Indigo Sea

Since 0.5.2-birch-16 Indigo has a second world: the Indigo Sea. It is almost all deep, open ocean with a handful of islands, made for the ships and submarines that need more water than Birch Brook has. Birch Brook itself is unchanged.

Getting there

Build a portal, the way you’d build a Nether portal, but out of Prismarine Bricks:

1. Frame: a vertical ring of Prismarine Bricks around an empty opening 2 wide and 3 tall. The corners are optional. It can face either way.
2. Light it: drop (Q) a Heart of the Sea into the opening. The frame lights up with glowing particles and the heart is used up, one per portal.
3. Step in and stand there for 2 seconds.

You arrive in the Indigo Sea at the same x/z as your portal. If there’s already a portal within 48 blocks you step out next to it; otherwise you get a small prismarine platform at the water’s surface with a sea lantern and a lit return portal, and Slow Falling while the area loads, so you never land in the water. Walk back into that portal to return to exactly where you left. Break any frame block to switch a portal off. Riders get off first, so ships and planes stay on their own side; build them there.

What’s there

• About 98% open water. The sea floor sits around 30 blocks down almost everywhere (anywhere from 20 to 35 is normal, with a few trenches over 100), so there is room to dive.

• A handful of islands to land on and build harbours, from small sandbars up to a few hundred blocks across.

• Normal Minecraft rules: day and night, weather, breathable air, ocean mobs, and ocean ruins and shipwrecks can turn up like in any ocean.

• It’s a new world, so it starts empty. Everything you build there stays there.

Ships and submarines

• Paste a boat in clear air above the water, then assemble it. Hold the schematic, right-click to activate it, print it a few blocks above the surface with nothing touching it, then look at the hull and run /sable assemble connected (staff), or use a Physics Assembler. It drops in as one craft. See Boats and Building planes.
• Deep Seas floaters keep big ships up, and the deep water is where submarines and their pressure ratings matter. Mind the depth: hulls give way below what they’re rated for.
• The ocean is deep enough to dive in almost everywhere. The lab measured the depths quoted above before this went live.