Sustained high-speed swimming technique for early game overworld exploration. "Water skiing" lets you swim 2200-3100 blocks per minute while maintaining a clear view of your surroundings, without stopping to breathe and without building anything beforehand. Great for finding special biomes like jungles, mushroom fields, and badlands. Also great for screwing around and having fun. Watch this tutorial to learn about this valuable skill that will transform how you travel in the game.

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0:00
0:54 Mechanics of water skiing
3:48 Launching tutorial
5:00 Breathing while swimming
5:53 Steering
7:06 Starting your exploration and navigating
9:03 Autosaves and server lag
10:25 Recovering the lead and dolphin
11:19 Changing speed, and towing additional mobs/players
12:41 An elytra demonstration loosely related to water skiing

6:09 If needed, you can lower your mouse sensitivity to make it easier to steer.

8:20 I do not recommend using a name tag on your dolphin. Name tags are relatively expensive in early game, and dolphin are fairly easy to find in the ocean. If you do use a name tag, consider using "Grumm" or "Dinnerbone" as the name so that the dolphin is rendered upside down, which makes it much easier to spot your dolphin in a crowd of other dolphin. Dolphin are notorious for suffocating themselves as they incessantly try to play with items (see 2:11 for an example), so you'll need to take care to clear the area of items when you have them tethered.

8:47 Another cue that you are going in circles is that the game no longer has trouble rendering the chunks since there is no longer any delay in creating them, and may have the chunks in cache. Also, seeing water or lava flow from the side of a mountain is a clear sign that the chunk was freshly created; it's a sign that you are NOT going in circles.

9:57 The fish in the distance stop for a moment when the autosave occurs.

10:09 I suspect an autosave sometimes occurs shortly after you stop water skiing, which sometimes causes the lead to break as you decelerate. This autosave does not affect the regularly scheduled autosave that still occurs every 5 minutes.

10:17 The game stutters right when the lead breaks, and there is a spike on the FPS monitor. Look at the land, the underwater mobs, and the surface of the water. I know that this is an autosave because of similar symptoms that occurred 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after this instance.

11:19 Travelling quickly in the game may put a lot of stress on your gaming system. Reducing your travel speed and render distance may help your system keep up, but remember that limiting the render distance might make it harder to spot the very things that you are searching for in the first place, so you'll need to find the right balance.

11:05 Your lead may also break if your dolphin veers off to play with other nearby dolphin. This is not common, so I don't try to avoid other dolphin while water skiing.

12:26 Each of the wandering trader's llamas will drop a lead when they die, which is fairly reliable way to accumulate leads in early game. To craft leads from scratch, you'll need slime balls and string. A single large slime, which you can find in a swamp at night, can get you half a stack of slimeballs if you use Looting 3.

12:42 This effectively allows multiple players to share a single set of elytra wings, though it can be dangerous. Open the elytra wings and swim at the water surface while looking up slightly, using dolphin's grace (tap sprint) and depth strider 2 to accelerate to take off speed. Then quickly look up about -35 degrees and use rockets to gain altitude. I suspect additional passengers, riding on saddled pigs, can be chained together in a line with leads. Dolphin's grace makes it easier to take off while towing a saddled pig, but it isn't absolutely necessary. To do this without a dolphin, use a rocket to get to take off speed instead (about 28 bps), and then look up at -35 degrees and fire a series of rockets.

Pretty cool that it was featured on screenrant:
https://screenrant.com/minecraft-ride...