Any useful strategies for finding a Nether Fortress?

Anyone have useful strategies for finding a Nether Fortress in Minecraft's Nether?

I got into the nether and wandered around for quite a while, but didn't find anything. I'm not sure if there are giveaways (I was looking for large building-like things in the distance). I've got a map, and have explored a small, but not unreasonable part of it. Any idea how many fortresses a single map might contain?

3 Answers

There are infinite nether fortresses in the nether. They spawn in rows every 200-400 blocks along the world's North/South axis.

Once you find the first one, just keep walking north or south from it to find another.

In my experience, you just got to look around a lot. They are big and black, and generally the main levels reside at a Z value of ... 64? I forget the exact value. The other piece of this, is if you are significantly higher than that, you'll just miss them (unless you can look down through big gaps in the netherrack), if you are down at the lava level, and the fortress extends down to that level, the fortress looks like a big black blocks, and you have to build a ladder or tunnel up them to get to the interesting stuff.

I felt like I had to look forever to find my first one. Keep it up, and you'll find one pretty soon.

No one has mentioned how to find nether fortresses by using f3, so I will! (Modern version)

• Press f3 + G
• Press shift + f3. In the corner of your screen a pie chart should show up, and you will see a lot of numbers and names below it.
• Click [4] for tick
• Click [1] for level
• Click [1] for entities
• Click [3] for block entities
• You will now see a green and purple piechart, if it has no blue, then there are no chest spawners where you are looking.
• If no chest spawners, then press f3 + f to increase render distance by 1
• Continue preasing until a blue portion pops up in the pie chart (spawners)
• Set render distance to 2
• Press f3
• Press shift + f3
• Set render distance to 1 less than spawner pop-up
• Look in the NSEW directions to check if a blue portion shows up in the piechart
• If a blue portion shows up in the piechart, then just travel in that direction and you will find yourself a nether fortress!

Video: How to find a nether fortress in Minecraft

This process is quite difficult so please tell me if I missed something or got something wrong