Minecraft wiki entry for Nether_hub, associated text: Often, players in the Overworld have good reason to travel thousands of blocks from one place to another, costing both time and resources. In these situations, the Nether can be used to significantly reduce the length of a journey. This is due to the fact that coordinates in the Nether are 8x the value of coordinates in the Overworld, meaning that every one block traveled in the Nether translates to eight blocks traveled in the Overworld.