Eye of Ender

The Eye of Ender (or Ender Eye) is a craftable item used to locate and activate an End Portal. Eyes can be used to activate End Portals by being placed into empty End Portal Frames until the entire ring of 12 Frames is filled (built as if a Nether portal),thereby activating the End Portal. They are used as an aid in finding the End Portal by leading the player to an End Portal Frame inside of a Stronghold by right-clicking while it is in your hand, which will throw the Eye of Ender.

When thrown, it will float diagonally upwards for about fifteen blocks in the direction of the nearest Ender Portal Frame, traveling through any type of block, leaving a trail of purple particles. It will float in the air for three seconds before either falling back to the ground as a collectable item or shattering into pieces and disappearing. If it does shatter, it does not mean you are by a portal. When thrown within twenty blocks of a Stronghold's portal, it will float toward the ground directly above the portal.

Players traveling to The End are advised to craft multiple Eyes of Ender since each one has a chance of disappearing after being used to locate the Stronghold containing the portal and up to 12 Eyes will be needed to activate it.

In Crafting
As of 12w21a:

History


The Eye of Ender was first added as an item in Beta 1.9 Pre-release 3, but had no use until Beta 1.9 Pre-release 4, when each Eye could be placed in a portal block or used to home in on a Stronghold. Jeb demonstrated the new uses for an Eye in his livestream. An End Portal within a Stronghold could be seen in the stream with two Eyes inserted into blocks.



Initially, Eyes of Ender were oddly large from third person or other players view in multiplayer. It also appeared to be held at a 90 degree angle from the original orientation. This was due to a programming error, which specifies that Eyes of Ender should be wielded as a "tool" in third person. This error was shared by Sugar. As of the Minecraft 1.0 this has been fixed.

In older worlds, generated before 1.9 Pre-release 3, the eyes may mislead you to a place where there isn't a Stronghold at all. This is most likely because the eyes lead to where a Stronghold should be based on the seed, and seeds generate worlds differently in older versions. Therefore, if you saved the coordinates the eye traveled to in an old world and generated a new world with the same seed, you could travel to those same coordinates and find a stronghold.

In 1.9 Pre-release 5, there was a bug when, if the eye is thrown, it would make both the arrow shooting sound and the egg throwing sound.

Bugs

 * If the world is generated with the "Generate structures" option disabled, the Eye of Ender will lead you to the place where the Stronghold would have been generated.
 * When thrown, the eye may travel in one or two completely different directions if even one block coordinate. This has yet to be fixed.

Trivia

 * The Eye of Ender's right-click function only works in the Overworld in normal worlds. It does nothing in the Nether, the End, or in Superflat worlds, as there are no Strongholds there.


 * The Eye of Ender seems to resemble a cat's eye with a dilated pupil.


 * The Eye of Ender may be a reference to the "Eye of Sauron" from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as it was a term used to describe Sauron's physical form and the Eye of Ender does resemble the appearance of the "Eye of Sauron".


 * In Weekly 12w21a, you can now trade Eyes of Ender for Emerald. This means you can now get easy Emeralds, especially if you have both a Blaze and Enderman farm.


 * In the 12w22a snapshot, you can buy Eyes of Ender, which means you can potentially activate the end portal without ever setting foot in the nether.