Check you out – diamond armour, an enchanted diamond sword, an elytra on your back, and a full stack of golden apples in your hotbar. You’ve been places and defeated mobs that new players couldn’t even dream of. There’s nothing left in the game for you to collect.

Or is there? (Spoiler: there is.) In the upcoming Nether Update, we’re adding a handful of new endgame-oriented items and challenges, and one of them just so happens to be our item of the week – the netherite ingot.

“We decided to add netherite for two reasons,” Jens Bergensten, Chief Creative Officer, told me, once I’d constructed the temple to his magnificence that he demands in exchange for an interview.

“With the Nether update, we felt that we wanted to create a long-term goal for the players, and reward them for spending time in the Nether. We also felt that this was a chance to introduce a brand new material to work with – and that it was the perfect time to do so.”

It’s possible to find netherite ingots in bastion remnant loot chests, but you can also make them by combining netherite scraps with gold ingots. Four of each makes a single netherite ingot.

Jens says that the dev team wanted to make netherite stronger than diamond, but that they didn’t want it to make diamond obsolete. “It turned out to be easier said than done,” he told me.

“Eventually, we came up with the idea that netherite could be used as a material to upgrade your current equipment, and not just an independent resource used to create its own tools and armor. That way we would maintain the value of diamond while also adding something new!”

Netherite items – helmets, chestplates, leggings, boots, swords, pickaxes, axes, shovels and hoes – are tougher, hit harder, and last longer than their diamond equivalents. A diamond sword, for example, will do a total of about 11,000 damage points before it breaks. A netherite one, though, can do more than 16,000 damage. Oh, and it can be enchanted as normal, too.

To upgrade your diamond items, you’ll need a smithing table. Pop the item you want to upgrade in the left slot, and the netherite ingot in the right. Durability, enchantments, and any custom names are preserved. You can also use netherite ingots to repair damaged netherite items, and to create a lodestone, which you’ll hear more about in the coming weeks.

One last feature of netherite that you might want to know is that it’s fireproof. Drop a netherite ingot into fire or lava, and it’ll just sit there happily, waiting for you to dive in to pick it up again.

No more howls of displeasure because you fell in a lava puddle and lost all your items. All you need to do now is figure out how to get those items out of the lava without dying again…

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