Eye of Ender

The Eye of Ender (or Ender Eye) is a craftable item used to locate and activate End Portals. 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 in the direction of the closest End Portal Frame. Eye of Enders are also used in the crafting of an Ender Chest. The Eye of Ender resembles a cat's eye with a dilated pupil.

As a crafting ingredient
As of 12w21a:

Uses


The Eye of Ender is primarily used for locating End Portals, along with their strongholds. 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.

The Eye is also the key ingredient in the crafting of an Ender Chest, which will enable a network of chests to be set up, with the items placed in the chest being stored automatically in every Ender Chest created. For more detailed information, click the link (Ender Chest) to see the main page for the chests.

The Eye of Ender is one of the more useful items available. Its ability to locate a Stronghold can give the player access to the Stronghold's resources, such as Stone Bricks, Bookshelves and Iron Bars. The Eye of Ender is also needed to light the End Portal, although up to twelve Eyes may be needed to complete the Portal.

The Eye of Ender is one of the harder items to craft. Although only two items are needed to create an Eye of Ender, these two items are both challenging to get hold of. The Ender Pearl is found as a Drop from Endermen. To acquire the Pearl, the player must first locate an Enderman and kill it. Endermen are one of the rarer hostile mobs, and finding one may pose a challenge in itself. Successfully killing an Enderman is also a tough prospect due to the Enderman's teleporting ability and the high amount of damage they can inflict.

The second item needed is that of Blaze Powder, which is itself crafted from Blaze Rods. To acquire the Blaze Powder needed to craft the Eye of Ender, the player must travel to The Nether and find and kill a Blaze. Blaze are another tough mob to kill, as their long range fireball attack can be hard to dodge, and the fact that they spawn in a Nether Fortress from a Mob Spawner means that the player will have to tackle several flying Blaze at once in order to acquire the Blaze Rods needed.

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.
 * Sometimes when trying to locate a stronghold, the eyes will lead you in circles, even though you may be up to 1000 blocks away from the stronghold. This bug can make it difficult to find a stronghold, as it may mislead you.The best way to fix this is to walk a ways past this circle in the way the eyes first led you. Then throw the eye again ;)

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 may be a reference to the "Eye of Sauron", as 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.