Bosslike Ender Dragon

The vanilla dragon circles somewhere above the island, lands when it feels like it, and dies to a bed.

Bosslike Ender Dragon rebuilds that fight. The dragon comes down to you, hunts you across the island, calls its crystals back when it starts to lose, and doesn't go quietly. It scales with how many of you came, and it remembers how many times it has been killed.

Server-side only. No new items, blocks, entities, textures or sounds: everything is built from things a vanilla client already draws, so your friends can join with an unmodified game and see all of it.

A dragon that's actually difficult

• It flies low. No more circling at the edge of render distance, and it perches far more often.
• Dive bomb. It roars, climbs up behind someone, marks the ground where it's aiming, and plunges nose-first into that spot in a burst of purple fire and a rolling shockwave.
• Strafing run. A line of purple fire is drawn across the ground, the dragon lines up behind it, then swoops the length of it just above the ground, straight through anything in the way.
• Breath bombardment. A ring flashes near where you're running and a fireball comes down on it, leaving burning breath behind. The weaker the dragon gets, the more often they fall.
• Rift ambush. The dragon tears a hole in the air and vanishes into the void. A second rift opens somewhere above you, and the dragon comes back out of it head first with a sonic boom, already diving.
• Void pull. It hangs overhead while a vortex opens on the ground and drags everything inside toward the breath at its centre, then collapses in a blast.
• Perched, it fights back. Standing under it gets you slammed into the ground. Standing anywhere near it gets you caught by a full 360° tail sweep or a wing buffet that throws you into the sky.
• Crystal rage. Break one of its crystals and it comes for you personally, wherever you are on the island.

Every big hit sends players flying properly: 20 blocks up and more.

Four parts to the fight

1. Guardian - the dragon above, dive bombs, strafing runs and bombardment.
2. Enraged - fireballs come in fans, its breath sweeps in lines, and the perched dragon starts using its wings and tail.
3. Desperate - crystals return to the pillars under the dragon's protection, and it flies faster and hits harder.
4. Final Stand - at the edge of death it rises over the exit portal, every crystal pouring healing into it while the boss bar counts down.

Each change of stage stops the fight for a moment: the dragon hovers, roars and blasts everyone back, and the boss bar changes colour.

The End rebuilt around the fight

• A summoning altar. The exit portal stands on a stepped dais of end stone brick and purpur, ringed with glowing runes and crying obsidian markers where the crystals go.
• New pillars. Crying obsidian veins, purpur bands and a crown of obsidian spikes and end rods around each crystal - and a different layout every single fight.
• Pillars that fall. Destroy a crystal and its pillar comes crashing down, leaving a broken stump and rubble across the ground.
• The first dragon is summoned. A freshly generated End has no pillars and no dragon. Come close, and something in the void stirs.
• Respawns are an event. The pillars sink and rise with lightning, energy streams into the portal, a rift tears open overhead and the dragon glides out of it, part by part.
• Death is an event too. The beaten dragon thrashes as light cracks down its body, and the void drags it back through a rift, head first, tail last.

It scales with your group

• More players, more dragon. Health and damage rise with every player who joins the fight: 200 health solo, 560 with four.
• Ascension. Every dragon you kill makes the next one stronger, up to five levels, shown as stars on the boss bar. Its XP grows with it.
• Every fight is worth it. Every dragon drops 12,000 XP for each player, and an egg for every kill, not just the first.

Made to be tuned

Every attack, timing, damage, knockback and radius lives in a commented config file, and every attack can be turned off. Chat messages and boss bar text are editable too. Operators get /bosslike commands for forcing stages and attacks while testing.

Stuck on the warded crystals?

The dragon tells you what to do in chat when you hit one, but if you missed it:

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2, Fabric Loader, Fabric API, Java 25
• Install on the server (or the world host in singleplayer and LAN). Other players don't need it.

License

All Rights Reserved. Feel free to use this in any modpack.