To make an ender chest in Minecraft, place 8 obsidian around the outside of a crafting table and 1 eye of ender in the center. The result is one of the most useful blocks in the game: a chest whose contents follow you everywhere, even across dimensions.
The ender chest is our favorite block in all of Minecraft. We liked it so much we named the whole site after it! Here is everything you need to know about crafting one, how it actually works, and the smartest ways to use it. Everything is current as of Minecraft Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.50 (Wilderness Bound).
How Do You Make an Ender Chest?
You will need two ingredients: 8 obsidian and 1 eye of ender. The obsidian is the easy part. Pour water over lava source blocks and mine the obsidian with a diamond or netherite pickaxe.
The eye of ender takes more work, because you have to craft it from an ender pearl and blaze powder:
- Get an ender pearl. Endermen drop these when killed. They spawn in dark areas (like other mobs) in the overworld and are everywhere in the warped forest in the nether.
- Get blaze powder. First build a nether portal, find a nether fortress, and defeat blazes for blaze rods. One blaze rod crafts into two blaze powder.
- Combine one ender pearl with one blaze powder in your crafting grid to make an eye of ender.
Then place the 8 obsidian around the edge of the crafting table with the eye of ender in the middle slot, and out comes your ender chest. Because of these ingredients, the ender chest is usually a mid-to-late game block. You will probably craft your first one around the same time you start hunting for a stronghold, since eyes of ender are also how you find one.
How Does an Ender Chest Work?
An ender chest is personal cloud storage. All ender chests in the world share one inventory, and that inventory is yours alone. Put a diamond in an ender chest at your base, walk a thousand blocks, place another ender chest, and the diamond is right there waiting for you. It works across dimensions too: items stored in the overworld can be taken out in the nether or the End.
On a multiplayer server, every player sees only their own items when they open an ender chest. Even if another player opens the exact same chest block, they see their inventory, not yours. No other player can ever take from it, so there is no need for lock plugins.
The chest gives you 27 slots, the same as a regular single chest. That may not sound like much, but there is a famous trick to multiply it: fill shulker boxes with items and store the shulker boxes inside the ender chest. That turns 27 slots into 27 full boxes of portable, private storage.
You Need Silk Touch to Move It
Here is the mistake every player makes exactly once: breaking an ender chest with a normal pickaxe. Do that and the chest drops 8 obsidian, and the eye of ender is gone forever. To pick up the actual ender chest, you must mine it with a pickaxe enchanted with Silk Touch.
The good news is your items are never lost either way. The shared inventory is not stored “inside” the block, so even if your ender chest is destroyed, everything is still there when you place or craft a new one. See our best Minecraft enchantments guide for how to get Silk Touch on your pickaxe.
Ender Chest vs Shulker Box
These two storage blocks get compared all the time. They have different uses for different situations. Here is how they differ:
| Ender Chest | Shulker Box | |
|---|---|---|
| Contents when broken | Stay in the shared inventory | Stay inside the dropped box |
| Access from anywhere | Yes, from any ender chest | No, you must carry the box |
| Private on servers | Yes, per-player inventory | No, anyone can open it |
| Can others steal from it | Never | Yes, if they find it |
| How you get it | Crafted (obsidian + eye of ender) | Crafted from shulker shells, which drop from shulkers in End cities |
| Can you store them inside each other | Holds shulker boxes | Holds ender chest items, but not other shulker boxes |
The winning combo, as mentioned above: shulker boxes inside an ender chest. The shulkers give you capacity, and the ender chest makes them accessible anywhere and safe from everyone.
The Best Items to Keep in Your Ender Chest
Since space is limited to 27 slots, use them for things that are painful to lose:
- Valuables: Diamonds, netherite, emeralds, and enchanted books stay safe here no matter how you die.
- A backup kit: A spare pickaxe, weapon, armor piece, food, and some torches can save a disaster run.
- Your best gear in transit: Carrying god armor to a far-away base? Put it in the ender chest and walk without fear.
- Potions and golden apples: Emergency supplies you want available in every dimension.
- Shulker boxes: As covered above, this is how you turn 27 slots into a whole warehouse.
A nice habit for the end game: keep one ender chest at your base near your storage room, one at each outpost, and carry one in your inventory with a Silk Touch pickaxe. You will never be more than a few seconds from your valuables.
A Few More Ender Chest Facts
- Piglins get angry when they see you open or mine an ender chest, just like with regular chests. Watch your back in the nether!
- Ender chests give off a light level of 7, so they glow faintly in the dark.
- They cannot be moved by pistons, and hoppers cannot put items in or take items out. Your storage stays manual (and private).
- Unlike regular chests, two ender chests placed side by side stay separate instead of forming a double chest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do your ender chest items carry over to other worlds or servers?
No. Your ender chest inventory is saved with your player data in each world, so every world and every server has its own separate ender chest. Items you store in your survival world will not show up when you join a friend’s server.
Why won’t my ender chest open?
Check the block on top of it. Just like a regular chest, an ender chest will not open if a solid block is sitting directly above it. Break or move that block. Transparent blocks like glass do not cause this problem.
Can server admins see what’s in my ender chest?
Yes. Other players can never open your ender chest inventory, but it is saved as part of your player data, so server operators can read it with commands, and some admin plugins can open it directly. Private from players does not mean private from the people who run the server.
Can creepers or TNT destroy an ender chest?
No. Ender chests have a very high blast resistance, so creeper and TNT explosions leave them standing. And even if an ender chest is removed some other way, your items are still safe in your shared inventory.
That concludes our complete guide to the ender chest in Minecraft! What do you keep in yours? Leave a comment below!
