End Cities and Elytra: The Complete Route

Getting to the End

The End is reached through the portal in a stronghold, which the stronghold guide covers: find the nearest first-ring stronghold on the map, travel through the Nether, fill the twelve frames with Eyes of Ender. You arrive on the central island with the Ender dragon circling ten obsidian pillars topped with End crystals. Destroy the crystals, some caged in iron bars, fight the dragon when it perches on the exit portal, and the exit portal activates.

Killing the dragon also creates an End gateway: a small bedrock frame with a purple beam, placed on a circle 96 blocks from the centre of the island. Each dragon kill adds another, up to twenty around the circle. The gateway is the door to the outer islands, where everything in the rest of this guide lives.

Where End cities generate

End cities generate only on the outer islands, more than about 1,000 blocks from the centre, on the high, flat parts of large islands called End highlands. Java places one attempt per 20×20-chunk region with an 11-chunk separation, keeps it where the terrain is high enough, and so cities appear every few hundred blocks across the big islands and never over the void between them.

On our test seeds the nearest city from the centre is 1,104 blocks out on seed 123456789 at 688, -864, with 42 cities within 3,000 blocks; 1,352 blocks on seed 0 at -1216, -592, with 24 within 3,000; and 1,377 blocks on the text seed chunkscout at 1376, 48. The End city finder matched the official Java server on every city tested; roughly half of the cities it lists have a ship.

Bedrock's End is shaped differently, and in testing none of the Java-rule positions existed there, so the finder is marked Java only and shows nothing for Bedrock. Coordinates that lead to void help nobody.

Gateway or bridge

There are two ways across the thousand-block gap. Throw an Ender pearl into the gateway beam, or walk into it in a narrow space, and you are teleported to a matching return gateway on the outer islands, roughly in the direction of the gateway you used. The End gateway finder shows where those return gateways are; on seed 123456789 the nearest sits at -377, -1022, which puts you a few hundred blocks from the city at 32, -1168.

Or bridge. A thousand blocks of cobblestone over the void is tedious but exact: you arrive where you aimed, which matters if the nearest city is in a direction no gateway serves yet. Each dragon kill opens one more gateway position on the 96-block circle, chosen in a fixed order, so players who respawn the dragon a few times get gateways in more directions.

Inside a city: shulkers, loot and the ship

An End city is a tower of purpur and End stone brick rooms connected by stairs and bridges, lit by End rods, with banners and chests. Shulkers cling to walls and floors; their bullets levitate you, which over the void is the real danger. Shulker shells craft shulker boxes, the portable chests that make the trip worth it on their own.

• City chests hold diamonds, iron and gold ingots, enchanted diamond gear, beetroot seeds, saddles and horse armour, with the enchantments among the best in the game.
• The ship, when there is one, floats beside the city at the end of a short bridge. Its treasure room holds two chests with the same loot pool, a brewing stand with potions, a dragon head on the bow and, in an item frame, the elytra.
• Chorus plants grow on the islands; chorus fruit teleports you a short distance and cooked chorus fruit makes purpur.

Fight shulkers from below their line of fire, with blocks ready to wall off a corridor, and carry slow falling potions: a water bucket does nothing against a fall into the void, so blocks and potions are your safety net. Levitation runs out; make sure you are over solid ground when it does.

End Cities, Shulkers, and Elytra! l The Ultimate End Guide 1.21 Minecraft Survival Bedrock & Java12 min

Flying home

Elytra glide; firework rockets push. With a stack of rockets you can cover the thousand blocks back to the centre in a minute, which turns the outer islands from a one-off trip into a place you come back to: every further city on the finder is a few rockets away, and each ship adds another elytra for a friend.

Any gateway on the outer islands returns you to the central island, and the exit portal there takes you home to the Overworld. Mark the cities you have looted on the map with the Completed checkbox, and the ones with ships you found with a marker; the finder keeps both per seed.

Planning several cities

The Nearest list from any point works in the End too. Set the origin to the return gateway you landed at and the finder lists cities by distance from there, and three or four cities chain into one flight. Shulker shells come at about two per shulker on average, so a dozen boxes means visiting several cities; the list is how you plan that without wandering.

If your seed's nearest cities are all over 1,500 blocks out, consider respawning the dragon once with four End crystals to open a second gateway in a better direction, or simply bridge: with the exact coordinates, the bridge is the slow but certain option.