Beat Minecraft: Blaze Rods, Eyes of Ender, Dragon and Elytra

This guide is for survival players and SMP owners who want a clean route through the game: Nether, blaze rods, eyes of ender, the Ender Dragon, and afterwards the elytra hidden in End ships. By the end you will know what to carry, where to search and what to do in what order. A short section at the bottom covers how server owners can give new players a fresh End.

Gather what you need before the Nether#

Everything in this route rests on one chain: blaze rods become blaze powder, and blaze powder plus an ender pearl becomes an eye of ender. One blaze rod crafts 2 blaze powder, and one eye needs one powder and one pearl. You need 12 eyes to fill a stronghold portal, so the bare minimum is 12 pearls and 6 rods.

Real runs need a margin. Each frame in a stronghold portal has a 10% chance to start with an eye, so on average about 1.2 are already filled. But every eye you throw to find the stronghold has a 20% chance to shatter. As practical advice (not a wiki figure), aim for 8 or more blaze rods and 12 or more ender pearls before you leave the Nether.

Build the Nether portal and travel smart#

A portal frame needs to be at least 4 wide and 5 tall. The four corners are optional, so 10 obsidian is enough. Light it with fire, for example flint and steel or a fire charge. In survival you stand in an active portal for about 4 seconds before you travel.

Nether distances are 1:8 against the Overworld. Divide your Overworld X and Z by 8 to get the matching Nether coordinates (Y stays the same). Write down your portal coordinates, because you will want a short way home from the fortress.

Find the Nether fortress and the blaze spawner#

Fortresses generate in all Nether biomes. If a bastion tries to generate in a basalt delta, a fortress generates instead, so deltas are a common place to find one. A fortress and a bastion never share a region. If you see a bastion, keep going.

Structures are placed per region. In Java Edition a fortress or bastion region is 432x432 blocks, and a region gives a fortress with a 40% chance (in Bedrock the regions are 480x480 and the chance is 33.3%). That makes one habit worth having: pick a direction and walk in a straight line, so you cross as many regions as possible instead of circling.

Inside, look for a blaze spawner platform. A fortress has up to 2 of them. Each is a small platform reached by three stair blocks, fenced with Nether brick fence, with the spawner in the middle. Blazes and wither skeletons spawn naturally only in fortresses. Nether wart grows in a soul sand garden room reached by stairways, which is handy if you plan to brew later.

Kill blazes and collect the rods#

A blaze charges for about 3 seconds, then fires three small fireballs 0.3 seconds apart, and it melee-attacks within 2 blocks. A shield blocks both the damage and the ignition from fireballs, so carry one. Fire resistance stops the burning but not the melee damage.

• Use their weakness. Blazes take no fire or lava damage but are hurt by water and snowballs. A snowball does 3 HP.
• Expect about one rod per two kills. A blaze drops a rod only when killed by a player or tamed wolf, with a 50% base chance for one. Looting raises it, to about 2 on average with Looting III.
• Fight near the spawner. Blazes spawn at light level 11 or lower, in groups of 2 to 3 in Java. In Java, mobs can spawn across the whole fortress on Nether bricks, so watch your back.

By that 50% rate, 6 rods is about 12 kills and 8 rods is about 16. It is arithmetic from the drop chance, so treat it as a rough guide.

Get your ender pearls#

You have four sources, and you can mix them:

• Endermen: in Java they drop 0 to 1 pearls with a 50% base chance, and Looting raises it.
• Piglin bartering: trade gold ingots. About 2.13% of trades give pearls, 2 to 4 per success, which works out to roughly 15.6 ingots per pearl on average. Piglins examine each ingot for about 6 seconds in Java (8 in Bedrock), so it is slow but safe to leave running.
• Cleric villagers: an expert cleric sells pearls for 5 emeralds each.
• Stronghold altar chests: a bonus, but you only reach them after you have found the stronghold.

A thrown pearl teleports you but deals 5 HP damage on arrival, has a 1 second cooldown and has a 5% chance to spawn an endermite. Keep your pearls for eyes, not for fun.

Craft eyes of ender and find the stronghold#

Craft one eye per blaze powder plus ender pearl. Throw one and it flies about 12 blocks toward the nearest stronghold. It rises when you are far away and drops when you are directly above. Walk where it flew, throw again, and repeat. When the eye sinks into the ground and you are standing on top, dig down.

In Java Edition strongholds are placed in eight rings around the world origin, 128 in total. The first ring has 3 strongholds, between 1,280 and 2,816 blocks from 0,0. In Bedrock Edition, 3 extra strongholds generate at least 453 blocks from the origin, often near village meeting points. Either way, expect a long walk.

Every stronghold has an End portal room. Strongholds also have silverfish spawners, and infested blocks release silverfish when broken, so mine carefully. Place eyes in the empty frames until all 12 are filled, then step through.

Running this route on a server? Walking thousands of blocks into unexplored land forces the server to generate new chunks, which is a common cause of lag. Our guide to pregenerating your world with Chunky and finding lag with spark shows how to avoid that.

Kill the Ender Dragon#

The dragon has 200 health and takes about 75% less damage unless you hit its head. End crystals on the obsidian pillars heal it by 1 HP every 0.5 seconds, so destroy the crystals first. Destroying a crystal that is currently healing the dragon also deals 10 damage to it.

The dragon circles the pillars, fires fireballs while strafing, and perches on the exit portal to use its breath attack. Its charging dive happens in Bedrock Edition; Java players mainly face strafing and the perch breath. When it perches it is immune to arrows, and it uses a 3 second breath attack on players within 20 blocks of the portal structure, like lingering Harming. Stay out of the cloud and hit it while it sits.

The first kill gives 12,000 XP and a dragon egg appears above the central structure. If you place four End crystals around the exit portal, the dragon respawns, and later kills give 500 XP each.

Reach the outer islands through the End gateway#

Once the dragon is dead, up to 20 End gateways can spawn one at a time around the edge of the central island, 96 blocks from the center at Y 75. Throw an ender pearl into the gateway, or fly through it with elytra, to reach the outer islands. The link runs roughly 1,024 blocks from the center, and where you land depends on the terrain.

Gateways also generate naturally on the outer islands, so you can return the same way. You can also cross the void by bridging with blocks, by elytra once you have it, or by ender pearls, so keep spare pearls from earlier.

Find an End city and an End ship for elytra#

End cities generate only on the outer islands. Do not expect every city to have a ship. In each tower direction there is a 50% chance of a bridge, and a bridge has a 12.5% chance of a ship, so a city has at most one ship. Keep scanning cities until you see a ship.

A ship holds the elytra in an item frame in its treasure room, with a dragon head at the bow and shulkers guarding the loot. The ship is the only survival source of elytra, since they cannot be crafted.

Look after your elytra#

• Elytra go in the chest armor slot and cannot be combined with a chestplate. Press jump while airborne to glide.
• In Java they have 432 durability (433 in Bedrock) and lose 1 per second of gliding.
• Phantom membranes repair them on an anvil, each restoring 25%.
• Firework rockets boost your flight and do not use durability.

For more detail on each structure, mob and item, the Minecraft Wiki page on elytra links through to all the others.

For server owners: give new players a fresh End#

On a long-running SMP, the first players loot the End ships and the outer islands go quiet. Resetting the End (and the Nether if you like) gives newcomers new islands, cities and ships. Always take a backup first, as our guide to Minecraft server backups explains.

One option is zResetMap, made by our team: it schedules resets of the Nether, End or custom worlds with a fresh seed each time, keeps your spawn build intact, and warns and teleports players before a reset. Its listing says Minecraft 1.21 and Paper or Spigot, with no WorldEdit needed.

Made by our team Plugins zResetMap | Scheduled World Resets Schedule Nether, End, or custom world resets. Fresh seed each time, spawn build stays intact. $12.59 View product

The other way is manual: stop the server, back up, delete the folder that holds the End dimension, and start again so a fresh End generates. Check your own server's world layout first, since folder names differ between versions and setups.

One more thing for the Nether: the allow-nether setting in server.properties was removed in Java 1.21.9 and replaced by the game rule allowEnteringNetherUsingPortals. If players cannot enter portals after an update, check that rule.