How to Beat the Ender Dragon: Stronghold, End Portal and the Fight

Eyes of Ender and finding the stronghold

An Eye of Ender is one blaze powder plus one ender pearl. Blaze powder comes from blaze rods (one rod makes two powder), which means a trip to a Nether fortress — our Nether guide covers that. Ender pearls come from endermen, from cleric villagers, or from bartering with piglins. Endermen are easiest to farm in a warped forest in the Nether, where they are the only hostile spawn.

Right-click with an eye and it flies toward the nearest stronghold, hovers, and drops for you to pick up — or shatters, which on Java happens about one time in five. Walk in the direction it flew for a few hundred blocks and throw another. When an eye flies steeply downward or appears to go behind you, you are above the stronghold; dig down carefully (stairs, never straight down) and you will hit stone brick.

The stronghold’s portal room is not necessarily under where the eye pointed — eyes aim at the stronghold’s start staircase, and the portal room can be a hundred blocks away through the corridors. On Java, strongholds sit in rings around the world origin; the first ring holds three, so if the first is inconvenient, a different direction finds another.

Inside the stronghold

Strongholds are mazes of stone brick corridors, libraries, prison cells and storerooms, with silverfish in some blocks. Bring torches and place them on one side only so you can find the way out. Libraries have chests with enchanted books; the storerooms have loot too. The portal room has a lava pool below a raised platform holding twelve End portal frames in a square, and a silverfish spawner in front of it — break that spawner first.

Place an Eye of Ender in each empty frame (right-click the frame). Any frame that already has an eye can stay. When the twelfth is in, the portal opens as a black star field. Before you jump in, set your spawn: bring a bed and sleep in the stronghold (respawn anchors only work in the Nether). You will almost certainly die at least once, and respawning two thousand blocks away is miserable.

Preparing: gear and potions

Empty your inventory of everything else and put your valuables in a chest. If you die, your items drop in the End and stay there until you return, which is manageable, but they can fall into the void, which is not.

Arriving in the End

You spawn on a small obsidian platform, often below the main island or a short distance from it, sometimes enclosed in end stone. Dig out or bridge across. The main island is a bowl of end stone with ten obsidian pillars in a ring, an End crystal on top of each, and a bedrock fountain in the centre with the inactive exit portal. Endermen spawn everywhere; wear the pumpkin until you are ready, or simply do not look at their heads.

Before doing anything else, put a chest near the arrival point and, if you brought a bed, do not use it here — sleeping does not work and a bed explodes. Your spawn is whatever you set in the Overworld or stronghold.

Phase one: the crystals

Every crystal that survives heals the dragon when it flies near, so this phase is mandatory. Count ten pillars of varying heights. The crystals on the lower pillars can be shot from the ground with a bow — aim at the crystal itself; when it explodes it damages anything nearby, including you, so keep your distance. Two or three of the tallest pillars have their crystals inside iron-bar cages, which arrows cannot reach.

For caged crystals, the standard method is to pillar up: stand at the base, look down, and jump while placing blocks under yourself until you reach the top. Break the bars with the pickaxe or hit the crystal from the side. Then, critically, get down before the dragon comes: drink Slow Falling, or ender pearl to the ground, or place water under you on Java. The dragon targets players on pillars and knocks them off. Do the caged ones first while you are fresh, and with a shield up when the dragon passes.

Phase two: the dragon

With the crystals gone, the dragon alternates between circling the island — where it strafes you with acid breath from range and occasionally charges — and perching on the bedrock fountain in the centre. Perching is when you do your damage. The pattern:

1. When the dragon lands on the fountain, run in and hit its head with the sword. Head hits do full damage; body and wings take only a quarter. Stand to the side of the head, never in front of it or under the body.
2. When it opens its mouth and starts the breath attack, back off — the purple cloud lingers and does heavy damage over time. Do not stand in it. Do not eat inside it.
3. When it takes off, switch to the bow. Shoot the head as it circles; arrows do full damage on a head hit and you can land several per pass. Stay off the high ground.
4. It will charge you when you are at range. Shield up, or sidestep. The charge does knockback more than damage; the void is the risk.
5. Heal between perches. Golden apples if low, food otherwise. Keep Slow Falling active while it is airborne if you have enough potions.

Two hundred health with a Sharpness V sword means roughly fifteen to twenty head hits, plus whatever the bow lands. Expect three to five perch cycles. If you are using beds: place a bed against the fountain while the dragon is perched, click it with the dragon’s head nearby, and stand behind an obsidian block to absorb the blast. Each explosion does dozens of hearts of damage to the dragon and will kill you without the block.

On Bedrock, the dragon is slightly more aggressive with charges and the breath cloud is larger, but the sequence is identical.

After the kill

The dragon dies in a burst of light and drops experience orbs — roughly 12,000 points the first time, which takes you from nothing to level 60-something. Collect them before they despawn. The exit portal in the fountain activates, with the dragon egg on the bedrock pillar above it. The egg teleports when you click it; to collect it, place a torch under the block it sits on, then break that block so the egg falls onto the torch and drops as an item. Alternatively push it with a piston.

Jump into the exit portal to go home, credits and all. An End gateway — a small bedrock frame with a beam — also appears near the island edge. Throw an ender pearl into it or fly through, and it takes you to the outer islands.

The outer islands: cities, elytra, shulkers

The outer End begins about a thousand blocks from the main island: floating islands of end stone covered in chorus plants, with End cities — purpur towers — scattered across them. Some cities have an End ship floating alongside, and every ship has one elytra in an item frame plus a dragon head on the prow. Elytra is the best mobility item in the game and the reason most players go to the End at all.

Cities are guarded by shulkers: box-shaped mobs in the walls that shoot homing bullets which inflict Levitation. Levitation over the void is lethal; carry blocks to place under yourself or a water bucket (Java) and fight shulkers when they open, or use a shield. Shulkers drop shulker shells, two of which craft a shulker box — the portable storage that changes the whole game. To reach a ship, bridge from the city with blocks or ender pearl across; the elytra is in the room at the stern behind the dragon head.

Chorus fruit, which grows everywhere out here, is food that teleports you randomly a short distance when eaten — handy for escaping the void, dangerous in a city. There is no shortcut across large gaps without elytra: ender pearls for short hops, blocks for long bridges, and a shield raised whenever a shulker is in sight.

Frequently asked questions