Note
The issue reported here was fixed in the 1.17.40 update, however, there are other ways players may take damage during portal travel. If you are experiencing damage or death during portal travel, please review the following reports and vote on the open report that best matches your experience to show that you are affected.
MCPE-42310
MCPE-146959
MCPE-115933 / MCPE-158215 / MCPE-173386
Please do not comment on this report. Comments about other ongoing issues will be removed.
Workaround
You can avoid taking damage from this bug when travelling overworld --> nether if you fill in 2 blocks below your nether-side portal, and make 2-block high chambers to the side, like this:
[media]Update by @unknown:
Steps to Reproduce:
Create a new world (No experiments, any seed, tested with several)
Build and light a nether portal in the overworld
Travel through
In the nether, move the nether portal down by 1 block
(break the top and bottom of the portal frame and place new blocks to move down by y1, and re-light)
Place lava underneath the bottom obsidian blocks
Switch to Survival
Travel through the portal to the Overworld
There's a ~50% chance that you will take half a heart of suffocation damage at this point
Now travel back through the portal to the Nether
Observed Results:
The player is loaded into the lava beneath the portal.
As you load into the Nether, you can hear the player taking fire damage, and when you load in visually, you are on fire for several seconds, reducing your health significantly.
Expected Results:
You should not take any unexpected damage when travelling through the portal - the player should be spawned in a safe spot on the base of obsidian portal frame
Screenshots/Videos attached: Yes
Notes:
Original Description:
When going through nether portals I get a half to a whole heart worth of damage on a regular basis. Also, when going through a nether portal that is suspended above ground I will glitch through the floor and take fall damage from it. In instances where I am above lava I will also catch on fire.
Keywords for search: player suffocation suffocate damage dmg clip inside block spawn safe point nether portal travel travelling traveling overworld nether obsidian frame
Related issues
is duplicated by
relates to
Attachments
Comments


I experienced the same problem today. The bug MCPE-10246 seems to be a duplicate of this bug. And MCPE-27781 and MCPE-28765 seem to be exactly the same problem (possibly duplicates too).
My setup:
1 (slow I7-4500U Intel CPU with integrated graphics chip) laptop running Windows 10 Edition Version 1.2.9,
no parallel applications except minecraft in a small window (not fullscreen).1 X-Box One running Minecraft (Bedrock) Version 1.2.9
Both players are logged in. The first player was most of the time idle.I played with the second player on my X-Box One.
Nether portal is somewhere inside some nether rock.
The portal in the world was built right in the middle of a big ravine, sitting on one layer of cobble stone right in the middle in air.
When going through a Nether Portal I am sometimes in a not fully constructed world
and see chunks loading (So it's maybe a performance problem? Only occurring when network
of the chunk loading hangs?).
And it seemed like I spawned way above the nether portal and
fell down. Taking all my hearts except the last one (barely survived).
After thinking about that a bit:
I see the "building world..." screen, then I see some glitchy half built world for a split second and my player falling. then I see myself being repositioned right where I should come out of the nether portal. It feels like there is a in-between-cached-room between nether and the real world where I fall before I get finally teleported to the right destination.

Reproduced on Windows 10 v1.2.1.0. I have a certain portal that I take 1/2 heart damage each direction.

I've taken as much as two and a half hearts of damage. It's always on the same portals. Most of the time it's on Xbox One but on occasion it's MCPE on Android. This is 1.7.10 better together on Realms as of 11/27/2018. Is there any ideas as to why this happens?

I figured it out. At least I fixed my problem. Had to make the portal taller. It's now six blocks tall by five wide making the actual pass through a 4 tall by 3 wide area. The damage I was taking was from spawning in the ceiling of the old portal.
Is the situation happening anymore where the player can fall through blocks, or is it just the issue of half a heart of damage now?

This is still happening in v1.7, v1.7.1, and v1.8 on Bedrock. We also play on a Realms, but as of 12/13/18 this is still a serious issue. It happens on multiple portals on our realm. Some of them, we can take up to have a life worth of damage before the "transition" loads and we can be free from the grips of the portal. Seems mostly like it is suffocation damage, but I will look for fall damage now too after reading about it here. Also, It is not doesnt seem to correlate with traveling from a tall portal to a short portal. We have a bunch of those combos that dont cause issue. I haven't found a correlation yet, but am looking too.

This still happens to me - I have 15-20 portals, and randomly will take damage going though any one of them in either direction. Its not everytime but most of the time.
Whatever current bedrock edition is on XBOX one as of this post.
They are all standard minimum sized portals,
some have one end auto-generated, some I built both ends to exact coordinate locations
I have tried clearing more terrain around the portals - including having some free-floating one block off the ground
It is SIGNIFICANTLY worse since I moved my world from a solo world to a Realm.
damage can vary from 1/2 a heart to almost dead from full health - hasn't killed me yet but probably will one of these days.
Always take the damage while it is in the transition screen (building terrain or whatever) where I can't do anything. The majority of the time its just 1/2 to a full heart of damage. But occasionally if the loading screen stays up longer, it is significantly more.
I've tried entering the portals from various angles, directions, side, middle, but no rhyme or reason as to why sometimes I have no issue, and other times I do.
no noticable difference based on number of people playing in the realm - from just me to 4 people. I'm not the only one that takes damage - everyone does.
The damage I BELIEVE is suffocation - and I get the constant tick-tick-tick of taking damage while the destination terrain is being built - so the longer that takes, the more damage I take (WHEN i take damage - which is not everytime but probably 50% of the time)

Windows 10 Bedrock 1.9.0
This has never happen to me before. Tonight, while playing, it has. I was playing on a friends world that we have been playing on for several months. While making paths through the nether to other areas, I opened a portal from the nether I went through and heard the damage ticks while on the loading screen. I waited for a few seconds then exited the game. Using the Xbox app I asked my friend if I died. They said I did. They reloaded the world from a backup, and we re-made the paths again. This time I had them break the nether portal to the jungle, where I exited, and I ran to the mesa to re-build the portal there in the over-world, the portal that killed me.
I created the portal from the mesa to the nether. I entered and had my friend fix the jungle portal. we tested both portals to make sure they were not linked. I entered and exited the nether twice from there, all was good.
We finished the new path and went back to the home portal. My friend entered, I did a few seconds after. Again I was taking damage on the loading screen. I quite the game immediately. I asked my friend on the Xbox app if I died, I did. None of my items were found. I assumed it sent me to the void. I should not have taken enough damage to kill me before exiting the game.

I used to have this issue on a single portal, only when exiting the nether to the overworld. I forget where I read about a possible solution (I guess not here, but maybe on one of the duplicated bugs) but it came down to which block inside the portal frame was the one initially lit. If it was one of the top blocks, then I think when I entered the overworld, I spawned at that block, so that my head was inside one of the obsidian frame blocks, and I'd take a half heart of damage before I fell down the two blocks to the bottom of the frame. To fix the problem, I broke the frame, repaired it, and then made sure to light one of the blocks right above the base of the frame to activate the portal. I never experienced the issue again.

I have died to this regularly for months. I've confirmed @mjohnsons conditions.
Given a portal:
EBBE
1XX2
3XX4
5XX6
E78E
Where E is empty, B and each number represents obsidian, and X represents portal
When the portal is lit using the sides of 1, 2, 3, or 4, you drown while coming back through the portal. The damage is proportional to your load time.
When lit with 5-8, no damage.
Thanks Matt.

Altho my experience may be a different issue, since spawning in the top block sounds legit, I will still update from my previous post since it regards dying from going through a portal.
I found a forum, but lost it, that mentioned when you first go through a portal it transports your character to the other dimension at the some coordinates of the portal you entered. It was said that if you desync from the server, prior do being placed at the exit location, and if the area at the location is not safe, you will take damage, Or die if the desync is long enough. Chances are, quitting the game while ticking down on the loading screen causes instant death. I had died when i quit within seconds of taking damage.
Continuing from my previous post.
The next time my friend loaded up their world, i traveled to the X,Z coordinates the portal in the nether was at in the over-world and found my inventory clustered together on the surface.
Deaths in the nether may result in your inventory being above the top bedrock.

Nintendo Switch Version 1.12.0
When traveling to the nether through any portal, I take suffocation damage. The amount of damage depends on how long it takes too load, I've died multiple times this way. I read that it takes you directly too the coordinates of the over world portal divided by 8, then once loaded it takes you to portal. So i tried clearing out the coordinates in the nether and I still take damage. We need to get this fixed because dying from slow load time is very frustrating and makes you not eve wanna play when you need to use portals a lot.

This happened to me recently. I went through a portal in the overworld and was stuck in the loading screen as i was taking suffocation damage.
I quit the game and my friend told me i "suffocated to death"
We both searched for my gear but the items never dropped and simply disappeared from the world.

Just had this happen on xbox one version going through a nether portal I use often. Is this the correct thread for Xbox one platform in an online realm. is there remedy for the gear or is it tough luck?
I tried to rerun to the portal and suffocated again, ran across the 5k blocks in the overworld to where the portal is, dug down and around the portal and dont see any items.

Still seems to happen in 1.13

Several content creators have reported in videos that if you originally "light" the portal on the side of the frame then you may take damage when using it, even if it otherwise works normally (ie, it takes you to the correct place and creates a portal where it takes you if none already there). If you "light" the portal on the bottom of the frame then you did not take suffocation damage (in 1.12 anyway). This may or may not be related to MCPE-54519, which applies to 1.13, where the portal takes you to the wrong coordinates AND you take damage because you are spawned inside solid blocks.
It does seem though that taking any kind of damage before the world fully generates is a bug, since the player is powerless to do anything about it and the amount of time to generate the world is variable. What should happen is that the player is immune to damage until the moment the world is done generating and appears to the player.

Can confirm this still persists on Windows 10 1.13.1
I've tried lighting it on various surfaces as suggested by some, but this didn't change anything. There are also no walls behind or in front of the portal. This happens travelling both directions to the overworld and to the nether.

Some of my friends and have lost a lot of their items because of this. It really ruined our whole ender dragon raid

Affects 1.16.0.53 on Windows 10 and Android.
How to Reproduce: Spawn over one hundred entities in the nether, then go back to the overworld. Go back into the nether and due to the lag caused by all of the entities, the player will take damage because the player's head is spawned inside the top of the portal. This happens even more on servers and realms due to lag.

Affects 1.16.0.55.
As mentioned in MCPE-47662, this might be reproducible by lighting the portal on the side of the frame.

player seems to spawn where the portal was lit, not at the base of the frame. It has been a known issue in the community for a while. sorry i didn't see the ticket or we could have added it.
Work around. Light the portal on the bottom. it doesn't happen.

I noticed something odd. After going through a portal and then instantly breaking that portal, the game generated another portal elsewhere and then sent me through it.
(I did this while this bug was happening)

I think the lighting on the side vs. the bottom is a superstition.
MCCToolChest shows no difference in portal data when it is lit in different places. Here is what is stored:
[media]
DimId: 0 for overworld, 1 for nether
Span: how wide the portal is in the X or Z direction
TpX, TpY, TpZ: the coordinates of the bottom northwest block of the portal.
Xz, Za: whether the portal extends in the X or Z direction.
Note that the height of the portal is not stored in portal data. Instead, the game just stores which blocks are portal tiles in the chunk section block data. Interaction with a portal is based on searching through connected portal tiles until a portal coordinate as defined above is found.
The game stores the player location at Y+1.62 above the displayed coordinate in-game (around eye-level depending on your skin). When you go through a portal, it spawns you at about Y+2 above the portal coordinate as defined above, so you fall a little bit (about .38 blocks) when you come out. This in itself does not explain how you could suffocate coming out of a portal.
Edit: deleted speculations that turned out to be wrong.

I have uploaded a a slow-motion video and a test world that reproduce the issue in a way that makes clear what is happening. Players take suffocation damage or fall damage going through a portal when the world is slow to generate because they initially spawn with their feet 2 blocks below (Y - 2) the stored TpX, TpY, TpZ values of the portal. Players teleport into the portal itself only at the end of the world generation process.
In
[media]you can see the coordinates change from -15, 30 -17 to -15, 32, -16. The TpX, TpY, TpZ values shown in MCCToolchest were -15, 32, -17. This was in creative mode. I am not sure why the "generating world" overlay screen does not show. It may be because I have a lag machine running in the overworld.
Before uploading the test world, I moved the portal in the nether up a few blocks and dug out below it, and changed to survival, so that you can experience taking fall damage before being teleported into the portal. To reproduce, simply
load
(It only works when the world is relogged on the nether side.)
go through the portal to the overworld,
then come back through the portal into the nether.
UPDATE: Here is a slow-motion video of a player coming into the nether, viewed by a second player from the nether side. The player's name renders below the portal briefly, though their skin does not.
[media]

I did experience this and i somehow was inside the obsidian visually and took damage after when i got out of it. Strange bug.

This just happened to me today, but a lot worse. My portal led to a build in the sky and it spawned me two blocks below my platform so I fell about 50 blocks before being teleported back into my portal and dying to fall damage. I fixed it by making my platform thicker near my portal but I still take suffocation damage when entering the over world. Hopefully this is fixed soon

My previous observations involved the player traveling from overworld to nether.
I've found something different when sending a mob (possibly including players, I'm not sure) from nether to the overworld:
When pushed into a portal, mobs first teleport to the overworld portal coordinates in the nether server-side, then they change dimensions from nether to overworld at those coordinates.
You can see this happening in the video below. There is an overworld portal at 16 31 16, and a nether portal at 2 32 2. I send dogs from the nether to the overworld through these portals. When there is lava at 16 31 16 in the nether, the dog catches fire before disappearing into the portal. When there is glass at 16 31 16 in the nether, the dog does not catch fire.
[media]
Here is the test world I used:
[media]
If you watch 16 31 16 in the nether during this transition, you never see the dog. This indicates that the dog is only being teleported server-side, not client-side. On the client-side it remains at 3 32 2 while visibly catching fire, because it is affected server-side by the lava at 16 31 16. You can hear it yelp as well (though not in the video, because the video has no sound). This works the same with non-pet mobs, it is just easier to test with sitting pets.
UPDATE: This happens with items, too.
[media]

Confirmed multiple times on 1.16.100 (iOS client and BDS server). For me this affects End Portal too, not only Nether portals. This appears to be a general issue regarding dimensional transportation and a slow server.
When a player enters a Nether/End Portal, the client begins simulating player movement even before receiving chunk data. Before receiving chunk data, obviously nothing is in the chunk so the client thinks the player is falling into the void until the chunk data finally arrive. Since falling damage is computed on the client side (for a good reason), the accumulated falling damage will be sent to the server once it finishes receiving chunk data.
From the standpoint of the server, the player was just standing still at the destination of the portal. But then the client reports a falling damage, and the server accepts and applies it to the player.
This is especially problematic when it happens on the Overworld → End transportation, because the obsidian platform is typically floating over the void. The client thinks the player fell from Y=49 (the obsidian platform) to Y=-40 (the bottom of the world) and reports that to the server, and the player instantly dies on the platform.

Three times the last two weeks players on my Bedrock server has suffered damage when going through the same portal from Nether to Overworld. The damage happened when the "building world" screen was visible. In two cases about 4 hearts of damage was done, and in the last occasion the player died and all of the stuff in the inventory just disappeared (which was a bit frustrating when all weapons, tools and armor were fully enchanted and made of Netherite).
On several occasions in the last past weeks (perhaps after upgrading to 1.16.210?) users who entered the same portal (as mentioned above) from the Overworld to the Nether, ended up in a completely different place in Nether (far north). When going back to the Overworld through the freshly created portal the users ended up about 16000 blocks north about 1000 blocks east from the original portal in Overworld coordinates.
Something seems to be broken with the portals lately. We have not had any such issues before the last couple of weeks.
To me this bug should be given high priority, since it completely ruins the gameplay if you don't dare do enter a portal for fear of losing everything without being able to do something about it.
Bedrock server version: 1.16.210.05
Minecraft Windows 10 client: 1.16.210
Edit from [Mod] GoldenHelmet: that's MCPE-115933, not this issue.

Yesterday I had took what I assumed was fire tick damage (this is common as the dimension is full of fire and lava) and I assumed I had died easily solvable problem… but what had actually happened was rather than my coordinates being decided by 7 or 8 excluding y, I was teleported to my exact overworld coordinates and rather than being on fire I was suffocating in netherack my overworld coords were 1414 78 0 and so were the nether coords
Edit from @unknown: that's not this issue. See my comment just above.

I went through a portal I’ve been through plenty and it suffocated me in a wall and I died. I did the trap door trick and it worked for a bit until it didn’t…
This is after having the issue where going through any portal would put us at the overworks coordinates in the nether rather than the actual coordinates. Stranded with no portal, thousands of blocks from the nearest portal, and eight times as far if I went to the overworld. Issue was only going overworld to nether. Why you doing us so dirty mojang??
Edit from @unknown: the trap door trick would not be expected to help with MCPE-115933, which sounds like what happened in this case.

What is the death message if you die of the damage taken when going through the Nether portal? Please respond as soon as possible. Thanks!

It would be suffocation or dying in lava or death from falling.