Affects all versions after 1.9. Tested 1.8.9, 1.9.4, 1.10 snapshot 16w20a, and 1.10.2, attack missing 16w20a and 1.10 (attack missing from game for 4 years). Known not to work between 1.13-1.16.1.
The dragon only seems to dive only to perch (in versions 1.13.1 and before, after which the dragon circles above the return portal to perch). And I did not see anything about the attack being removed when I looked on the wiki.
Ender Dragon's dive attack (1.7.10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsYVJuz-CvY&t=1525s
Ender Dragon fight in 1.15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-As3w9Hhl88&t=1105s
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This is not a bug. The dragon only charges players after it's been on the fountain for a while, an intentional change to the fight made in 1.9.
@PotholedSea40 Are you sure? The Mojang priority says otherwise. This was never mentioned in any change log. I remember that they only said in a certain snapshot's changelog that the dragon will no longer stop its attack when it is hit, which had made it easy to avoid it before. That change would be useless if the divebomb attack was intentionally removed.
And if this was indeed intentional, it wasn't a very smart change, which you will understand if you've ever run out of arrows while fighting it. You have to wait for it to land, and that can take ages. And of course the dragon fight is a lot less challenging when it never charges at you.
This attack getting unintentionally removed def made the dragon fight 100 time easier and more boring.
Imo this should be fixed when the combat snapshots get implemented because it wouldnt make sense to fix it if not alongside a combat update
In 1.21.10 and 1.21.11-pre1. Note that this bug may be yet another byproduct of MC-272431, the massive bug with the ender dragon causes all of its AI to be messed up in Java Edition currently.
Can in fact confirm this is a byproduct of MC-272431, fixing the vertical velocity bug using a datapack reintroduces the dive attack where the dragon dives down to shoot a fireball at the player.
According to the comments below, this bug links to MC-272431. And it still exists in the current snapshot 26.1. In the file net/minecrat/world/entity/boss/EnderDragon.class, I found the code and marked it. 0.01 should be changed to 0.1
This bug is not fixed in the current version 26.1-snapshot 5. We expect the ender dragon behaves like that in 1.9-1.13 version. Also the behavior on bedrock edition is same to java edition 1.9-1.13. However after 1.14 the ender dragon moves so slow on Y axis, so it perches so slow and can’t charges at the player (The explanation in MC-197201 is a little bit inaccurate but the bug exists).
This data pack fixes the problem (https://modrinth.com/datapack/dragon-movement-fix ), it just makes dragon’s y velocity much larger. Then I load this data pack on 26.1-snapshot 5. My conclusion is that the incorrect y velocity leads to these problem, and there is no more AI problems.
Firstly, I gave ender dragon a custom name to know the data pack is loaded successfully.
Video 1: The ender dragon charged to player like that in 1.9-1.13. Also the dragon can dive at player and then shot a fireball. So it solved MC-197201.
Video 2: The ender dragon perches like that in 1.9-1.13. So it solved MC-272431.
I agree with the previous comments, as it marked in the screenshot(屏幕截图 2025-12-31 164529), ydd * 0.1D is written as ydd * 0.01D and leads to these two problems. I don’t think there is any more bugs in file net/minecrat/world/entity/boss/ender/EnderDragon.class.
I’m so surprised that MC-102774 is fixed. So it’s time for MC-197201 and MC-272431.
MC-167052 Was reported by me (apparently it is a duplicate even though it is the older report... Well at least somebody else has noticed this as well.) This was broken all the way back in 1.9, when the dragon fight was revamped.