Minecraft: Here’s How Many End Portals Can Spawn

For some, the end goal in Minecraft is to reach the End and defeat the Ender dragon, and although it’s fairly easy to do so, finding the stronghold that’ll get you to the End portal might end up being a harder task than you originally planned. Your chances of finding a stronghold by sheer luck are slim, but it’s not impossible, so how many End portals can spawn in Minecraft?
Number of End portal blocks in Minecraft
One End portal frame consists of a total of 12 blocks, 3 for each side, and to activate them, you’ll also need upwards of 12 Eyes of Ender that you can get by combining ender pearls, usually acquirable via trading with piglins or killing Ender men and blaze powder that you can get by killing blazes in the Nether.
The number is not definitively set to 12 because you have a chance of stumbling upon an end portal frame with some of the eyes of the ender already in them. Each portal frame has a 10% chance to contain an eye of ender, and when you combine them all, there’s one in a trillion chance that you’ll stumble upon a fully set End portal in Minecraft.
But I initially wanted to say that if there’s a total of 128 strongholds in Minecraft and 128 End portals, there’s a total of 1536 End portal blocks in Minecraft. In Survival mode, these blocks are unbreakable and can’t be crafted either.
Number of strongholds in Minecraft
As I mentioned before, there’s an equal amount of strongholds and End portals in Minecraft, but what I want to discuss here are your chances to randomly stumble upon a stronghold in Minecraft by looking at where strongholds usually spawn and at what Y level they spawn in, is it random or predetermined?
How strongholds spawn in Minecraft
Strongholds in Minecraft generate rings, meaning that if you looked at a map of the world and circled out rings with specific distances measured, you could accurately say how many strongholds are in a given ring. The first ring contains your spawn point and has three strongholds within 1408 to 2688 blocks from the spawn point.
There’s a total of 8 rings, and the 7th contains most of the strongholds, 36 to be exact. Strongholds also prefer to generate underground but in biomes above sea level, which does not exclude the possibility of a stronghold generating below sea level either.
A comparison: Minecraft world VS strongholds
If you don’t know already, one Minecraft world spans 30 million blocks in each direction. This means that a Minecraft world is 60 million blocks long and wide. Suppose we took a guess and said that every stronghold in our supposed Minecraft world is a maximum of 112 wide and long. We have to calculate the surface area these strongholds take, so we multiply 112 by 112 and then multiply again by 128. This equals 1.605,632 blocks. We are comparing that to the surface area of one Minecraft world, which comes out to be 3.600,000,000,000,000 because we multiplied 60.000,000 by 60.000,000.
Then, we divide the surface area of the strongholds by the surface area of Minecraft worlds and then multiply by a hundred. The number we get tells us that all the strongholds in a Minecraft world take up 0.00000000446% of the world, which isn’t a lot, but the way a Minecraft world spawns makes it easier for you to find a stronghold.
Three strongholds generate near your spawn point 0,0, but getting to all the strongholds is likely an unachievable dream since you’d have to walk almost to the world border and back in each direction before you found all of them. It takes months for people to walk to the border with that simple goal in mind.
But, as we know, strongholds generate in rings until 128 is reached, so it would take much less time than originally estimated to find all the strongholds. Activating the portals in those strongholds is a different story, though. The first problem you might face is that some portal rooms are overwritten with ravines, mine shafts, dungeons, etc., making it impossible to activate a portal and forcing a player to find another stronghold. Another problem would be gathering eyes of ender and blaze rods.
Collecting eyes of ender
Although to the average Minecraft player, activating all 128 portals would pose a problem since the drop rate for blaze rods is 50% and the drop rate for ender pearls is also 50% chance, you could make use of an extensive array of farms that you can make to speed up the process of gathering enough materials.
Here’s an example of a blaze rod farm that you can copy if you think you’re up for the challenge of finding and activating all the portals in your Minecraft world.
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