Minecraft – Is it possible to get a Blaze to spawn on a Skyblock map

minecraft-java-edition

I've been playing the Skyblock 2.1 map for Minecraft and have figured out there's a way to get Villagers, but only if you can first get a Blaze Rod. In Skyblock, the Nether consists of only a small 3x3x3 block of glowstone and a portal within the boundaries of the Skyblock map, nothing else. I presume if one went far enough in any direction they would find normal chunks (and thus the possibility of Nether fortresses and Blaze spawners), but this would be cheating.

After perusing this question, it's clear that even when all the blocks of a Nether fortress are removed you can still get Blazes (and Withers) to spawn in that location if you just build some new ground there. So, if the valid playable region of a Skyblock map originally contained a Nether fortress, and if the data for the "Structure Pieces" of that Nether fortress still remain in the folder for the Skyblock map, it should be possible to get a Blaze to spawn.

So, the million-emerald question…

Has anyone either found a location where Blazes spawned, or used some method/mod to determine if there are any Blaze-spawnable regions in the valid playable section of the Nether of a Skyblock map?

Best Answer

The Bounding Box Outline mod will show you nicely-shaded bounding boxes for all Structure Pieces placed in the world, including Nether Fortresses. It's currently available for 1.6.x and requires Minecraft Forge.

I've already got a Forge profile laying around, so it was a simple matter of dropping the mod in a fresh game directory along with the Skyblock 2.1 save, an edit to the level.dat to enable Creative, and lo and behold:

Nether Fortress outlines are visible near the Nether portal

So yes, there are two Nether Fortress "ghosts" not far from the glowstone island.

The nearest corner of the one visible on the left is at approximately 76, 62, -63 (XYZ) and stretches to the North and a bit to the East from there, not including a hallway protruding to the West (the direction back toward the portal, but farther North than this corner).

The nearest corner of the one visible on the right is at approximately 94, 71, 73 and stretches East from there with a Southward and downward tendency.

You could go off those numbers and just grope around trying to make a blaze-spawnable area without the mod. If you want to use the mod though, it's quite easy to install starting from zero modding experience: download and use the automatic Forge installer which will create a new forge-enabled Profile, then drop the Bounding Box Outline mod's zipfile into the new .minecraft/mods/ folder that will be created after you run Forge once. Once in the game, turn the mod's visuals on by pressing F3+n (simultaneously) and the fortresses will show up bright as day.