Minecraft – Why does gravel remain static in the Nether

According to this thread in the Minecraft Forums that seems to have peeked into the code, length dilation does not affect the y-axis.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/345806-nether-portal-science/

Summary version

• Calculate coordinate of destination based on entry coordinate. (X, Y, Z) <---> (X*8, Y, Z*8)

• At destination, look for the closest active nether portal within a 128 block radius of the player (257x257x128 area centered on destination) (the Euclidean distance (the 3D distance)). Teleport player there if one exists.

• If no portal exists in the 128 block radius, the game creates one by looking for the closest possible nearby position within a 16 radius column (33x33x128 area) that has enough space to spawn a portal. And teleports the player there.

• And if there's no possible spawn position with solid ground, it just creates a portal at the destination anyway, converting any blocks in the way into a portal.

It is intentional, does happen in SMP, and cannot be disabled on a vanilla server as far as I know. On a Bukkit server, the DisableIt plugin can disable any type of explosion, including beds.

In the Nether, there basically is no time of day — bring a watch with you and see what happens. The beds only let you sleep in them when it's night time, and this lack of time apparently confuses them to the point of spontaneous explosion.

Sleeping in the Nether has never worked, but before Beta 1.6 the beds were neither sentient nor quite as explosive; you'd simply get the "you can only sleep at night" message. Of course, this isn't really appropriate for the Nether, since it is never night. Notch likely wanted to make it more obvious to players that beds don't work in the Nether at all. Why explosions? I'm not sure, but it certainly drives the point home, doesn't it? Possibly Evil Notch had a hand in this.