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End Cities are often considered the best dungeons in Minecraft due to the sheer quality of loot. These are the only structures where an abundance of diamonds and diamond gear can be found easily. Moreover, much of the gear found in these cities is typically enchanted with powerful effects.
The most important feature of an End City is, however, the Elytra. Not every city will have an Elytra, as only one with a ship floating by its side has one. Finding these cities in the vast and complex End islands is a complicated task; thankfully, you can learn how to quickly and efficiently find an End City here.
Updated July 16, 2023 by Jacqueline Zalace: The End in Minecraft can be quite a desolate place. We've updated this guide with even more information, so you can get in and out as quickly as possible. Additionally, we've adjusted the formatting a bit to help with readability.
Equip Feather Falling Boots And A Pumpkin Head
While it's perfectly plausible to enter the End with just iron armor, it's recommended to have at least a full set of diamond gear or Netherite gear. This is because Shulkers do a surprising amount of damage, especially when there are multiple of them firing at you.
Feather Falling IV on diamond boots is the ideal piece of gear to have before entering an End City since Shulkers will forcefully levitate you with their projectiles before dropping you from a height.
For Endermen, you can simply prepare a carved pumpkin head. The reduced vision can be really annoying to deal with, especially in a dark dimension like the End, but there are several mods that remove this effect.
Take Your Elytra & Rockets
For those who already have their first Elytra, it's a good idea to take it with you along with a bunch of rockets. Make sure your Elytra has the Mending enchantment on it, so you can repair it by killing a few Endermen here and there.
To craft fireworks rockets, you'll need paper and gunpowder. Fireworks come in three different strengths. For Elytra flight, it's best to always craft rockets with one paper and three pieces of gunpowder to get the longest flight duration.
While flying around in the end with an Elytra is easy, low-end PCs that struggle rendering or SMP servers with lag and multiple players online might result in player deaths, so be careful when using this method.
Prepare A Lot Of Blocks
Assuming you haven't found an Elytra yet, the best way to travel in the End is to bridge across its multiple islands. Sometimes these gaps between floating landmasses can be well over 64 blocks, so the more you can fit stacks upon stacks of blocks in your inventory, the better.
Need even more blocks? Try bringing along an Ender Chest that has extra stacks for you to use. Don't forget to take a Silk Touch pickaxe with you as well so you can safely break the Ender chest while on the go.
A great idea is to grab a cheap block in its regular form, such as cobblestone, and once in the End, use a crafting table to turn it into slabs. Slabs allow you to place half of a regular block and actually save up on inventory space when you craft them on the spot.
Other cheap blocks include any type of block that you most likely won't need in the future, such as netherrack, which is easy and quick to mine and doesn't really serve an important purpose. Dirt, diorite, granite, and andesite are also great if you happen to be low on cobblestone.
Brew Potions Of Swiftness And Slow Falling
The End is an extremely boring and tedious dimension to traverse, given how little there is to see and experience. Most of the time you'll be walking very long distances and possibly spending hours of real-world time looking for an End City, especially if you get particularly unlucky. In this case, anything that speeds the process is worth trying.
Potions of Swiftness are a very valid strategy for the End, especially when walking across large island masses. They're also extremely cheap to brew. You only need some sugar from sugar cane and redstone to extend the duration of the potion. Pack a few of these with you, and you won't have to waste your hunger on running either.
You'll also need Potions of Slow Falling if you don't have good diamond boots with Feather Falling IV. This will help when fighting off Shulkers that levitate you. After brewing an awkward potion with Nether Wart, add in a Phantom Membrane. You can extend the duration with redstone.
Use Ender Pearls
Another way to save time and significantly speed up the process is to use Ender pearls to move around. They can be particularly useful when closing distances on large islands where the land is relatively solid, but traveling across it might take a long time. They're also absolutely fantastic to jump across gaps to nearby islands if the distance isn't too long.
If you happen to miss the land you are aiming for with the Ender pearl, don't worry! Rather than teleporting you into the void, nothing will happen. Still, we recommend aiming carefully, so you don't waste these precious pearls.
Pick One Direction At A Time
When you initially spawn into the End islands area after taking the portal from the central dragon island, you'll want to first look around and pick a general direction. Press F3 to find north, south, east, and west, and mark your starting location. Beginning from your first spawn, you can try traveling in each direction for several thousands of blocks.
Even if you find yourself stuck at the edge of an island with a long distance to bridge, having the patience to bridge across is key. That effort could be rewarded by an End City hiding just across the gap. That's why it's important to commit to a general direction and not always just pick the easiest islands to travel to.
Prioritize Large Islands
The islands in the End all come in varying sizes and shapes. The type of island cities spawn on are typically quite large, and more specifically have the End midlands or End highlands biome name. You can check the biome by pressing F3 and walking around.
When trying to decide which island to go to next by building a bridge or throwing an Ender pearl, try to determine how large the island you want to go to is in size. The larger, the better.
Smaller or medium-sized islands are usually not worth the time to build a bridge to unless you want to use them as a way to find other, bigger islands.
Up Your Render Distance
Those with beefy PCs will benefit from a slight advantage. If your PC can handle it, try to up your render distance as much as possible. The maximum render distance in the Java version is currently 32 chunks, which is the "extreme" render distance option. This can have adverse effects on low-end computers, so use it with caution.
The extreme option allows you to see as far as 512 blocks, which is a massive help in the End where distances can be quite significant between islands. The "far" option, which is 16 chunks, gives you 256 blocks worth of visibility, which is still pretty decent.
If your PC struggles with this, you can do this momentarily while scouting for faraway islands, and then turn it off once you're determined which direction you'd like to go.
Remove All Of Your Items
So, you finished exploring the End, now what? If you managed to find an End City, you probably also found an Ender Chest. Rather than mining the chest up (with a Silk Touch pickaxe, of course), there is a simpler way to leave.
Put all of your belongings into this chest, and then jump into the void! None of your items will be lost, as they are in the chest, which connects to every other Ender Chest in the world. Once you respawn in the Overworld, you can grab all your items from an Ender Chest.
Go Into Creative Mode
If your goal is to find an End City fast and you know the seed of the world in question, you can simply create a new world, put yourself in Creative Mode and enter the End. You'll first need to use the command "/locate stronghold" and then teleport to the coordinates given to you.
Once you're in the End, you can ignore the Ender Dragon and just fly out of the central End island off into the distance. After about 1,000 blocks, you'll arrive at the End islands. When you find an End City, jot down the coordinates. You can find that location with those coordinates by loading up your survival world.
Use A Waypoint Mod
There's one really useful mod out there meant for exploration in particular. It's not just great for finding End Cities, but any type of structure in Minecraft. Xaero's Minimap allows you to have a constant minimap in the corner of your screen, which helps when exploring the End in particular.
Moreover, the mod lets you set up waypoints, which can make traveling and exploration in the End far more efficient. The map is so accurate it can even display mobs on the map, and there are multiple levels of zoom to choose from as well.
Use A Seed Finder
Lastly, you can use a seed finder to locate any End Cities that may be around you. To use Chunk Base, enter your seed, and will display pretty much anything on the map for you.
This site will display the coordinates of all End Cities, allowing you to head to the location on your own server. Additionally, if you head over to the biome map of the End, you can see the islands scattered like in the image above. This can be used to plan your route.