If you have searched “minecraft build a portal” hoping for a simple crafting recipe, here is the twist: you cannot craft an End Portal at all. Unlike a Nether Portal, which you build yourself out of obsidian, the End Portal already exists somewhere in your world — buried inside a stronghold. Your job is to find it, then activate it with Eyes of Ender.
It sounds simple, but between locating a stronghold, surviving a Nether Fortress, and gearing up for the Ender Dragon on the other side, this is one of the most involved goals in the game. This guide walks through the whole process for Minecraft’s current 26.1 build, from crafting your first Eye of Ender to stepping through the portal itself.
Quick answer: To make an End Portal in Minecraft, craft Eyes of Ender by combining Blaze Powder (from Blaze Rods) with Ender Pearls. Throw the eyes in the Overworld to track down a stronghold, dig into its portal room, and place up to 12 Eyes of Ender into the empty End Portal Frame blocks to activate the portal.
What Is an End Portal in Minecraft?
An End Portal is the fixed, naturally generated structure that leads to the End dimension — home of the Ender Dragon. It’s a ring of 12 End Portal Frame blocks surrounding a 3×3 floor. Every stronghold generates with a portal room containing this ring, though the frames start out mostly empty. You fill the missing slots with Eyes of Ender to open the portal.
This is different from a Nether Portal, which players build entirely from scratch using obsidian and flint and steel. End Portal Frame blocks aren’t obtainable in Survival mode at all — you can’t mine, craft, or place them without cheats or Creative mode, which is exactly why the whole “build a portal” process is really a “find and activate” process instead.
What You’ll Need Before You Start
| Item | Quantity | Where to Get It |
|---|---|---|
| Ender Pearls | 12 minimum, 16–20 recommended | Kill Endermen, barter with Piglins, or trade with expert-level Cleric villagers |
| Blaze Powder | Same amount as your Ender Pearls | Crafted from Blaze Rods (1 rod = 2 powder) |
| Blaze Rods | 6–10 | Dropped by Blazes in a Nether Fortress |
| Diamond or Netherite gear | Full set, ideally enchanted | Mining, smithing, or trading |
| Bow and arrows | Several stacks | Crafting or looting |
| Building blocks, food, torches | Plenty | General survival prep |
Step 1: Farm Blaze Rods for Blaze Powder
Blaze Powder is the ingredient that turns an Ender Pearl into a usable Eye of Ender, and it only comes from Blaze Rods. You’ll need to build a Nether Portal, push into the Nether, and locate a Nether Fortress — the dark brick structure where Blazes spawn near a spawner in one of the towers.
Blazes are dangerous in groups: they fly, shoot fireballs, and hit hard in melee. Fighting from a doorway or using a shield to block fireballs makes the fight much safer. Each Blaze Rod crafts into 2 Blaze Powder, so 6–10 rods gives you a comfortable buffer above the 12 you’ll ultimately need.
Step 2: Collect Enough Ender Pearls
You have three realistic ways to stock up on Ender Pearls:
- Kill Endermen. They spawn at night in the Overworld and constantly in the End, and drop pearls when defeated. Attack their legs rather than looking at their face to avoid provoking them, or trap them in water, which they can’t stand in.
- Barter with Piglins. Wearing at least one piece of gold armor, throw gold ingots to nearby Piglins in the Nether. There’s roughly a 2–4% chance per ingot of receiving 2–4 Ender Pearls back — a slow but genuinely passive method you can run while you’re already farming Blaze Rods nearby.
- Trade with a Cleric villager. Once leveled up to Expert, Cleric villagers occasionally sell Ender Pearls for emeralds.
Aim for at least 16–20 pearls. You need a minimum of 12 to fully activate a portal, but eyes can break while you’re hunting for the stronghold, so extra padding saves you a return trip.
Step 3: Craft Your Eyes of Ender
With Blaze Powder and Ender Pearls in hand, combine them at a crafting table:
1 Ender Pearl + 1 Blaze Powder = 1 Eye of Ender
It’s a shapeless recipe, so the ingredients can sit in any two slots. Craft as many as your materials allow — again, 16–20 is a safer target than the bare minimum of 12.
Step 4: Throw Your Eyes of Ender to Find a Stronghold
This is the step that actually earns the “build a portal” search — it’s the hunt. Right-click (or press use) to throw an Eye of Ender. It flies roughly 12 blocks in the direction of the nearest stronghold, leaving a trail of purple particles, then either drops back to the ground for you to collect or shatters mid-air. Each throw has an 80% chance of surviving and a 20% chance of breaking, so don’t be surprised if you burn through a few extra eyes along the way.
Walk in the direction the eye pointed, then throw another one every 30–50 blocks or whenever you lose the trail. Once an eye starts flying straight down or hovering in place instead of forward, you’re standing directly above (or very near) the stronghold — time to start digging.
If you’re playing in a world with cheats enabled, you can skip the guesswork entirely with /locate structure minecraft:stronghold, which prints the nearest stronghold’s coordinates directly. This is handy for testing builds or if you just want to skip straight to the portal room.
Step 5: Dig In and Find the Portal Room
Strongholds are maze-like: winding corridors, libraries, empty storage rooms, and the occasional silverfish nest hidden in a block that looks identical to its neighbors. Mine straight down carefully from where the eye stopped moving — keep a water bucket handy in case you break into open air, and bring a stack of blocks to bridge or backfill as needed.
The portal room is usually recognizable by its large staircase and the eerie stillness around the frame ring. Once you’re inside, you’ve found the actual End Portal.
Step 6: Place the Eyes of Ender and Activate the Portal
Inside the portal room, look for the ring of 12 End Portal Frame blocks around a sunken 3×3 floor. Some frames may already contain an eye — each one has a 10% chance of spawning pre-filled, so you occasionally get lucky and need fewer than 12.
Right-click each empty frame with an Eye of Ender to lock it in place. Once every frame in the ring holds an eye, the 3×3 floor fills with the swirling black-and-purple End Portal texture, and it’s ready to use. One important note: eyes can’t be removed once placed, so don’t slot any in until you’re actually ready to commit.
Step 7: Gear Up Before You Jump In
The Ender Dragon fight waits on the other side, so don’t step through half-prepared. A solid checklist looks like this:
- Full enchanted armor (Protection is the priority)
- A strong weapon and a bow with a good arrow supply
- A stack or two of blocks for bridging up to the dragon
- Food, and ideally a few potions (Healing, Strength, or Slow Falling)
- Extra Ender Pearls for repositioning during the fight
If your gear has taken a beating on the way here, an anvil lets you repair it or combine enchantments before the fight instead of gambling on a fresh enchanting table roll — our guide on how to make an anvil in Minecraft covers the full recipe if you haven’t built one yet. It’s also worth setting up a small trading post beforehand: a leveled-up librarian can sell enchanted books like Mending or Protection IV, and our walkthrough on building your own Minecraft village explains how to get a trading hall running from scratch.
Building an End Portal in Creative Mode or With Commands
If you just want an End Portal for a build, a showcase, or a custom map rather than a Survival playthrough, you can place one manually — but only in Creative mode or with cheats, since End Portal Frame blocks aren’t craftable.
- Open your creative inventory (or run
/give @p end_portal_frame) and collect 12 End Portal Frame blocks. - Stand in the center of where you want the portal and place the frames in a ring around yourself, rotating between each placement so the arrow/eye socket on every block faces inward toward the center.
- Use an Eye of Ender on each frame (or place them directly in Creative) until all 12 are filled.
A lot of builders like to dress up a display portal rather than leave it sitting bare. Colored concrete holds up well around a portal frame since it doesn’t fade or need light like wool, and our guide to making concrete in Minecraft covers every color and both editions. If you’d rather build this somewhere other than your main world, our list of the best Minecraft creative servers is a good place to find a dedicated space to work in with others.
Tips to Find a Stronghold Faster
- Triangulate instead of guessing. Throw an eye, note the direction, walk perpendicular to it for a few hundred blocks, then throw another. Where the two lines cross is roughly where the stronghold sits — far more reliable than following a single straight line the whole way.
- Start from a favorable seed. Some worlds generate a stronghold a short walk from spawn, cutting the entire search down to minutes. Our roundup of the best Minecraft 26.1 seeds includes several of exactly that type if you’d rather skip the hunt.
- Don’t throw eyes too often. Every throw risks a 20% break chance, so only throw when you’ve genuinely lost the direction rather than every few steps.
What Happens After You Step Through
You’ll land on a small obsidian platform in the End, facing a barren island with the Ender Dragon circling overhead and a ring of obsidian towers, each topped with a healing End Crystal. Destroy the crystals first — the dragon can heal off them mid-fight — then focus damage on the dragon itself with your bow and melee weapon until it’s defeated.
Beating the dragon spawns an exit portal and a dragon egg on the main island, and stepping into the exit portal takes you back to the Overworld with the credits and a portal that stays open for repeat trips to the End afterward, including access to the outer islands via End Gateways for elytra and shulker shells.
If the vanilla fight starts to feel too short after a few runs, several community mods add new phases, remixed attacks, or entirely new encounters to face once the standard dragon goes down — our breakdown of the best dragon mods for Minecraft is a good starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Eyes of Ender do I actually need? Up to 12, but often fewer, since each frame block has a 10% independent chance of already containing an eye when the stronghold generates. Craft 16–20 to cover both the activation and the roughly 20% chance an eye shatters each time you throw it while searching.
Can I make an End Portal without finding a stronghold? Not in Survival mode — End Portal Frame blocks can’t be mined, crafted, or obtained through normal gameplay. In Creative mode or with cheats enabled, you can place your own ring of frames anywhere and activate it the same way.
Do Eyes of Ender always lead to a stronghold? Yes, as long as one exists within range of your world. Java Edition generates 128 strongholds per world, while Bedrock Edition generates them as needed around the player. In both cases, an eye will always point toward the nearest one it can detect.
What’s the fastest way to stock up on Ender Pearls? Piglin bartering while you’re already in the Nether farming Blaze Rods is the most passive option, but killing Endermen at night in the Overworld is usually faster if you’re geared up for melee combat.
Do mods change how strongholds or End Portals generate? Some do. Mods that add new structures can occasionally alter or overlap with vanilla stronghold generation, so it’s worth checking compatibility notes before installing them on a world you’re planning to speedrun — our list of Minecraft mods that add new structures flags which ones touch world generation directly.
Finding and activating an End Portal is less about building anything yourself and more about following the trail Mojang already laid out in your world — throw the eyes, dig where they point, and fill the ring. Once that portal lights up, the Ender Dragon fight is the only thing standing between you and one of Minecraft’s biggest milestones.
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