bigchadguys and the holy grail

Not much of significance happened. Just the usual stuff: finding a place to live, setting up, getting materials...

Our current goal is to head to the End. A mod in the pack has made it all complicated and whatnot- making each Eye of Ender obtainable through certain tasks or found in specific structures. In the first 50 days, we managed to find 8 out of the 12 that are needed!

I was a bit worried we wouldn't be able to find all the Eyes before day 100, but we did it!

Here's what it took to get them, starting from the first row and going left to right:

• Cryptic Eye: Randomly obtained while Enchanting.
• Old Eye: Found in a Desert Pyramid.
• Evil Eye: Bought from a Cleric for Emeralds and Rabbit's Foot.
• Rogue Eye: Found in a Jungle Pyramid.
• Witch Eye: Crafted with an Eye of Ender and Witch Pupil.
• Black Eye: Found in Buried Treasure.
• Cold Eye: Found in an Igloo.
• Nether Eye: Found in a Nether Fortress.
• Cursed Eye: Found in a Bastion.
• Exotic Eye: Crafted with an Eye of Ender, coral, conduits, and glow ink sacs.
• Corrupted Eye: Found in a Pillager Outpost.
• Wither Eye: Dropped by the Wither.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but the Stronghold was replaced with a better version of the structure. This new Stronghold is massive as hell and has a lot of loot and puzzles before you reach the Portal.

Some shenanigans occurred. Max died while we were doing a puzzle. The thing about the room the puzzle was in was that you had to go through a maze to enter it. Turns out you didn't have to go through the maze at all. Max discovered this after running around to find their stuff. The portal entrance is just further down the hallway of the maze's opening.

It also turns out that this Stronghold didn't realize we'd be using special Eyes of Ender. The portal still had the usual normal Eyes of Ender in them, which don't work with our modded ones. Honestly for the best. Just look at this picture.

We were somewhat hesitant to enter the portal. With this modpack, how hard would the dragon be? We've also never beaten it in Vanilla, either. Oh well. We jumped in.

So, imagine this. We're already stressed because we don't know what to expect and have never fought the dragon before. We spawn OFF of the island and go through a tense episode of bridging, hoping that nothing knocks us off. There's also ominous bell ringing playing throughout. I have to give props to the mod that did this, because this all made for a very stressful atmosphere.

We knew enough to destroy all the End Crystals. Then, the real fight began. Max ended up dying again. (lol)

Eventually, I got it after a horrible, drawn-out fight where there were way too many close calls. I was forced to hide in a tower structure and shoot my bow from a small opening. Even that wasn't safe because the dragon would brush against me sometimes. But I did get it.