What an eye of ender is
The eye of ender is the item that gets you to the End. It does two jobs: thrown in the Overworld, it flies toward the nearest stronghold and shows you which way to go, and placed into an End portal frame, it fills one of the twelve slots that activate the portal. There is no other way to find a stronghold without commands, and no other way to light the portal at all.
You craft it from an ender pearl and blaze powder, which means you need to have visited the Nether and killed blazes before the item is even available. That gating is deliberate. The eye is the checkpoint between the Nether and the End, and most of the effort in reaching the ender dragon is really just gathering enough eyes.
Eyes of ender stack to 64, have no durability, and are also the odd ingredient in the ender chest recipe. This article covers the recipe, exactly how a thrown eye behaves, how to turn a few throws into a stronghold location, and how many eyes you should carry before you set out.
How to craft an eye of ender
The recipe is shapeless: one ender pearl plus one blaze powder anywhere in the crafting grid gives you one eye of ender. It works in a 2×2 inventory grid, so you don’t need a crafting table.
Both ingredients come from hostile mobs. Ender pearls drop from endermen, which spawn in every Overworld biome at night and in large numbers in warped forests in the Nether. Each enderman drops zero or one pearl, and the Looting enchantment raises the ceiling. If you’d rather not fight them, cleric villagers sell ender pearls for emeralds once they reach expert level, and piglins sometimes hand them over in bartering when you give them gold ingots.
Blaze powder comes from blaze rods. One rod in the crafting grid gives two powder, and rods only drop from blazes, which only spawn in a nether fortress. Blazes drop zero to one rod each, again improved by Looting. So the shopping list for twelve eyes is twelve pearls and six rods, and in practice you want more than that.
Since each pearl makes exactly one eye, ender pearls are almost always the bottleneck. Blazes come from a spawner and are farmable; endermen you have to go and find.
Throwing an eye of ender
Hold the eye and use it (right-click on Java, the use button on Bedrock) while standing in the Overworld. The eye leaves your hand, rises a few blocks into the air, and drifts horizontally in the direction of the nearest stronghold, leaving a trail of purple particles. It floats for a few seconds and then does one of two things.
- Most of the time it drops back to the ground as an item, and you walk over and pick it back up.
- About one throw in five, it shatters with a puff of particles and is gone for good.
The shatter chance is 20 percent per throw, so the average eye survives four throws. Budget for losses. If you throw a dozen times on the way to a stronghold, expect to lose two or three eyes doing it.
The eye also carries vertical information. While the stronghold is far away, the eye rises and travels forward at roughly the same height. Once you are standing more or less on top of the stronghold, the thrown eye stops travelling sideways and heads downward into the ground. That is your signal to stop walking and start digging.
One detail that trips people up: the eye points at the stronghold’s starting staircase, the spiral stairwell where the structure begins, not at the portal room. Strongholds are large and the portal room can be a long walk through the corridors from where you land. When you dig down and hit stone brick, you’re in the right place, but you still have some exploring to do.
Eyes only work this way in the Overworld, because strongholds only generate there. Don’t waste one testing in the Nether.
Finding a stronghold with triangulation
A single throw tells you a direction. Walking in that direction and throwing again every few hundred blocks will eventually get you there, and that is what most players do. It works, but it burns eyes and time on a long trip. Triangulation gets you the actual coordinates from two throws.
Set up the first line
Throw an eye and stand still. On Java, open the debug screen with F3, look directly along the eye’s flight path, and write down your X and Z coordinates and the “Facing” angle. On Bedrock, turn on the “Show Coordinates” world option and line yourself up by eye; there is no facing readout, so use a landmark in the distance instead.
What you’ve recorded is a line through the world. The stronghold is somewhere on that line.
Get a second line
Now move sideways, at roughly a right angle to the first line, for at least 200 blocks. Moving further apart makes the answer more accurate, so 300 to 500 is better. Throw again and record a second position and direction.
The stronghold’s starting staircase is where the two lines cross. You can work it out with a bit of trigonometry, or just draw both lines on a piece of paper or a map and eyeball the intersection. Either way, head to that point and throw one more eye to confirm before you dig.
A cheaper version
If you don’t want to do any math, walk along the first line and watch for the direction of the throws to swing. When you overshoot, the next eye flies back the way you came. The stronghold is between your last two throw points, and one more throw from the middle will drop straight down.
Where strongholds actually are
Strongholds generate in rings around the world origin. The first ring holds three strongholds, each between roughly 1,300 and 2,800 blocks from 0,0. If you spawn near the center of the map, the walk is long no matter which direction the eye picks. A boat along a river or a horse cuts the trip down a lot, and a Nether route cuts it by a factor of eight.
The /locate structure stronghold command gives the coordinates directly if cheats are on and you don’t care about doing it the intended way. Read more about the structure itself in the stronghold guide.
Filling the End portal frame
The End portal sits in a small room in the stronghold with a silverfish spawner in front of it and a pool of lava underneath. The portal itself is a ring of twelve End portal frame blocks around a 3×3 hole. Some of those frames already have an eye in them when the world generates: each frame has an independent 10 percent chance to spawn filled, so you’ll usually find one or two done and occasionally none.
To fill an empty frame, hold an eye of ender and use it on the frame block. The eye snaps into place. Repeat for every empty frame. When the twelfth eye goes in, the portal activates on its own, the hole fills with the starfield portal surface, and the room plays a low activation sound.
A few things to know before you start placing:
- Once an eye is in a frame, you cannot get it back. Frames can’t be broken in survival, and there’s no way to pull an eye out.
- The frames must all face inward toward the center. Naturally generated portals always do, so you only need to think about this if you’ve built one in creative mode with
/setblock. - Deal with the silverfish spawner first. Break it with a pickaxe or cover it with torches so you aren’t fighting silverfish while you work over lava.
- The lava under the portal is real lava. Placing blocks over it before you start costs nothing and saves the occasional death.
Jump into the activated portal and you arrive on the obsidian platform in the End, with the ender dragon already circling overhead. There’s no going back through the portal you came in by; the return trip is through the exit portal that appears when the dragon dies. On Java, entering the End also grants the “The End?” advancement, and simply walking into the stronghold gives “Eye Spy”.
Eye of ender in the ender chest recipe
The other use for the eye is the ender chest. Surround one eye of ender with eight obsidian in a crafting table: obsidian in every slot except the center, eye in the middle. The result is a chest whose 27 slots are shared between every ender chest you ever open, in any dimension, and are private to you.
One eye per chest is cheap, so it’s worth crafting a few and leaving them at bases, at the stronghold, and in the End. Mining an ender chest without Silk Touch drops eight obsidian and no eye, so use a Silk Touch pickaxe if you want the chest itself back.
How many eyes of ender to bring
The absolute minimum is twelve, minus whatever the portal happens to have pre-filled, plus enough to throw on the way. Since you can’t know how many frames are already filled until you get there, plan for all twelve.
A sensible number is somewhere between 16 and 20. That gives you twelve for the frames plus four to eight throws with the shatter losses built in. If you’re going to walk 2,000 blocks and throw every 300, that’s seven throws and roughly one or two shattered eyes, which fits inside the margin. If you’re doing proper triangulation you’ll throw three or four times and can get away with 14 or 15.
Carrying more is never wasted. Extra eyes become ender chests, and you won’t want to make a second Nether trip because you were one pearl short in a stronghold.
A practical order of operations that avoids backtracking:
- Build a blaze farm or at least clear a fortress spawner and collect ten or more rods.
- Hunt endermen at night in a flat biome like a desert or plains, or a warped forest in the Nether, until you have about 20 pearls.
- Craft all the eyes at once and pack food, blocks, a pickaxe with a spare, a bed, and a water bucket for the lava room.
- Throw, triangulate, dig, fill, jump.
Tips and common mistakes
Don’t throw eyes while standing in a cave or under a roof. The eye rises before it moves, and if it hits a ceiling it can bounce or drop in an unhelpful spot. Throw from the surface in open air.
Don’t throw from inside a boat or while sprinting, because you’ll lose track of the landing spot. Stand still, watch where it comes down, and pick it up before doing anything else.
If an eye goes almost straight up and comes straight back down, the stronghold is under you. Players sometimes read this as the eye being broken and keep walking. It isn’t; start digging, and go carefully, because the stronghold’s rooms are open air and you can fall a long way.
The eye points to the stronghold’s start, not the portal room. If you dig down, land in a corridor, and see no portal, that is normal. Explore with torches, and remember stronghold libraries are worth looting for enchanted books on the way.
Take a few blocks of cobblestone into the portal room and block off the silverfish spawner before placing eyes. A stray silverfish knocking you into the lava with eleven eyes placed is a bad afternoon.
Java vs Bedrock differences
The eye itself works the same on both editions: same recipe, same flight toward the nearest stronghold, same 20 percent shatter chance, same twelve-frame portal, same ender chest recipe. The differences are around it.
On Java, the F3 debug screen gives you an exact facing angle and coordinates, which makes triangulation precise. Bedrock has no debug screen, only the optional coordinate display, so lining up on landmarks is the best you can do.
Bedrock strongholds can also generate directly beneath villages, so on that edition an eye that leads you to a village may well be pointing at a stronghold under it. Java strongholds don’t have that link to villages.
Java awards the “Eye Spy” and “The End?” advancements; Bedrock has an equivalent achievement for entering the End but not for the stronghold.
Frequently asked questions
How do you make an eye of ender?
Combine one ender pearl and one blaze powder in any crafting grid. The recipe is shapeless and gives one eye. Blaze powder comes from putting a blaze rod in the grid, which yields two powder per rod.
Why did my eye of ender break?
Every thrown eye has a 20 percent chance to shatter instead of dropping. Nothing you did caused it, and there’s no way to prevent it. Carry extras.
How many eyes of ender do you need for the End portal?
The portal has twelve frames. Each one has a 10 percent chance of generating with an eye already inside, so you’ll usually need ten to twelve. Plan on twelve, since you won’t know until you get there, and add a handful for throwing.
Can you get an eye of ender back out of a portal frame?
No. Once placed, the eye is permanent. The frame can’t be broken in survival mode and there’s no interaction that removes the eye.
Why does the eye of ender go straight down?
Because you’re above the stronghold. When the eye stops moving sideways and drops into the ground, dig down where it landed. You’ll hit stone brick within a few dozen blocks in most cases.
Does the eye of ender point to the portal room?
No, it points to the stronghold’s starting staircase. The portal room can be a fair distance from there through the corridors. Once you’re inside, explore until you find it.
Can you throw an eye of ender in the Nether?
Strongholds don’t generate in the Nether or the End, so an eye thrown there won’t find one. Save your eyes for the Overworld.
The eye is the whole quest
Everything about getting to the End funnels through this one item. If you organize the Nether trip around collecting enough rods, and spend one night of enderman hunting with Looting on your sword, you’ll walk into the stronghold with more eyes than you need and never have to come back for one. Twenty eyes in the hotbar and a Silk Touch pickaxe for the ender chests afterward is the setup that makes the dragon fight the only hard part.
