The Nether trip finally happens. Basket swaps into fresh armor, lights the portal, and spends most of the episode crossing netherrack and lava lakes looking for a Nether fortress. One shows up in the last two minutes.
Gearing up
First a quick tour. The ceiling corners are rounded off now, a small staircase leads up a level, and the books and gear have moved into the chests behind the library wall. Basket only needed a few of them, sorted into tools, bow things, sword things, helmets, boots and general armor.
The new diamond helmet carries Fire Protection IV, and the boots read Protection IV, Feather Falling IV and Unbreaking III. Two pieces have regular protection and two have fire protection, "so hopefully that'll be enough to help me out with all the bad guys." Basket packs dirt, wood, obsidian, extra food and a second flint and steel, and leaves the buckets behind.
Through the portal
The obsidian goes up in a narrow stone brick space, Basket lights it, and in it goes. "Ooh, this isn't safe at all." The portal has landed on gravel at the edge of a cliff above a lava lake. A ghast shows up right away, and Basket gets the bow out: "wow this bow is awesome, one shot."
That spare flint and steel has a reason. A ghast blast near the portal can put it out, and without a way to relight it, "you're just stuck to the nether."
So the first job is walls. Ghasts can't break cobblestone, and Basket boxes the portal in with it, with a door planned for the front. Zombie pigmen are the other locals. They leave you alone, but "if you attack on them anything around you start attacking you."
Glowstone, quartz and soul sand
Basket heads south. The silk touch pick takes glowstone whole, which beats breaking it into dust: "you only get like two to four" dust, and it takes four to make a block. There's quartz for redstone builds, and a stack or more of soul sand for growing nether wart later. Basket calls it "Slow Sand" before catching the slip.
Ghasts keep coming. Basket gets a ghast tear from one, hits one ghast's fireball back at it, and misses a lot. "I'm just not hitting this guy." Back near the portal, a chest takes the extra gravel and junk, and a cobblestone tower near the portal helps Basket find the way back.
South, and south again
Lava blocks the way north and the other direction too, so south it is. Basket bridges a little, lights the path with torches to find the way back, and holds shift along thin ledges. "It's easy to fall and die." The glowstone pile grows to about two stacks. Then the pick turns out to be "about half gone." The only spare has no Unbreaking, so Basket tries to tunnel through less netherrack. A brief fire gets put out fast by the armor.
A fortress at last
"There's the start of the nether fortress." Dark walls rise out of the gloom with fires around them. Basket spots what look like blazes and remembers wither skeletons too. "So that will be pretty dangerous." Basket saw a magma cube too.
Basket stops there, by rough count "a thousand blocks or so" from the portal. The plan for next time is to go in for blaze rods and nether wart. The episode ends with Basket alive at the edge of the fortress area, armor holding up.