Today on MaMinecraft, the official AAGH Minecraft server, we finally got around the slaying the ender dragon. After many delays (we originally planned on doing the fight back in January), the battle finally commenced today. It wasn’t without its trials, though – things never go quite as planned in Minecraft, do they? Click through for the tale of our battle, along with a video.

MaMinecraft versus the Ender Dragon

Our goal was the do battle with the dragon at 9 AM EST, so I logged on at 7, because I’m eager like that. JrMod iRylie logged on shortly after 7:30 and helped me kill time by working on a variable light switch build (long story, but the gist of it was a light switch that had multiple levels of brightness) because, it’s Minecraft, and building weird things just is one of those things you do. Most of the rest of our dragon killing crew – Admin Floata, Mod Mrcoasterboy, JrMod LindellW, and members CarolineCW, BeanChan and Chet246 slowly trickled in after 8. Everyone got geared up and deemed themselves a little after 9, so we teleported to the maze and got started.

Ok, I can hear you now: maze? What maze? It has become MaMinecraft tradition to go through a maze built by our resident maze lover (and server admin) Floata before going into a custom built end portal. Before you clamor about us cheating by not finding the naturally generated portal, we did find the natural portal, but the tradition started on our old world that did not have one due to its age. In any case, we all dove into the maze and promptly got lost. Mrcoasterboy and LindellW made good headway, zipping deep into the multi-floor maze, while Floata and I tried to lead the rest of the group through the maze. Whenever one of us found the elevator to the next floor (MaMinecraft is a Bukkit server with a plugin for elevators), we would teleport the rest of the group to us to expedite the process. After we made it to the third floor – where Floata had decided to put in lever puzzles and traps – we knew we were almost to our goal when the following message came through chat.

BeanChan tried to Swim in Lava

Dammit.

BeanChan got stuck in Floata’s lava trap and was killed, so we had to wait for her to go gear up again. Finally we all made it to the top floor where the portal was, and after several minutes of organizing everyone, we went into the portal… only to appear inside of an underground chamber. Thankfully LindellW quickly dug us up to the surface and the battle began at last. While taking out the pillars, I caught iRylie commenting that she had a bow but no arrows. I was surprised she’d come into the end without arrows, but I went to toss her some of the spares I brought (my bow had Infinite I, so I brought the arrows just for this occasion). It turns out she was talking to Chet246, who came without arrows or a bow. Fortunately iRylie had a spare bow (turns out, that’s what she was saying she had a bow for) and I had a few stacks of arrows so we geared him up and got back to the battle.

Compared to our last ender dragon fight in January 2013, which took over 10 minutes, this was a fairly short fight. As we whittled the last of his health bar down, we held our fire until he was right over the central part of the land mass before unloading one last arrow barrage into him to finish the job in approximately five minutes. Our battle was a success, and the end was free of his draconic tyranny. That’s a good day, if you ask me.

Here’s the video, which was supposed to be livestreamed, but some dumbass (me) hit the wrong button and just recorded it instead.