Everything You Need to Know About Strongholds in Minecraft

Updated on 2 November 2026: stronghold count in Bedrock Edition, depth, libraries and loot checked and corrected; quick answer, room overview and FAQ added.

A stronghold is an underground structure and the only place where you find an End Portal. To find one, type /locate structure stronghold (cheats required) or throw Eyes of Ender and follow them. When an eye flies down into the ground instead of up, you are above the stronghold and can dig down.

• Java Edition: 128 strongholds in eight rings around the world origin (0,0); the 3 nearest are 1,280–2,816 blocks from it.
• Bedrock Edition: no fixed total; strongholds generate at least 160 blocks from the origin, plus 3 extra ones at least 453 blocks away.
• Depth: no fixed height; mostly underground, sometimes underwater or down to bedrock level.
• Inside: one End Portal room with 12 portal frames and a silverfish spawner, 0–2 libraries, prison cells, storerooms and fountain rooms.

So, we will go through this quick guide, which will help you locate the Strongholds and then explore every part of them. Here is everything you need to know.

How to Find a Stronghold (3 Methods)

This is where the real challenge begins. Exploring a Stronghold is far easier than actually locating it. But not impossible. You need to follow certain steps to get there. Let’s see how you can do it:

1. Using the /locate Command

If cheats are enabled, type /locate structure stronghold in the chat. The game shows the X and Z coordinates of a nearby stronghold and the distance in blocks. This works in Java Edition and Bedrock Edition; in Java Edition you can click the coordinates to put a matching /tp command into the chat. The command does not show the height, so you still have to dig down.

2. Using Eyes Of Ender

This is the classic method that everyone follows to locate the Stronghold, which is by using Eyes of Ender, and you will need a lot of these.

1. Start by crafting Eyes of Ender: For this, combine Blaze Powder (from blaze rods in the Nether) with an Ender Pearl (dropped by Endermen). Make sure you have enough of these since you will need a lot of them.
2. Throw the Eye: To use this as a guide, you need to throw the Eyes of Ender into the air. It flies about 12 blocks toward the nearest stronghold, then drops back down or shatters (20% chance per throw).
3. Follow the Path: Keep throwing the Eyes of Ender every 50-100 blocks, and all you have to do is simply follow the path now.
4. Eye drop under: Once you are within about 12 blocks of the stronghold’s entrance staircase, the next Eye you throw flies down into the ground instead of up. That’s your signal to start digging carefully.

Pro Tip: Take 15–20 Eyes of Ender. Every throw has a 20% chance to break the Eye, and the End Portal itself needs up to 12 more to activate.

3. Seed Mapping

There are a lot of online tools, like Chunkbase, where you can add the seed for your world and locate the exact location for all the Strongholds. This is much easier and direct than actually moving around using Eyes of Ender.

Surely, these tools are accurate (since strongholds have fixed generation rules), but they take away the sense of discovery. If you’re going for an authentic experience, stick to Eyes of Ender.

Searching for a Stronghold is a journey in itself since it pushes you to visit the Nether for the Blaze Powder, farm Endermen for Ender Pearls, and then tests your navigation skills as you track the Eyes across the overworld.

This isn’t an entry-level experience that you can go with; you need to be fully prepared with all the resources for this hectic and long journey.

Where Strongholds Generate and How Deep They Are

We already know that at the core of any Stronghold, we have an End Portal Room that takes us directly to the Ender Dragon fight. This is what you are here for and the reason you search for Strongholds in the first place.

But the question is, where can you find these structures? They do not pop up anywhere like villages or ruined portals. You need to carefully follow a designated path to be able to track them since they are buried deep in the ground.

In Java Edition there are 128 strongholds, arranged in eight concentric rings around the world’s origin (0,0). The first ring has 3 strongholds, the outer rings have more:

In Bedrock Edition there is no fixed total. Strongholds generate at random at least 160 blocks from the world origin, plus three extra strongholds at least 453 blocks away, which always generate below a village.

How deep is a stronghold? There is no fixed height: strongholds generate at any Y level, mostly underground, underwater if necessary, and sometimes down to bedrock level. In Java Edition, any part that would stick out above sea level is replaced with air. Caves and mineshafts often cut through them, and sometimes a ravine exposes one. An easy way to identify if you are close to a stronghold is when you dig underground and come across its building blocks: roughly 45% stone bricks, 30% mossy stone bricks, 20% cracked stone bricks and 5% infested stone bricks, which look like normal ones but hide a silverfish.

Stronghold Rooms at a Glance

Every stronghold is put together at random from the same set of rooms. This overview shows what you can find and how many of each room a stronghold can have:

How to Prepare for a Stronghold Run

Before you can even think of going for a Stronghold exploration, there are a lot of items you will need, apart from just carrying Eyes of Ender for direction. Here is a compact checklist:

• Weapons: a sword, ideally fully enchanted, plus a bow and arrows for creepers and skeletons.
• Armor: at least iron armor, better diamond or netherite, enchanted if you can.
• Pickaxe and shovel: an iron or diamond pickaxe (Efficiency, Unbreaking) for stone and dead ends, a shovel for dirt, gravel and sand.
• Food: golden carrots are best, steak and cooked porkchops work too.
• Torches and 2–3 stacks of cobblestone: to light and mark your way, bridge over lava and block off paths.
• Water bucket: saves you from lava and turns lava into obsidian.
• 15–20 Eyes of Ender: up to 12 for the portal plus spares, because every throw has a 20% chance to break the Eye.
• Optional: flint and steel and obsidian, if you want to build a Nether portal near the End Portal.

And that is all you are ever going to need to explore the Strongholds.

Stronghold Structure: Rooms & Layout

The moment you enter a Stronghold, you will see twisting staircases, dead-end hallways, and the occasional room that makes you wonder why it’s even there. However, every Stronghold features a particular structure with a specific set of rooms, and once you know what to expect, they become much easier to navigate.

Let’s look at what you can find here:

1. Corridors and Staircases

The moment you enter any Stronghold, you will notice all sorts of stone brick variants (cracked, mossy, and regular) lining the walls, making it easy to know you’re in the right place.

Speaking of the layout, the entire Stronghold is filled with long and narrow corridors connected by staircases. While a lot of them lead you to different rooms, some corridors have doors that lead to dead ends; a detail that makes strongholds feel like puzzles.

You need to ensure you put torches on every path you cross as a mark, so that you are not entirely lost while exploring the corridors.

2. The Library

Another very prominent room is the Library. A large library has 233 bookshelves, a small one 161. Not every stronghold has one: there are 0–2 libraries per stronghold.

For survival players, this is a huge shortcut. Instead of farming sugar cane and leather for weeks, you can instantly collect enough bookshelves here to max out your enchanting table and still have leftovers for trading with villagers.

A large library has two chests, a small one has one. They contain paper, books, enchanted books, sometimes a compass or a map, and one Eye armor trim in every library chest. The enchanted books can give you powerful upgrades like Sharpness, Efficiency, or Protection without needing to gamble on the enchanting table.

There is one thing you need to look out for: the cobwebs. They are everywhere in this room, and if you are not too careful, you might get entangled. You can either break them down on your way using a Sword or simply break down the bookshelves and make your way through it.

3. Prison Cells

On your way through the corridors, you will find many rooms that look like prison cells. They are mostly empty, but they might spawn a few hostile mobs trapped in them; overall, they are pretty useless.

From a survival perspective, prison cells aren’t very useful on their own. However, many players repurpose them; they can work as ready-made holding areas for villagers, mobs, or even storage builds if you like the atmosphere of keeping them intact.

4. Fountain / Well Rooms

Next, we have the Fountain and Well rooms. While exploring, you will come across large rooms with a fountain in the middle: a water source on a small pillar that flows into a basin. Unlike libraries or the portal room, these don’t serve any direct gameplay purpose; there’s no loot, no mobs tied to them, and no hidden tricks.

They simply spawn here to give the entire structure a meaningful and aesthetic effect. These rooms can also be used as a landmark so that you are not lost and can easily make out if you accidentally revisit them.

5. Storerooms and Dead Ends

Next, we have Storerooms and Dead Ends. Let’s talk about Storerooms first. They are large rooms with a second floor made of oak planks, reached by a ladder, with one chest on the upper floor. They do not spawn in every stronghold and can be rare, but the chest can give you pretty good loot, such as apples, bread, coal, iron and gold ingots, redstone, or, if you are lucky, an enchanted book or an iron pickaxe. Ender pearls are not found here, but in the chests on small altars in some corridors.

Dead Ends, on the other hand, are more of a wasted space. You’ll open a door only to find a blank wall, or a corridor that goes nowhere. These don’t serve any real purpose other than making the stronghold maze-like and harder to navigate.

However, make sure to always break the walls in these areas since they can lead to more rooms that you have missed.

End Portal Room: All You Need To Know

There is one room we did not speak about yet: the End Portal room. This is what you are here for. Let’s learn about the anatomy of this room and what you will find here. We will also talk about how you can activate the portal.

1. Anatomy

Each Stronghold has one portal room, which serves as the gateway to the End World. This room consists of a raised platform of 12 End Portal Frame blocks arranged in a rectangle. Each of the 12 frames has a 10% chance to already contain an Eye of Ender, 1.2 per portal on average: about 28% of portals have no pre-filled eye, 38% have one and 23% have two. So in about 9 out of 10 portals you need 10 to 12 Eyes of your own.

Since each portal needs 12 Eyes, make sure to carry 15-20 of them, since you will also need them to show you the way to the Stronghold.

2. Silverfish Spawner

The moment you enter the room, you will see a staircase by which you can access the portal floating from the ground level. Just above the staircase, there is a Silverfish Spawner.

Silverfish are not too dangerous and can be easily killed, but they swarm quickly and can trigger nearby infested stone bricks, leading to a sudden wave of attacks. Hence, most players tend to destroy the spawner immediately to avoid trouble. That said, some keep it and build a silverfish XP farm, though this is much more niche.

3. Lava Pool

There are multiple lava pools as well in this particular room. Two of them are present right after you enter the room, on each side. While the biggest one is right below the portal. Make sure to stay clear of it, and you do not accidentally fall into it.

The best use of this lava pool is that you can create Obsidian from it. As mentioned above, many rooms in Stronghold contain waterfalls, fountains, etc. If you have a bucket with you, you can collect water from here.

Then, pour the water on the lava pool to give you Obsidian. This eventually can be used to create a Nether portal right outside the End Portal room.

Mobs and Spawners

You may find a few hostile mobs and spawners here in the Stronghold. Although not the most dangerous, you must carry a fully enchanted sword to tackle them.

Some of the most common ones are listed below:

1. Skeletons: These are probably the most dangerous mobs found in Stronghold. They are either trapped in the Prison cells, or you can find them randomly in dark rooms. To defeat them, use a shield or simply hit them with your sword. Also, stay clear of their arrow; they can do a good deal of damage.
2. Zombies: They are less threatening, but again, they are hostile. You can easily kill them with your sword, but if they spawn in large numbers, it can get tricky. On Hard difficulty they also break down wooden doors, which explains why you’ll sometimes find random doors missing inside the stronghold.
3. Creepers: Another less threatening mob, but don’t forget they blast off if they come close to you. So, it's best to carry a bow and arrow to kill them or simply run away.
4. Silverfish: The stronghold’s “signature” mob. They spawn from the silverfish spawner in the portal room and can also burst out of infested stone bricks scattered around. Now, they are not dangerous, but they do alert others around them, leading to swarms that overwhelm you fast.

A few players have encountered spiders as well in the Stronghold; you need to be careful of them, too.

Speaking of the Spawners, there is only a single Silverfish Spawner in the End Portal room that we spoke about earlier. It keeps spawning silverfish as long as you are nearby. Most players break it immediately, which is the most reliable way to stop them.

Strategies To Clear a Stronghold Safely

Now that we know everything about the Stronghold, it's time to understand how you can safely explore and navigate it. Every player has a different strategy, but there are a few common things they all do.

Let’s see how you can do it too:

1. Entering and Lighting

The moment you break into a Stronghold, you will see a spiral-like staircase that will be your entrance to this structure. Your first job will be to place a torch and light it up.

That is not all. To ensure that you are not lost in this maze-like structure, you need to keep adding a torch on every wall you cross. A good habit is to place all your torches on one side of the wall (say, the right side). That way, if you’re lost, following torches on the opposite side will always lead you back to the entrance.

2. Follow This Searching Method

By now, you already know what you are searching for: End Portal Room. Instead of wandering around, you need to stick to a plan.

You can either choose to go wall-by-wall and explore everything along the way. Or you can move room by room, working outward or inward in a spiral until you’ve covered the whole structure.

Along with torches, you can also place a dirt or cobblestone block in rooms you have already discovered and covered, so that you do not visit the same place again and continue with your exploration.

3. What To Do With Libraries

We have already spoken about how libraries are one of the treasure rooms if you know exactly what to do with them. Instead of breaking them all and finding your way out of there, you can instead collect them all by using Silk Touch on your tool.

Even if you don’t, try to at least loot the chests first (they often contain enchanted books). Clear out cobwebs with a sword to avoid getting trapped mid-fight, and grab the string since it’s always useful later.

4. Secure the Portal Room

If you finally find the Portal room, don’t simply rush to it. You need to secure the area.

• Break the silverfish spawner immediately (unless you want to keep it for farming).
• Cover the lava pool with solid blocks like cobblestone. This prevents accidents and gives you a flat surface to work on.
• Light the room thoroughly to stop mobs from wandering in while you’re focused on the portal.

Only after the room is safe should you think about filling the frames with Eyes of Ender.

5. Don’t Forget Secret Rooms

Some strongholds hide secret rooms. While exploring, try to break through walls that may seem suspicious or walls around the dead ends. They often lead to more secret rooms or rooms you have not explored yet.

Your best chance is the five-way crossing, a junction room with exits on two levels. Behind a smooth wall where an exit could be, there may be a hidden room; an indentation on the same wall is a hint that the game tried to place one there.

Minecraft Stronghold FAQ

How do I find a stronghold in Minecraft?

Type /locate structure stronghold if cheats are on, or throw an Eye of Ender and walk in the direction it flies. When it flies down into the ground instead of up, you are above the stronghold and can dig down.

How many strongholds are there in Minecraft?

In Java Edition there are 128, arranged in eight rings around the world origin, with 3 in the first ring. Bedrock Edition has no fixed total: strongholds generate at random at least 160 blocks from the origin, plus 3 extra ones at least 453 blocks away.

How far away is the nearest stronghold?

In Java Edition the three strongholds of the first ring are 1,280 to 2,816 blocks from the world origin (0,0). In Bedrock Edition a stronghold can be as close as 160 blocks.

How deep is a stronghold?

There is no fixed depth. Strongholds generate at any Y level, mostly underground, sometimes underwater or down to bedrock level. The /locate command only shows the X and Z coordinates, so you still have to dig down.

What is the stronghold stairway?

It is the spiral staircase where every stronghold starts. Eyes of Ender lead to the chunk of this staircase, so it is usually the first part you reach when you dig down. From there, corridors lead to the other rooms.

How many Eyes of Ender do I need?

The End Portal has 12 frames and each needs an eye, but every frame has a 10% chance to be pre-filled, so most portals need 10 to 12. Bring 15–20, because every throw has a 20% chance to break the eye.

What is inside a stronghold?

Corridors and staircases, prison cells, chests on small altars, fountain rooms and storerooms, 0–2 libraries and exactly one End Portal room with a silverfish spawner.

Wrapping Up

Well, that is all from this guide. It can feel overwhelming, starting right from finding a Stronghold and then exploring each part of it.

But it's all worth it. They’re meant to test your preparation, patience, and combat skills before letting you step into the End. With the right gear, a good search strategy, and some awareness of common pitfalls, you’ll not only survive the stronghold; you’ll conquer it.