Cathedral

A legendary Nether zone. One black hall of arches, about 100 blocks tall, runs the length of the zone.

The Cathedral is a zone type in the Nether. One hall runs through the whole zone in a straight line. It is about 100 blocks tall, the same on both sides, and it leads nowhere.

What it looks like

• The hall runs east-west or north-south, the whole length of the zone. It is 45 to 55 blocks wide.
• Down the middle is the nave, 19 to 25 blocks wide, under a pointed vault 96 to 100 blocks above the floor.
• On each side, a row of pointed arches on piers opens into a narrower aisle with its own pointed vault.
• Above each arch, a tall pointed recess is set into the wall.
• The same bay repeats every 16 to 20 blocks. At each pier a column runs up the nave wall and a rib crosses the vault.
• Everything is polished blackstone and polished blackstone bricks.
• Soul fire burns in four channels in the floor, two in the nave and one down each aisle. It is the only light. The vault is dark.
• The floor is below the level of the lava sea. The walls keep the lava out.

There are no doors, no altar and nothing inside.

Getting in

Where the hall meets the edge of the zone, a wall closes it. Where it meets the edge head-on, a tall pointed cut in the end wall opens onto the Nether outside, wherever the Nether there is open. Where it is not, the cut is bricked up. The cut starts at the height of the lava sea, 10 to 14 blocks above the hall floor. You can also dig in through the walls.

Where the hall crosses an open cavern, you can see it from outside: black walls rising out of the lava, the aisle roofs and the vault.

By biome

The hall is the same in every biome. In basalt deltas, pools of lava and magma and basalt columns can form on the floor, as everywhere in the deltas. Fortresses and bastions can stand in the hall.

Mobs spawn as they do in the rest of the biome, and ghasts have room. The hall has no loot and nothing worth mining.

How rare it is

The Cathedral is a legendary zone, the rarest in the Nether. About 0.1 percent of Nether zones are a Cathedral, about one zone in 1,000. It exists in the Nether only, and only in Nether land far from anything that existed when it was added. The Nether around spawn never gets it.

There are no other chunk errors inside the zone.

See Chunk errors for every zone type.