how to find end portal in stronghold

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How Stronghold Locations Are Generated

How To Find A Stronghold In Minecraft

How To Prepare For A Stronghold

The Mobs Inside A Stronghold

Loot Table For Stronghold Chests

The Stronghold Library

The End Portal Room

Throughout the years, Minecraft has continued to remain popular. Players have the opportunity to explore new and dangerous locations, or just build really cool houses. We are going to take a walk on the dangerous side in this guide, and look at strongholds.

Strongholds are underground structures filled with mobs and loot, and are the key to entering the End. A stronghold holds a room with an End portal that transports you to the End, where you can find the ender dragon, new mobs, and End Cities. First, let's take a look at stronghold locations and where to find one.

How Stronghold Locations Are Generated

Strongholds are spread across the world in rings. The center of each ring is located at X=0, Z=0. Basically, this means that there rings (or circles) that surround your spawn point.

In total, there are eight rings, with 128 strongholds spread across them. The number of strongholds in each ring varies.

This information isn't the most helpful when finding a stronghold but you can successfully find strongholds without calculating their position in the rings around you. Just know that you won't have to travel too far to find a stronghold.

How To Find A Stronghold In Minecraft

To find a stronghold, you will need an eye of ender. This is an object creating by combining ender pearls and blaze powder.

Ender pearls are dropped by endermen. You can find endermen in the following locations.

Overworld at night
Warped Forest biome (Nether)
Nether Wastes biome (Nether)
Soul Sand Valley biome (Nether)

Additionally, expert-level cleric villagers will have a chance to sell an ender pearl for five emeralds. Each eye of ender will only need one pearl but you will need quite a few of these eyes.

Blaze powder is a little more difficult to find. This material is crafted from blaze rods, which only drop from blazes. This mob spawns naturally and from spawners within nether fortresses.

You will probably encounter a few blazes pretty quickly, but they can annoying to fight because they fly and shoot fireballs. Make sure that you have enough fire protection when fighting a blaze. Try to fight them above a platform as well, so the blaze rods don't fall into the lava.

Once you have the eyes of ender, throw one into the sky. The eye will float towards the location of the nearest stronghold. Catch the eye when it drops and head in that direction. Periodically throw an eye to make sure that you are on the right track.

An eye of ender has a chance to break when thrown, so be sure to bring extras.

To activate an End portal in the stronghold, you will need up to 12 eyes of ender, this is because some will likely be in place already. Make sure that you have enough to find the stronghold and proceed through the portal. We will go over how to activate an End portal later.

When the eyes start aiming towards the ground, you are close. Eyes of ender will point downwards if you are above the stronghold. Next, just dig a path down. You may have to try a few different directions but eventually, you will drop into the stronghold.

How To Prepare For A Stronghold

Strongholds are dangerous, so it's important to prepare. If you proceed through the End portal, you will be in the End. The End is even more dangerous, and you will definitely want some of these items. Below, you can check out some important items to bring with you.

Full Diamond or Netherite Armor
Pickaxe
Food (golden apples, bread, meat)
A Bed
Bow and Arrows
Eyes of Ender
Torches
Water Bucket
Stack of Blocks

Armor, tools, and food are a necessity to every exploration. Consider enchanting all of your armor and tools as well. A bed will come in handy to set up a spawn point, especially if you plan to go to fight the ender dragon. If you die at any point, you will respawn at the bed. Try placing the bed above ground, in the area around the stronghold. You can even build a little shack to store some materials.

As for a water bucket and stack of blocks, these will help you fully explore the area. By using water, you can easily ascend and descend any steep walls. Blocks will help you cross any area, or block off a room that is full of mobs.

The Mobs Inside A Stronghold

Mobs will spawn throughout the stronghold. You will see the usual mobs; creepers, skeletons, and zombies. In addition to these mobs though, you will encounter silverfish.

Next to the End portal, you will see a silverfish spawner. These little bugs are quite annoying. Since silverfish are very small, it's easy to miss them. You can easily kill them, but make sure you aren't low on health. A silverfish can sneak up and kill you in just one attack if you don't have much HP left.

They also frequently 'infest' blocks, meaning they will spawn as you mine in the area.

Loot Table For Stronghold Chests

Throughout the stronghold, there will be chests available to loot. This loot can be found within altars, storerooms, and libraries. Let's take a look at loot for each location.

Altars	Apple Bread Iron Ingot Ender Pearl Redstone Dust Gold Ingot Iron Pickaxe Full Iron Armor Diamonds Enchanted Book Saddle Iron/Gold/Diamond Horse Armor Golden Apple
Storerooms	Apple Bread Coal Iron Ingot Redstone Dust Enchanted Book Iron Pickaxe
Libraries	Paper Book Enchanted Book Compass Empty Map

The loot found within a stronghold is pretty average. Most of this material can easily be found elsewhere. In addition to loot in chests, strongholds are also a great place to find a lot of books. Let's look at the library next.

The Stronghold Library

Each stronghold will have a library. This is a room packed with bookcases. A stronghold can spawn multiple libraries, and they can be one or two floors. This is a great place to find books.

A two-story library will have 233 bookcases. Breaking all of these bookcases will give you 699 books. That's an incredible amount, so you definitely want to take some books on the way out. Alternatively, you can remove intact bookshelves by using a silk touch tool.

The End Portal Room

Lastly, we have the End portal room. Each stronghold only has one End portal room. Upon entering, you will see the silverfish spawner in front of the End portal frames. There will be 12 frames, with anywhere from zero to 12 eyes of ender placed.

To activate the End portal, you will need to fill in each frame with an eye of ender. You may only need a few, but there is a chance that every frame is empty. This is why you should bring extra eyes of ender when you venture into a stronghold.

After all 12 frames are filled, a portal will open and you can jump through. Although there is lava underneath the frames, you will teleport before reaching it. Unlike a nether portal, the End portal will teleport you immediately.

That's all there is to a stronghold! Once you've visited your first stronghold, you should be able to confidently navigate others. Remember, there are 128 in total. After you go through the end portal, check out our guides on fighting the ender dragon and finding End Cities!

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