Minecraft Walkthrough 2026: From spawn to Ender Dragon, complete guide

Even though many people already own Minecraft, 2026 will still bring new and returning players ready to take on the adventure. Minecraft is a sandbox game with endless possibilities, but there’s still a clear early-game path you can follow. Your end goal is to defeat the Ender Dragon! Whether you’re a new player or a seasoned veteran, we’ve summed up all the key steps to overcome this challenge and reach Minecraft’s true ending. There are still plenty of long-time players who have never beaten the dragon. Throughout this walkthrough, we’ll also link to additional posts with more in-depth tips.

Minecraft Overworld: First steps for beginners

1. First tools and shelter in Minecraft

As soon as you spawn in your world, take care of your tools. Look for trees and start punching logs. Use them to craft wood and sticks, then make your first wooden tools. The green recipe book in your inventory shows you all crafting recipes. Build a Crafting Table and a Furnace early. Find a shelter for the upcoming night. Either dig into a hillside or build a small starter base. A Bed helps you set your spawn point and skip nights.

2. Food in Minecraft: Find and craft food

You’ll get hungry, so you need to secure food to heal and avoid dying. Depending on your biome, there are different food sources. You can kill animals and cook meat, plant seeds, fish, or gather berries. Look around and always carry enough food. A crop field or an animal farm are renewable food sources (Building a Minecraft Farm: Simple Guide for Food and Resources) .

3. Caves and ores in Minecraft: Diamonds, iron, and more

Once you have a permanent base with a farm, head into a cave. This is essential for finding certain ores and upgrading your tools. Start with stone, move on to iron, and later to diamond. After that, you can upgrade your diamond gear to netherite. Where to find each ore is explained in our post (Minecraft Mining Techniques: Efficiently Extract Resources) . The most important milestone is the hunt for diamonds.

Your goal: Mine at least 10 obsidian with a diamond pickaxe to build a Nether portal. You can also find Ruined Portals as world structures and repair them.

Minecraft Nether: Build a portal and enter the dimension

4. Find a Nether Fortress: Navigation tips in the Nether

With your portal, you can enter a new dimension: the Nether. It’s a hellish realm where you must watch out for lava and dangerous mobs. If you’re struggling, use our guide to stay alive . Your next task is to find a Nether Fortress. You’ll primarily find them in the Nether Wastes, and they’re hard to miss once you’re nearby.

5. Farm Blaze Rods: Find Blazes and use Looting

In Nether Fortresses, you’ll encounter Blazes, yellow mobs that shoot fireballs. Fortresses even contain spawners for them. Blazes are vital for your next progression step. They drop Blaze Rods, which you can craft into Blaze Powder.

Blaze Rods aren’t always easy to get, so this is a great time to look into enchanting (Minecraft Enchantments – Your Ultimate Guide) . Gather enough levels and build an Enchanting Table to, for example, add “Looting” to your sword. This increases your chance for Blaze Rods from the usual 50% up to about 91% per kill.

6. Farm Ender Pearls: Find Endermen in the Overworld and Nether

The second item you need for progression is Ender Pearls. You get them from Endermen, and enchantments will also help here to boost your drops. Endermen spawn as nighttime mobs in the Overworld, but you can also find them in the Nether. They spawn in the Warped Forest, and sometimes in the Nether Wastes or Soul Sand Valley.

Your goal: Craft Blaze Powder from Blaze Rods and combine it with Ender Pearls to make Eyes of Ender. These are essential to find and open the End. We recommend at least 20 Eyes of Ender.

Minecraft End: Find the Stronghold and defeat the Ender Dragon

7. Find a Stronghold: Use Eyes of Ender correctly

Now you need to find your way to the End, and the mechanic isn’t immediately obvious. You must use Eyes of Ender to track down a Stronghold. That’s an abandoned structure containing another portal. Each world has several Strongholds, generated in a ring around the world’s center.

Throw an Eye of Ender into the air, and it will point toward the nearest Stronghold. Sometimes the eye breaks, and you’ll need to use another. Once the eye stops moving in a consistent direction, dig down and search for the Stronghold.

8. Activate the End Portal: Insert eyes and avoid hazards

Strongholds are large structures and can be very maze-like. There’s also plenty of loot, including enchanted books and more Ender Pearls. Keep searching until you find the portal room. Watch out for the silverfish spawner—it’s usually safest to break it.

The portal likely isn’t active yet, and you’ll need to insert up to 12 Eyes of Ender to open it. In extremely rare cases, all 12 eyes are already placed, and the portal is active immediately.

9. Defeat the Ender Dragon: Strategy, gear, and tips

After that, enter the End to face the Ender Dragon. Naturally, we recommend thorough preparation. Use our guide to make sure you don’t forget anything (Ender Dragon in Minecraft: Ultimate Guide to Victory) . The fight isn’t too difficult if you arrive with good gear. A bow or crossbow, a water bucket, beds for special strategies, and strong armor help a lot.

Once you defeat the dragon, collect the experience and the dragon egg. There’s only one egg per world. Then jump through the central portal to watch the credits and read the End Poem. Congratulations! You’ve beaten Minecraft—but now the game truly begins. You can travel the End islands and find items like Shulker Boxes and Elytra.

Conclusion: Beat Minecraft successfully

Minecraft gives you endless freedom, but it’s worth playing through a full start-to-finish walkthrough at least once. You’ll not only learn all the game’s fundamentals, but also unlock important end-game items. From your first survival steps to the Ender Dragon, you’ll traverse multiple dimensions and learn how to play Minecraft efficiently in Survival mode.

If you rent your own Minecraft server from us, you can experience all of this with friends. You could even start a challenge and see who defeats the dragon first.