When all 3 end portals have failed to spawn there is no way to get to the end

I agree with the infinite stronghold idea, Jens mentioned long ago in a tweet that strongholds would eventually spawn regularly instead of just the 3. That wouldn't damage builds because only new chunks would generate new strongholds.

3rd party editors can be used but shouldn't be required, just like creative and /give. I hope more strongholds soon can be generated. I don't see what the problem with that is, we have multiple villages, temples etc.

Perhaps strongholds must spawn in a simple predefined pattern for the eye of ender to work.

Strongholds needs to appear very special and unique, or they will not be as cool as they are. More than 3 of them is bad.

Agreed; they can't be thrown about willy-nilly... but 3 strongholds (provided they generate properly in the first place), especially on larger multiplayer servers, almost guarantees that no one will have access to The End without mods, plugins, MCEdit, etc.

of course they need to be quite rare but at least they should exist. Infinite strongholds but with the same distance between as there are between those that are supposed to spawn now would be fine IMO, perhaps ever further away. The reason why I mentioned villages and other structures is that they don't seem to generate in a very simple pattern while strongholds do.

Why does this reporting system let you mark it as a future version?

I think it really should be its own biome, just like supposed to be upcoming soon village biome. Make it as rare as mushroomland.

But Paul, in a server the admin can create manually more portals, don't?

Sure we can drop a portal down somewhere, but the whole 'locating with endereyes, discovering the stronghold, navigating to the portal' aspect is lost to all but the first few people who find (and eventually destroy, intentional or not) the original strongholds/portals.

Yeah "Admin can repair" is not a real solution.

It's just the order of the generation code that's need to be rearranged. I don't know much about it, but if the structures that generate first get overwritten by the next structures generated, the portal code should be the last built. If it's the other way around (as in blocks cannot overwrite another), portal goes first.

But that wouldn't help for existing worlds.

For everyone watching this issue, don't forget to vote it up!

i feel that strongholds should spawn more than three times, guaranteeing an end portal and increasing the diversity of worlds

This is a issue that has been around for quite awhile. There should be a gamerule that end portal frames can not be broken, even by generated structures.

Probably not a gamerule, as that would require cheats to be on. Just a coding switch

Is this still a concern in the current Minecraft version 1.6.4 / Launcher version 1.2.5 ? If so, please update the affected versions in order to best aid Mojang ensuring bugs are still valid in the latest releases/pre-releases.

This is still an issue in 1.6.4 and the snapshots for 1.7 as well.

Maybe if they change the world generation to generate ravines THEN strongholds

vincent: that doesn't help for existing worlds. what us required to solve the bug is to spawn more than 3 strongholds.

They could make an application as an optional download where it will reset all structures in game.

This is true, but what are the odds of 1 end portal failing to spawn, let alone all of them?

Matthew: the chunks could be generated before portals were implemented. in my opinion cheating or creating a new world shouldn't be required to get the new features. to me starting all over defeats the whole point of building and exploring.

Why not require an existing Eye of Ender inside the world for 3 SHolds to spawn? Maybe a message to tell they spawned. That way, we can let the world generate before the Holds.

It would be incredibly disruptive for underground structures to generate at any time later than chunk generation. What if you had built something in the area where the stronghold appears? They're supposed to be ancient too, why would they suddenly appear?

Right... But we still need an item to be able to spawn 3 more strongholds.

It should be possible to "repair" a partially-generated portal with eyes of ender. For example, a single piece of portal frame may be able to generate the rest of the portal structure if it detects that it is missing. When you put an eye of ender in it, if it detects that the other needed pieces of portal frame are missing, it will generate the rest of them over the lava pool (to keep it centered). This could be expanded upon by making another part of the stronghold be able to generate another entire portal room in case that whole thing gets generated over. Alternatively, strongholds could generate last, and cut into ravines, mineshafts, etc if needed.

Do you have Peaceful mode on. If not restart your game and refresh your world chunks. F3+A is how you do that btw.

Why not make the portal frame be able to be crafted via a combination of boss drops? That way if you happen to be in a world where all the strongholds are buggered up you can still reach the end. It will be more of a challenge, but you can do it..

Maybe strongholds could generate after caves and ravines.

If I may suggest that End portals should simply stay put, no matter whether worldgen would have otherwise eaten them. Some sort of flag that they can't be changed by other worldgen functions or something.

I don't think there should be an item to generate end portals. If you really want an end portal, however, you can actually place one with Creative. Just make sure you're standing in the center of the frame and then, tada, End portal frame. At which point you can switch back to survival.

@Zan Zurathi: What happens if the portal frame block has an Eye already in?

Fixed in 15w43a. There are now 128 strongholds per world.

This is great news! This means the legit survival server I've played on with my friends since 2011 (with some years break for architectural studies) can finally go to the end. I wish I could invite the devs to a banquet at my castle to celebrate 😃 .

I'd like to point out that this is not technically "fixed", as it would still be possible for all 128 portals to not generate. It's just a very effective workaround.

While true, it's also statistically possible to never get Ender Pearls. Is that a bug 😛?