How to Find Netherite and Upgrade Your Gear

One ingot upgrades one item, and each upgrade also uses up one Netherite Upgrade Smithing Template. Count the upgrades you want before you go, because that number sets how much debris you have to dig.

You only need to find one template. Each extra copy costs 7 Diamonds and 1 Netherrack, as the upgrading section below shows.

Where Ancient Debris generates

Every Nether chunk gets two tries at a vein, in all five Nether biomes:

Measured averages come out at roughly 1.6 Ancient Debris per chunk. Tunnel with your feet at Y=15 and your body covers Y=15 and 16, two of the three densest layers. Going a few blocks lower is also fine: the large vein still reaches Y=8, and deeper tunnels are less likely to break into a lava sea, which fills open space up to Y=31.

Two generation rules matter:

• It never generates touching air, so it never sits on an open cave wall and you rarely spot it by accident.
• It only replaces Netherrack, Basalt and Blackstone.

For every other ore's height range, see the best Y-level for every ore.

Gear to bring

• A Diamond Pickaxe or better. An Iron Pickaxe breaks Ancient Debris but drops nothing. Fortune does nothing either: each block always drops exactly one of itself. Each block takes 5.65 seconds with an unenchanted Diamond Pickaxe and 5 seconds with a Netherite one.
• Efficiency II or higher. At that level a Diamond Pickaxe breaks Netherrack instantly, which is most of the digging.
• Fire Resistance potions. They make you immune to fire and lava for 3 minutes, or 8 with the extended version. The potion brewing chart has the recipe.
• One piece of golden armour. Piglins stay neutral while you wear it, unless you attack one, open or break a container (chest, barrel, shulker box, ender chest), or break Nether Gold Ore, Gilded Blackstone or a Block of Gold. Nether Gold Ore is common at tunnel height, so check what you are mining when piglins are close. Piglin Brutes attack you anyway.
• A stack of Cobblestone. Nether lava flows up to 7 blocks and advances a block every 10 ticks, against 3 blocks and 30 ticks in the Overworld. Plug leaks fast.

Bed mining, step by step

A bed used in the Nether explodes with power 5, stronger than TNT's 4. Ancient Debris has a blast resistance of 1,200, the same as Obsidian, while Netherrack has 0.4. The blast clears the Netherrack and leaves the debris standing in the crater.

1. 1.Craft your beds: 3 Wool of one colour and 3 Planks of any wood each. Beds don't stack, so each one takes an inventory slot.
2. 2.At Y=15, dig a straight main tunnel. Every 16 blocks, cut a side tunnel 1 block wide, 1 block high and 5 blocks long at eye level.
3. 3.Place a bed at the far end of a side tunnel.
4. 4.Step back and to one side, so solid rock stands between your body and the bed while you can still reach it. Explosion damage scales with how much of you the blast can reach, so rock in the way cuts it.
5. 5.Use the bed. It explodes and sets fire to blocks around it.
6. 6.Walk the crater, mine any debris, and put out the flames on your path. Fire on Netherrack never burns out.

Knockback is the other danger, because the blast can throw you into lava. Blast Protection cuts explosion knockback by 15% per level, and that stacks across armour pieces. It can't share a piece with Protection, so it suits a spare mining set.

TNT instead of beds

TNT's advantage is volume. A single slot holds 64 charges, and the 4-second fuse gives you time to get round a corner. Set TNT into the tunnel wall, light it and step away. Basalt (4.2) and Blackstone (6) resist blasts far better than Netherrack (0.4), so expect smaller craters wherever they are common.

Plain tunnelling works too. It needs only a pickaxe and food, but you only find debris sitting in the walls, floor or ceiling your tunnel exposes.

Smelting and upgrading

1. 1.Smelt the Ancient Debris in a Furnace or Blast Furnace. Each block gives one Netherite Scrap and 2 XP.
2. 2.Craft 4 Netherite Scrap and 4 Gold Ingots into one Netherite Ingot. The grid position does not matter.
3. 3.At a Smithing Table, put the template on the left, the diamond item in the middle and the Netherite Ingot on the right. It costs no XP.

The upgrade keeps the item's enchantments, custom name and wear. Only the template and the ingot are used up. Twelve diamond items take it: the four armour pieces, sword, pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, spear, Diamond Horse Armor and Diamond Nautilus Armor.

In your inventory the template is called Smithing Template, with "Netherite Upgrade" in its tooltip. The treasure-room chest in a bastion remnant always holds one, and every other bastion chest has a 1 in 10 chance. Switch the Seed Map to the Nether to see where bastions can generate in your world. Bastions never generate in Basalt Deltas, so a marked spot that turns out to be one holds a Nether Fortress instead.

Copy the template before you use it. At a Crafting Table, put the template in the top middle, Netherrack in the centre and Diamonds in the other seven slots. You get two templates back. Every smithing template and where to find it has the duplication material for every other template, which bastion chests to check, and the structures that hold the armour trim templates.

Netherite from bastion chests

Bastions also hold netherite outright. The odds per chest:

What the upgrade gets you

Armour points stay at 20 for a full set, so the extra toughness is the difference: a 20-damage hit gets 8 through full diamond and 7.2 through full netherite, before enchantments. How armour damage reduction works has the formula, and the armour calculator runs any hit.

Enchantments carry over, so enchanted diamond gear loses nothing in the upgrade. If an item has no enchantments yet, an Enchanting Table rolls slightly better on netherite. Netherite items also never burn: dropped in lava, they float instead of being destroyed.