes in at... 4.2. Sweet!
Crisis averted... today's adventure IN GAME starts at Painted Peak, already missing a few hundred blocks of white terracotta from the statue project. Today's harvest will be the netherish tones: red, orange, and soul-sand brown. But before I began mining, I remembered that there's a ruined portal here. I'd earlier mined it for its obsidian, but I have plenty now, so how about I rebuild it like I did at the watchtower spot?
Ooh, I can see my home portal from here! We spawned in a good spot for once. I can just fly back and forth with one rocket. No construction needed! I do like using the ruined portals when I can, rather than just throwing down portals wherever. It feels like I'm reconnecting with some kind of ancestral spirit as I restore their magical creations...
Back out on the mesa, and I got to work with my pickaxe and shears. Yes, shears. Dead bushes aren't renewable. You aren't gonna murder those precious dead bushes, are you? Yes, I know they're already "dead". Doesn't matter. You have bushy blood on your hands!
Ahem. Where are we going with this? Right – minecart elevator in the nether! I picked a strategic spot in front of my home portal and built a pillar (only 3 of 4 sides) with my coloured blocks. They're arranged in a chevron pattern to give the impression of upward motion. I extended my little safety bunker to attach to it, lest any skeletons or ghasts try to sneak a shot in as I travel.
Now for the fun part: installing the carts! There's five steps to this. First is the ladders – you need one every four blocks. Next, place a temporary block above the ladder. Then a rail – sideways, to reduce the chances of a cart falling out – on the block. Pop a cart on the rail and, finally, punch out the block so that the cart falls onto the ladder. And then, do that seven more times, keeping high alert for ghasts so that you're ready to fly out and kill them before they fire a shot at the exposed carts!
Conventional wisdom would suggest that you seal up the elevator with a column of solid blocks. But I like to look out on my hellscape while I'm waiting for my floor, so I checked the wiki again for blocks that are both see-through and ghast-proof... aaand iron bars it is. How uplifting.
All right, so we're into the nether ceiling. Now what? Surely the only way to go from here is down, right?
...Right?
WRONG. If you find the thinnest part of the bedrock ceiling (y127), push as high as you can go with a ladder or scaffold, and throw an ender pearl straight up, you can CLIP THROUGH THE BLOCK and reach the other side. Welcome to the endless bedrock desert that is the nether roof. It may not look appealing, but this place is a haven for technical minecrafters. Be warned though – if you come unprepared, you will die a slow, painful death. Much like a real desert, actually.
Bedrock blocks are supposed to be indestructible – they're immune to mining and explosions. The community, refusing to accept this, has come up with dozens of exploits to break bedrock (and in rare cases even collect it). Most of these methods were quickly patched, but our super block has one kryptonite that remains as potent as ever: pistons. There are countless piston-based bedrock breaker designs out there, but I'm just gonna show off a super basic one that deletes a single block.
Here's the setup. The piston on the left is above the spot where you want the hole. You need to get under the trapdoor, flip the lever to trigger the TNT, crawl back to the left side of the trapdoor, and spam right-click to place a downward-facing piston attached to the obsidian block (where the existing piston is) right when the explosion hits. (Aim at the upper inside corner of the obsidian block to get a downward piston). This is exactly as convoluted as it sounds. The video explains it better than words. This all takes place in a few seconds by the way. If you ended up with a piston facing up, there's a good chance it worked – mine it up and take a peek...
Bingo – first try! I've had plenty of practice on my last server, lol. Of course, my elevator system needs an up and a down, so I went and took out a second block nearby.
Some advice before you try this:
- Go into Settings -> Controls and remap your right-click to a key (I use R) so you can spam inputs by holding the key. It makes the timing aspect WAY more consistent.
- Practice in a test world before you try it for real! It can take a few attempts to get it right.
- Bring extra supplies! If you run out, you're doomed to starve up there :(
- Remember to remap back to right-click once you're done :D
I'll be honest, I don't know why this works, but I'm glad it does. This opens up a whole new world. Well, half a dimension.
All righty, now that we've broken the glass bedrock ceiling, let's get back to work on the minecart elevator! This section is encased in blocks, so I decided to do away with the iron bars and box in the carts with terracotta – only to find that the cart's hitbox got in the way of placing blocks. It's ok though – I found a way around this by placing most of the blocks first, then placing the cart, and breaking the temporary block from diagonally below.
Things got tricky again when I approached the roof and started encountering bedrock blocks. But once again, there's a way around this! I took the second exit to the nether roof, reached down, and popped the cart in from above. After that, there was just one more cart to go. Thanks to some prior planning with the y levels, this one sits neatly on the level of the nether roof – very satisfying indeed!
And that's the minecart elevator – or as I like to call it, the Hellevator! Fourteen carts from portal to bedrock roof. All I have to do is look up and spam right-click, then shift at the end to exit. It's even faster than a bubble elevator, which you can't build in the nether for obvious reasons. The journey back down is... rather less glamorous, but perfectly comfortable with my wings on! If and when I find some powder snow, I'll be able to upgrade the down shaft – and crack into a nether-roof based project too! We're really moving up in the world :D
