I'm back with another useful spreadsheet. This time for Minecraft!
Are you trying to find the Overworld Stronghold, but only have a few eyes of ender? Don't want to be halfway there only to run out of eyes and can't find your way home? (Well that's a creepy thought...)
Well fear not, my intrepid adventurer! Have I the tool for you! I call it...
The Stronghold Finder
Using this spreadsheet, you can calculate pretty accurately the location of the stronghold in as little as 3 throws, possibly all with one eye of ender!
Now set out to find a mostly flat and open area. Bring along some eyes of ender and some marker blocks. I like cobblestone because it's easy to come by and hard to confuse as part of the natural land structure.
Place a marker block down and stand on it. Then throw your eye of ender and run to it so you can be standing under it when it hovers (or have a friend assist). Place another marker block here. Record your location into the blue table: x1 and z1 represent the position where you threw from, and x2 and z2 represent the position where the eye hovered in the air. Y coordinates do not affect the process and are not used.
Once logged, it's time to head to another spot. for best result, head perpendicular to the main cardinal direction of the eye's flight path, and in the direction it veered off from the main cardinal direction. In my case it went primarily West, but angled a little tot he left. So I went South. You'll want to find a location where it starts to angle the opposite way.
After my third throw, the eye started to veer to the right, still facing West.
Record all the throws into the spreadsheet, and you'll see this happen.
And a location estimator showing, well, the currently estimated location by taking the average of all the fields.
You can now head to these coordinates and see if you got it, or start circling around and try to get a more accurate location. I'll do the second one, but I will check our current estimated coordinates to see how good of a job we did.
Final Outcome
After collecting 10 eye of ender trajectories, I have compiled all the results into my spreadsheet.
And a final estimation of -1808, 360.
And now to see if our hard work paid off.
First off, if we dig down from our first estimation of -1821, 381 to a Y of 30, we find ourselves very close to the stronghold. I found it after digging a short tunnel
After completing all 10, we're not too far away from our first point. Digging down to Y of 30 again, we are also pretty close to the stronghold. Again, needing to dig a tunnel to find it though.
I'd say this is pretty accurate! Do the test, record the data, then go to the recommended coordinates and dig down to Y:30, then make branching tunnels to see if you can find it. Of course if you have any eyes of ender left over, you can toss them to get an idea which way you need to dig if you're a little off.
You can do it too!
Wanna try it out? Head over to my spreadsheet and make a copy for yourself on your google drive. (File -> Make a copy)
This way you can edit it and save it for yourself for every world you need to find the stronghold in. Then just work the document like I do here, and you'll be at the stronghold in no time!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QmeojH3_cpsOtXSAn97LFa-6NUSpauTYO9lL747b_Vw/edit?usp=sharing