In the 1.16 nether update release (and previously, its beta versions), nether fortresses are extremely rare. On average, /locate outputs a fortress that is 600-800 blocks away, often even farther. This is opposed to the fortress generation in 1.14 and every other version for that matter, where about 90% of the tests I have done resulted in a fortress within a few hundred blocks or less. Fortresses have been made extremely rare now, even rarer than bastions, which is absurd considering their not great loot and the fact that they are necessary for beating the game.
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1.16.2 it's still the case.
This completely ruins the fun of building bridges linking fortresses together. I spawned a world with one fantastic fortress, then spent 2 hours looking for another in any direction, flying in creative, tunneling through netherack & bassalt, & never found one. Found lots of bastions though.
A second world yielded 2 fortresses & 7 bastions in the same allotment of time.
Updated to include 1.16.40 hotfix
Are you sure this is a bug? It may be set to be rare.
Still an issue in 1.19.63. Fortresses an bastions are both uncommon and crucial to gameplay. Bastions are going to be more important due to Netherite Upgrade Templated being added. Nether quadrant sizes and structure spawning probabilities needs to be brought to parity before the release of 1.20.
Quadrants for fortress and bastion spawning are much larger in Bedrock than in Java, being 480×480 blocks and 432×432 blocks, respectively.
Fortress spawning chance is also lower, from 40% in Java to 33.33...% in Bedrock.
This leads to fortresses and bastions being VERY far away from spawn. A rough average distance to the nearest fortress would be 600 blocks from spawn on bedrock, in my experience, and about 300 in Java. I plan to do precise statistical calculations soon.
This makes obtaining blaze rods and reaching The End much harder. The early game in the nether is much more difficult as a direct result of this. I have stopped playing many survival worlds due to lack of access to a fortress. This harms player retention, so it needs to be brought to parity soon.
This is driving me crazy, I hope they fix this. I spent two hours searching for a fortress in 1.16 with my friend in survival. It never used to take this long.