End portal



An End Portal (or Ender Portal) is a naturally occurring structure that is used to travel into The End. It can only be found in strongholds, and consists of 12 Ender Portal Frame blocks, organized into a horizontal ring shape five blocks square. Each frame block requires an Eye of Ender to activate the portal.

Layout and usage
End Portals are found within the portal room of a stronghold, hanging horizontally over a pool of lava, with a staircase leading up to the portal. A Silverfish spawner sits in the staircase. Some of the portal frame blocks already have Eyes of Ender in them (usually 1-2), while the rest do not.

Upon placing an Eye of Ender in every End Portal Frame block of a specific portal, the portal activates, creating 9 End Portal blocks inside the frame, and allowing the player to access The End. In creative mode the player can copy the end portal frame by pressing the scroll-wheel on their mouse but the portal does not always appear.

The layout of End Portals can be disrupted if the End Room is intersected by Generated Structures such as Abandoned Mine Shaft, which could render End Portals impossible to activate.

Behavior
Stepping into an activated End Portal immediately opens up a loading screen, and transports the player to The End - this leaves no time to back out, unlike the Nether Portal. Upon entering The End, a 5 x 5 horizontal platform of obsidian is spawned at (0,72,0), often in midair, and the player is placed on top of it. Due to the lack of a return portal being generated, the Ender Portal is one way and the End cannot be escaped from without dying, killing the Ender Dragon, or entering the Nether by placing Nether Portal blocks obtained via inventory editing.

The black portal blocks emit light of level 15, which is as powerful as Glowstone and is the brightest light level there is. It only takes one block of portal to teleport to The End. Through the use of an inventory editor, you can place these portal blocks anywhere, and they will still function as if they were a complete portal. The only exception to this is in The End, where the portal blocks will decay instantly.

Activating the Ender Portal will destroy any blocks located in the center 3 x 3 square, where the resulting Ender Portal blocks will be. They will even destroy Bedrock or another Ender Portal Frame (though neither of these items will occur there naturally). It will destroy fluids, though if the source block is not also removed, then it will immediately flow back through. The destruction of the blocks does not make any sound, and applicable blocks do not drop as resources (exceptions being the top part of a door or the extended part of a vertical piston, which both destroy the whole object and drop them as resources), and events sometimes triggered by block destruction will fail to occur: TNT will simply disappear without detonating, and Block 97 will fail to spawn a silverfish. However, Chests, Dispensers, Furnaces, and Jukeboxes will all drop their contents. Mobs are unaffected.

Exit portal
The portal for exiting The End, which appears after the defeat of the Ender Dragon, is similar to the End Portal but different in detail. Instead of a frame of Ender Portal Frame blocks, it has a 7-block wide bowl-shaped frame of Bedrock, and a central pillar surrounded by torches and topped with a Dragon Egg.

The exit portal is made up of the same block and tile entity as the End Portal, block 119, but due to being located in the End, teleports players to the Overworld instead of the End.

Trivia


 * Unlike the End Portal, the exit portal's frame has a bottom; this means that items dropped into its middle may become unretrievable since they will not fall through and cannot be approached close enough to pick up without the player entering the portal. Care should therefore be taken when attempting to retrieve the Dragon Egg.

History
The End Portal was part of the Beta 1.9 Pre-release 3 update, but nonfunctional until Pre-release 4. The official release for the Portal was to be Beta 1.9, released as 1.0.0.

In Beta 1.9 Pre-3, the End Portal frame block could be broken by an explosion. As of Beta 1.9 Pre-4, it cannot be destroyed at all, except with mods or creative mode.

The End Portal Frame originally used a partially-transparent blue texture. In Beta 1.9 Pre-4, it was changed to the current End Stone/Eye of Ender texture.

As of Snapshot 12w23a, End Portal frames can be found in the creative menu

Trivia

 * If you ride a minecart into an active End portal, then you will not go to the End, but the moment you exit the cart, you will be sent there.
 * If you look closely at the sides, the Portal bricks appear to be made of end stone.
 * End portals are very thin, and only the top face is solid. You can jump through the bottom face, and not the top face.
 * You can see through the bottom of an activated end portal because the portal substance is not visible from the bottom.
 * The portal does not deactivate if you somehow manage to destroy the frame.
 * The non-solid portal blocks can be destroyed in creative mode by punching them.
 * When an ender portal frame block breaks, it makes the same noise as breaking glass.
 * If the player somehow obtains the necessary Ender Portal Frame blocks, it becomes possible for them to build their own portal. However, the portal frame block that last receives the Eye of Ender must be oriented the correct way, placed from inside the circle and facing out. Oddly, the orientation of the other 11 frame blocks does not matter. This only works in the Overworld.
 * Player-made portals may be created adjacent to one another, sharing blocks. However, if they are sharing anything except the corners, the last-placed Eye of Ender may not be in a block 1 block diagonal to or up to 2 blocks adjacent to any Frame block not belonging to that portal.  They may, however, be freely stacked vertically.
 * In Minecraft 1.0.0 there is a glitch where only 3 sides of the incomplete portal will spawn. The player will be unable to go to The End and will have to find a complete portal.
 * End portal blocks themselves are a darker version of one of the phases of water (if looked closely).
 * End portals give off light at level 15, including the frame block itself.
 * Unlike Nether Portals, you are transported the instant you touch the portal.
 * If the Ender Dragon spawns before you activate the portal, you will see a boss health meter when you jump in.
 * The blocks needed to make the portal can only be obtained through the command /give in multiplayer, through inventory editing tools, by using mods or by using the Pick-Block button in creative
 * Although End Portals do not occur in Super Flat worlds, spawning an End Portal via third-party plug-in or mods and entering the portal will still allow the player to reach The End normally.
 * if you drop a gravity following block (gravel, sand or a dragon egg) into the portal it seems to enter then disappear forever.