How to Beat Minecraft: Survival Steps to the Ender Dragon

To beat Minecraft you kill the Ender Dragon, and getting there is a chain of six goals: survive the first night, get iron, get diamonds and an enchanting setup, go to the Nether for blaze rods, find the stronghold with eyes of ender, then fight the dragon in the End. Everything below follows that order and tells you what you actually need at each stage, so you don’t spend three days mining for things the fight doesn’t require.

1. The first day

Punch a tree, make planks, a crafting table and a wooden pickaxe, then go straight to stone and make stone tools. Before sunset you want three things: a shelter (digging into a hill counts), some food, and ideally a bed. Three wool from sheep gets you a bed, and sleeping skips the night and sets your spawn point. That alone prevents most early deaths.

If you can’t find sheep, just stay in your hole and mine downward until morning. Coal is common in exposed stone, and torches will stop mobs spawning inside your shelter.

2. Iron and a safe base

Iron changes the game. With it you get a shield, armor, better tools and a bucket. Look in cave walls and mountainsides, or read how to find iron for the best Y levels. Your shopping list:

• an iron pickaxe (needed for diamonds, gold and redstone)
• a shield (it blocks skeleton arrows and creeper blasts from the front)
• a full set of iron armor, 24 ingots
• a water bucket, which puts out fire, breaks falls and turns lava into obsidian

Set up a few basics at home: a furnace, chests, and a small wheat or carrot farm. Bread and baked potatoes are enough to carry you to the end of the game.

3. Diamonds and enchanting

You don’t strictly need diamonds to beat the dragon, but you need them for an enchanting table, and enchantments make the fight much easier. Mine around Y -59 with your iron pickaxe; how to find diamonds has the full method. Five diamonds gets you a pickaxe and an enchanting table (which also needs obsidian and a book). Put the rest into a sword and armor if you have enough.

Surround the table with bookshelves to get level 30 enchantments. The ones that matter for the end game are Protection on armor, Power on a bow, Sharpness on a sword and Feather Falling on boots.

4. The Nether

Build a Nether portal from at least 10 obsidian. You can make obsidian without diamonds by pouring water on lava source blocks, but you need a diamond pickaxe to mine it.

You’re going to the Nether for one thing: blaze rods. They come only from blazes, which spawn in Nether fortresses. Bring:

• gold boots or any gold armor piece, so piglins don’t attack you
• a bow, because blazes shoot fireballs from range
• a stack of cobblestone to block fireballs and build bridges
• food, plus a fire resistance potion if you have one

Kill blazes until you have at least 7 rods. One rod makes 2 blaze powder, and each eye of ender needs 1 powder, so 6 rods covers 12 eyes and the seventh goes into a brewing stand. If you’re comfortable with redstone, a blaze farm on the fortress spawner gives you more than you’ll ever need.

5. Ender pearls and the stronghold

Each eye of ender is 1 ender pearl plus 1 blaze powder. Pearls drop from endermen in the Overworld at night, and they’re much more common in warped forests in the Nether. Piglins also barter pearls for gold ingots, and cleric villagers sell them.

When you have around 15 eyes, throw one into the air and walk in the direction it flies. Repeat until the eye drops into the ground instead of flying off. Dig down there and you’ll find a stronghold. Finding a stronghold covers triangulation and the portal room in detail. Fill the empty frames with eyes and the portal lights.

6. Before you jump in

The End is a one-way trip until the dragon dies (or you die). Check this list first:

• armor, ideally enchanted with Protection
• a bow with 2 or more stacks of arrows, or a Power bow with Infinity
• a sword
• 2 stacks of blocks for pillaring and bridging
• food for the whole fight
• a water bucket
• a carved pumpkin to wear if you want endermen to ignore you looking at them

Set your spawn with a bed near the stronghold portal first. If you die in the End, you’ll want to respawn close to the portal, not on the other side of the world.

7. The dragon fight

The Ender Dragon has 200 health and heals from the end crystals on top of the obsidian pillars. Destroy the crystals first. Shoot them with arrows; the ones inside iron cages need you to pillar up and break the cage, or hit them from close range. Stay out of the blast when one explodes.

Once the crystals are gone, chip at the dragon with arrows while it flies, and hit it with your sword when it perches on the portal in the center. Don’t stand in its purple breath, and don’t look directly at endermen. When it dies, it drops a lot of experience, and a portal back home opens in the center.

Jump in, read the poem, and that’s the game beaten.

What to do afterward

Plenty of players think the game really starts here. Throw an ender pearl into the small gateway portal that appears at the edge of the island to reach the outer End, where end cities hold elytra and shulker boxes. After that comes the Wither, beacons and big farms. If you want to get faster at all of the above for next time, how to get good at Minecraft is about the skills rather than the route, and the survival tips page collects the habits that keep you alive along the way.