Charge

The dragon chooses a random player and quickly charges at them, dealing very high damage and knockback.

A dragon charging at an unprepared player

Fireballs

Flies towards a random outpost and rapidly shoots at players with explosive dragon fireballs. The fireballs leave behind dragon's breath.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

The dragon preparing its fireball attack

Lightning

Flies to a high location, then after a few seconds of warning, strikes all exposed players with devastating true damage.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

The player getting struck by lightning (easy difficulty!)

Enraged Charge

Charges at nearby players multiple times in quick succession, at an even faster speed than normal charges.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

Slowly falling into the void after getting charged at by a dragon...

Breath Attack

Dives towards a lower Y-level near a player, and breathes a trail of dragon's breath.

This attack can't happen twice in a row.

The dragon performing its breath attack

A very menacing creature

Health: 40.0
Armor: 2/4 Netherite, Protection IV
Follow Range: 196.0m

Mount Health: 70.0
Mount Armor: Netherite Horse Armor
Mount Speed: Very Fast
Mount Step Height: 3.0m

This miniboss spawns once every few minutes, depending on the amount of fighting players, and targets the player with the highest Y-level.

The skeleton switches between a bow, a spear and a sword depending on its distance to its target. Its horse is pretty fast and can run up walls up to 3 blocks tall, meaning it can scale an end spike in a matter of seconds.

An indestructible end crystal orbits it until it gets killed, after which the crystal explodes after 2 seconds. The dragon can heal from this crystal.

End crystals within a 12-block radius of it become immune to damage.

A variant of this without a horse spawns on the end crystals after the dragon reaches half health. They shoot at players climbing up their end spike, and jump off their crystal when damaged.

A crystal protector guarding an end crystal

– Hyper heal activates after dragon isn't damaged for a long time
– Dragon's breath buffs endermen with strength II and speed II
– Dragon's breath destroys items
– Headshots do 2x damage
– Immune to one-cycling, and a single hit deals at most 200 damage
– Effectiveness of the protection enchantment is reduced
– Dragon no longer has damage invincibility, so spamming becomes effective
– Dragon fight fog removed
– Dragon has a lower chance of perching
– Bedrock burns soul fire instead of fire
– Custom dragon death messages
– Higher chance of endermites appearing from ender pearls

The config is generated at config/dragons-revamped.json and reloaded whenever a world or server starts. These are the defaults. The comments are only here for explanation, since JSON files can't contain comments. All text uses MiniMessage formatting.

{
    // How many players the fight is balanced for. Scales basically everything
    "playerCount": 1,
    // The dragon's custom name
    "dragonName": "<light_purple>Ender Dragon</light_purple>",

    "dragon": {
        // Overrides the scaled health
        "healthOverride": null,
        // Grace period so players can get onto the end island without being knocked off
        "gracePeriodSeconds": 15,
        // Dragon movement speed multiplier
        "speedMultiplier": 0.8,
        // Speed multiplier for its charge attacks
        "diveSpeedMultiplier": 1.0,
        // How much damage one single hit can do
        "limitMaxDamagePerHit": true,
        "maxDamagePerHit": 200.0
    },

    "healing": {
        // Multiplier for how fast the dragon heals from crystals
        "crystalHealRate": 1.0,
        // Hyper heal makes the dragon heal super fast if it's not damaged for a long time
        "hyperHeal": true,
        // Multiplier for hyper heal
        "hyperHealRate": 1.0
    },

    "crystals": {
        // How fast destroyed end crystals respawn
        "respawnRate": 1.0,
        // Amount of crystals remaining for respawns to start
        "respawnThreshold": 7,
        // How much damage the first crystals do to the dragon when destroyed
        "initialDamage": 50.0,
        // How much damage respawned crystals do to the dragon when destroyed
        "respawnedDamage": 30.0
    },

    "crystalProtectors": {
        // Maximum amount of crystal protectors alive at once, default is the square root of playerCount, rounded up
        "maxAlive": null,
        // How often they spawn
        "spawnRate": 1.0,
        // How many spawn guarding end crystals (during half health event)
        "amountOnCrystals": 2
    },

    "damage": {
        // Damage from the dragon's head and wings for each difficulty. Peaceful uses easy
        "headContact": { "easy": 9.0, "normal": 16.0, "hard": 24.0 },
        "wingContact": { "easy": 6.5, "normal": 11.0, "hard": 16.5 },
        // True damage from the Lightning attack
        "lightning": { "easy": 6.75, "normal": 11.5, "hard": 17.25 },
        // How much the Protection enchantment counts against head and wing hits.
        // 1.0 is the vanilla amount, 0.0 ignores protection
        "protectionEffectiveness": 0.5
    },

    "misc": {
        // Removes the dark fog during the fight
        "disableFog": true,
        // Whether the dragon's breath destroys items on the ground
        "dragonBreathErodesItems": true,
        // Chance for an ender pearl to spawn an endermite while the dragon is alive (vanilla is 0.05)
        "endermiteChance": 0.5
    },

    "messages": {
        // Placeholders:
        // <player> (player name)
        // <dragon> (dragon name)
        // <count> (remaining crystals)
        // <health> (remaining health of dragon/protector)

        // Death messages
        "lightningKill": "<player> was struck down by <dragon>",
        "bodyKill": "<player> got run through by <dragon>",
        // Sent when the dragon reaches half health.
        "rageAnnouncement": "<dark_purple>[<dragon>]</dark_purple> <white>My strongest soldiers have arrived to end this battle!</white>",
        // Message when a crystal respawns
        "crystalRespawned": "<light_purple>An End Crystal has respawned!</light_purple>",
        // Message when a crystal protector spawns
        "protectorJoined": "<dark_purple>A Crystal Protector joins the battle!</dark_purple>",
        // Action bar when hitting a crystal guarded by protector
        "crystalIsProtected": "<light_purple>This crystal is guarded by a nearby Crystal Protector!</light_purple>",
        // Action bar showing how many crystals are left
        "crystalsRemaining": "<dark_purple>✦ Crystals Remaining: <count></dark_purple>",
        // Action bar after hitting a dragon
        "dragonHealth": "<red>❤ Dragon Health: <health></red>",
        // Action bar after hitting a crystal protector
        "protectorHealth": "<dark_aqua>❤ Protector Health: <health></dark_aqua>"
    }
}

Recommended gear:
– Maxed out netherite/diamond armor
– A strong sword with looting III (for pearls)
– Bow with power V and several stacks of arrows (or infinity)
– A spear with lunge III
– A mace with density (for good damage during perch)
– A fast pickaxe
– Many totems of undying
– Several stacks of ender pearls
– Several stacks of blocks
– Several stacks of wind charges
– 2+ stacks of nutritious food
– Golden apples for emergency healing
– Elytra (with rockets) if you have one
– Some potions of slow falling

Hide under blocks to avoid the lightning attack. On hard mode this does 8.5 hearts of true damage, so it's definitely worth dodging.

The dragon is extremely fast, so shooting it from an elevated point is easier than from the ground. Just be ready to ender pearl if you get hit off.

Be ready to run/pearl away from a Crystal Protector after you kill it, since you only have 2 seconds before the crystal explodes.

Slow falling is useful in general, but if you get hit off the island absurdly far, you can use slow falling + lunge spear to get you back within pearling range.

There's no shame in switching the difficulty to easy or normal, or adjusting the config. The fight was designed to be extremely difficult.