How to make Ender Dragon perch faster in Minecraft

The Ender Dragon fight is the most important fight in the entirety of Minecraft. It signifies the end of the game, both literally (as the guardian of the portal to the credits) and metaphorically (as it represents when speedrunners have finished their runs). However, the boss mob can also be frustrating to fight, as it wastes a bunch of time aimlessly flying around.

Thankfully, there's plenty that you can do to speed the fight up. Everything you need to know about getting the Ender Dragon to perch as fast as possible can be found detailed below.

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What to do to make Minecraft's Ender Dragon perch faster

1) Destroy tower crystals

Destroying end crystals will make the dragon perch more (Image via Mojang)

There's a line within the Minecraft Ender Dragon's code that states it has a 1/(3 + remaining crystals) chance of perching. This means that it becomes considerably more likely to land when all of the end crystals have been destroyed. Since there are 10 crystals to start, the chance goes from 1/13 or 7.7% to 1/3 or 33%.

Make sure to destroy the end crystals in cages first. To get a good angle on the Minecraft bow shot needed to destroy them, you'll need to be very close to the obsidian towers. This makes it hard for the mob to see you, which slows the fight down for reasons explained later. Just keep in mind that if you're planning on destroying any crystals, the ones in cages are top priority.

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2) Move away from the portal

The farther away the player is, the higher the chance of perching (Image via Mojang)

Another interesting quirk of the Ender Dragon fight is that it's much more likely to perch the farther away you are from the main portal. There's a sweet spot here, developed by the community over hundreds of hours of Minecraft speedruns.

Getting too far away can make it easy to miss the perch, making the fight actually take longer, even if the mob lands more. It's recommended that you try and stay roughly the same distance from the portal as the towers. This gives ample time to get into position once the perching phase begins and also helps maximize the perching likelihood.

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3) Pillar up

Pillaring up high is a great way to force the dragon to land (Image via Mojang)

Pillaring up is also an effective way to increase your distance from the portal, as your vertical distance will also be taken into consideration whenever the Ender Dragon decides if it's going to perch. However, pillaring up also has a secondary benefit to speeding up the dragon fight: it makes the mob switch phases faster.

Whenever the Ender Dragon starts its straffing phase, it can only ever exit straffing once it's shot a fireball at the player. And it's impossible for it to shoot at a target it's unable to see. Therefore, pillaring up makes the mob take less time to establish a line of sight to you, allowing it to get a shot off and switch phases in considerably less time.

This is also why it was mentioned earlier that the cage crystals should be destroyed first, as the towers themselves can block line of sight and might be able to slow down an otherwise early Minecraft Ender Dragon perch.

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4) Hope for north-south perches

Getting north-south perches is up to chance, but much faster than anything else (Image via Mojang)

Unfortunately, this final perch-speed tip relies entirely on RNG. The Ender Dragon needs to circle around invisible "perching nodes" before it can actually land on the Minecraft end portal. While the east and west nodes line up with towers that the dragon needs to circle before landing, the north and south nodes don't.

This means that, if you get lucky, the Ender Dragon will select one of these towerless north or south nodes to start its perch. There's nothing to circle, so the mob ends up landing considerably faster than it otherwise would.