How To Respawn The Ender Dragon: Our Guide

The Ender Dragon is the ultimate fight in Minecraft. While other bosses, such as the Wither or the Warden, provide their own challenges, nothing compares to the Ender Dragon.

Upon defeating the Ender Dragon, taking in its massive experience reward, and watching the credits, you’re placed back in the Overworld. But what if you want to fight it again? You’ll have to respawn it.

Fortunately, this guide covers everything you need to know about how to respawn the Ender Dragon.

Table of Contents

What Is The Ender Dragon?

The Ender Dragon is Minecraft’s first endgame boss. It’s arguably the game’s most famous boss to this day, and taking it down requires a lot of preparation and teamwork.

The Ender Dragon is massive, and flies around attacking you and your friends with its dragon's breath.

Finding the Ender Dragon requires you and your friends to discover a Stronghold. Within the Stronghold, you must then activate an End Portal using hard-to-find materials from around the Overworld and the Nether.

Even with a Bow, this boss is no easy feat.

Once inside, you’ll have to fend off the Ender Dragon and its many abilities, such as its dragon’s breath or its charge.

Not only this, but you must break the many End Crystals (or Ender Crystals) littered around the arena to prevent it from healing. Each End Crystal you destroy prevents it from healing a little more.

While you don’t need to destroy every End Crystal to defeat the Ender Dragon, doing so will save you a ton of time.

Defeating the Ender Dragon will drop tons of experience points.

Once defeated, the Ender Dragon will drop thousands of experience points. The game’s end credits will play from there, and you’ll be put back in the Overworld.

Now that the fight is complete, you can choose to respawn the Ender Dragon and try again — albeit for fewer experience points. You do get an achievement for doing so, though!

How To Respawn The Ender Dragon

There is only one way to respawn the Ender Dragon in survival mode.

After defeating the beast, you’ll notice that an Ender Dragon egg appears on the exit portal. This is what you’ll use to respawn the Ender Dragon.

Make sure to leave the egg be and enter the portal to head back to the Overworld.

A dragon egg appears on the exit portal.

Now, you need to craft four End Crystals. To craft the End Crystals, you need a few materials.

How To Craft End Crystals

The three materials you need to craft End Crystals are glass blocks, an Eye of Ender, and a Ghast Tear.

An End Crystal in all of its glory. A key requirement to respawn the Ender Dragon.

Glass blocks

Glass blocks are the most straightforward material to acquire, so we’ll cover those first.

To acquire glass, you use a shovel to dig up sand and burn it in a furnace. It’s really that easy! For the End Crystal recipe, you need seven blocks (or 28 in this case, since we need four End Crystals.)

Eye of Ender

An Eye of Ender is a little more challenging to craft or find.

You may have already utilized these multi-functional items to find a Stronghold before fighting the Ender Dragon; let’s cover them here in case you didn’t.

You can craft an Eye of Ender with an Ender Pearl and Blaze Powder. To acquire the Ender Pearls, you must defeat an Enderman or find them in chests.

The Enderman typically drops Ender Pearls.

To get Blaze Powder, you must defeat a Blaze in the Nether to acquire a Blaze Rod, then break the rod down into Blaze Powder via a Crafting Table. Each Blaze Rod breaks into two Blaze Powder.

The Blaze is a tough enemy, but its Blaze Rod drops are quite valuable.

You’ll need four Eyes of Ender to craft four End Crystals, so make sure to gather four Ender Pearls and two Blaze Rods.

You can use an Eye of Ender to find Strongholds.

Ghast Tears

Finally, you must defeat Ghasts in the Nether, which occasionally drop Ghast Tears. These flying beasts can be a bit of a pain to grind, so we recommend bringing a bow with the Infinity enchantment for unlimited arrows.

The Ghast is loud and proud. Bring a bow for this beast.

A Ghast typically drops one Ghast Tear at a time, so make sure to grab four of them.

Now that you’ve acquired the materials, it’s time to craft four End Crystals.

End Crystal Recipe

With your finished materials in hand, approach a crafting table and place them in the following order:

An Eye of Ender in the middle square.
A Ghast Tear in the bottom middle square.
Seven glass blocks in the surrounding squares.

The violet End Crystal icon is quite stunning.

Do this four times, and you’ll have four End Crystals.

Now it’s time to re-enter the End.

The End Portal is nothing short of intimidating.

Place End Crystals on the Exit Portal

Use the Stronghold you previously found to fight the Ender Dragon and get ready to summon it once again.

Find the exit portal within the End, and surround it with four End Crystals — one on each side.

Four Ender Crystals will respawn the Ender Dragon.

If done correctly, the Exit Portal structure will summon the End Crystals from the first Ender Dragon fight before spawning the dragon.

The End Crystals starting the resummoning process.

From now on, you can fight the Ender Dragon once again. Just know that you won’t get nearly as many experience points this time.

The Ender Crystals you place will respawn the other Ender Crystals around the arena.

Using this method, you can respawn the Ender Dragon as many times as you’d like, as a new dragon egg will appear each time you defeat the Ender Dragon.

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