One of Minecraft’s biggest mods is 2011’s Aether, which became so popular that its developer was hired by Mojang. The premise is pretty simple—what if there was a ‘good’ dimension? We have Hell and The Void, but no Heaven or even somewhere neutral. As much as I love the red lava canyons of the Nether and the sparse pitch-black cities of the End, I’m still craving a mythical new dimension, but after all this time an unofficial mod is the closest we’ve gotten.
Minecraft Legends finally gives us a new dimension after 12 years, even if it only appears briefly. It’s not quite the Aether’s lush sky islands adorned with golden trees, but it’s clearly a place of good, rather than nothingness and eternal damnation. Three helpful, god-like architects known as Knowledge, Action, and Foresight usher us through a portal into this sprawling bright-blue expanse where giant towers await on the horizon. We soon find out that this is a border world. Portals lead to and from different players’ universes that are seen in the intro cutscene when we’re plucked from the base Minecraft before being moved to the world of Legends.
RELATED: Minecraft Helped Me Overcome My Fear Of Change
We don’t see much aside from where the trio gather and the small tutorial zone, so what this world houses is still a mystery. It’s very reminiscent of the End, feeling detached and completely alien to the Overworld, whereas the Nether is a distortion of what we already know. This in-between has a beautiful space-like sky, no hostile mobs, and is filled with bright blue water that glimmers under the sparkling lights. Beyond that, who knows what’s out there? Perhaps it has multiple biomes like the Nether, or maybe it’s just an endless land of towers holding portals to other worlds. Whatever it is, I’d love to see more of it.
This new dimension already has a precedent among fan-run servers. You can get add-ons that let you create multiple worlds that can then be connected by a hub of portals. The server manages this just fine, and these worlds can share items and gear, or be completely separate. This means you can have a ‘plotland’ for creative building, a Hunger Games-style hub, a world specifically for minigames, and even a survival Factions area, all in one server. This new dimension, if added to base Minecraft, could offer players the chance to do something similar without the need for add-ons or multiplayer.
Imagine tiring of your world but you don’t want to start fresh, so instead, you build a portal to this limbo and venture somewhere new. Maybe we will find a skyblock world, or a flatland. Perhaps we’d even stumble into a creative world where we can experiment freely, leaving our gear at the door. It’s all part of Minecraft’s signature—going wherever and doing whatever you want. There are no dimensions like this, currently. The End is where you find Shulker Boxes and Elytra’s, and the Nether is where you go to farm Blazes and Netherrite. They have resource-driven purposes tied to late game play, making our lives easier, but this new limbo world would open up a completely unique opportunity to explore in all new ways.
There’s a reason the Aether went viral. The Nether and End, as much as they’ve been overhauled over the years, are old news. We’ve had the same three spaces to explore, no matter how different updates make them, for over a decade. The Aether was a breath of fresh air because it was so different, and with fans still making posts to this day asking about it, it’s clear that the itch for a new dimension hasn’t been satisfied, no matter how many times the game reinvents itself. Legends’ new world isn’t the Heaven so many want to see, but it has far more potential, offering us doors to whole new worlds across a Minecraft multiverse.
Next: Vampire Survivors DLC, Tides Of The Foscari, Is Just More Of The Same
