Minecraft 1.17 Speedrunning Guide for Beginners

Minecraft can happily absorb hundreds of hours before the end credits ever appear. A speedrun asks the opposite question: how quickly can the Ender Dragon be defeated from a fresh world?

This beginner route focuses on an any percent, glitchless, random seed run in Minecraft 1.17 using the village strategy. That means no custom seed for official attempts, default vanilla rules, no bug abuse, and the goal of killing the Ender Dragon as fast as possible. Easy difficulty is commonly used for official runs, because the dragon does not award style points for suffering.

1. Create or Reset the World

A random seed can be excellent, average, or a crime against your timer. Resetting until a useful spawn appears is normal in Minecraft speedrunning. For this route, the best early target is a nearby village. Every second spent wandering before tools, food, or lava is already on the clock, so beginners should treat poor spawns as practice only or reset quickly.

Useful spawn features include:

• A village
• A surface lava pool
• A ruined portal with a chest
• Nearby gravel

For practice only, this seed starts in a village with helpful resources nearby:

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2. Make Basic Tools Fast

The first goal is reaching the Nether quickly. Punch wood, craft a wooden pickaxe, mine cobblestone, then make a stone axe, stone shovel, and stone pickaxe.

Skip the sword. The axe handles both tree cutting and early combat, and saving a few seconds matters more than looking properly armed.

3. Loot the Village

A village gives the run food, beds, and possibly iron or obsidian. If no village appears nearby, reset or keep searching, but beginners should avoid village-free routes until the basics feel comfortable.

Build a three-block tower beside the iron golem, stand above it, and attack with the axe. The golem cannot hit you from that position if the setup is correct. Jumping for critical hits saves time.

After the golem dies, collect the iron immediately and loot. Bring the crafting table, spare wood, and spare cobblestone with you while moving through the village so crafting detours do not become their own tiny side quest.

• Hay bales, or another reliable food source
• Seven beds
• Iron bars, if a blacksmith has them
• Obsidian, if a blacksmith or ruined portal provides it

Turn hay bales into wheat, then bread. Steal beds from houses. If there are not enough beds, wool and string can help make more.

If a blacksmith chest has enough iron for a bucket, flint and steel, and an iron pickaxe, the golem kill can be skipped. If it also has ten obsidian, or enough to complete a nearby ruined portal, build or repair the portal and jump ahead to the Nether section.

4. Get Flint and Craft Key Items

Find gravel, usually near water, and dig with the stone shovel until flint drops. Use the iron from the golem or chest to craft a bucket, flint and steel, and an iron pickaxe if there is enough iron left. Fill the bucket with water.

If the golem drops only three iron and no other iron is available, mine and smelt iron as quickly as possible. A bucket and flint and steel are required for the normal route.

Before making the portal, the inventory should include:

• Stone axe
• Stone pickaxe
• Stone shovel
• Extra wood
• Extra cobblestone
• Crafting table
• Bread or another food source
• Seven beds
• Water bucket
• Flint and steel
• Iron pickaxe if available
• Obsidian if available

5. Build the Nether Portal

If a surface lava pool was spotted, return to it. Otherwise, dig down carefully enough to find lava without turning the run into a cautionary tale.

The goal is to use lava, water, and blocks to form a Nether portal without mining obsidian. This takes practice, so a visual guide helps.

Light the portal with flint and steel, then enter the Nether.

6. Record Portal Coordinates

Once inside, press F3 and write down the portal coordinates. Losing the portal after a strong Nether section is one of the fastest ways to ruin a run. The timer will not feel sympathy.

The Nether goal is to collect at least twelve ender pearls and six blaze rods.

7. Barter With Piglins

Search for piglins, with bastion remnants being a strong place to find them. Mine Nether gold ore along the way, craft the gold nuggets into gold ingots, and throw ingots to piglins.

Unlike villagers, piglins do not use a trading menu. They accept gold ingots tossed near them. Trapping piglins in a hole keeps them close and prevents wandering or attacks while bartering.

Each gold ingot has a chance to produce two to four ender pearls. Twelve pearls are the minimum target, though extras are useful because eyes of ender can break.

If gravel remains, it can be dropped into the piglin pit to push items upward while suffocating the piglins after trading. Efficient, grim, and very Minecraft.

8. Kill Blazes

Find a Nether fortress and kill Blazes. Six blaze rods are usually enough, but seven adds safety.

Fortress luck can decide the run. If the fortress is far away, the time loss may be severe, but for practice, finish the route anyway. Learning the full sequence matters more than resetting every imperfect attempt.

After collecting rods, return to the portal using the saved coordinates.

9. Locate the Stronghold

Back in the Overworld, craft blaze rods into blaze powder, then combine powder with pearls to make eyes of ender.

Throw an eye and follow its direction. Pick it back up when possible, since eyes can break and spares are limited. When the eye travels downward, dig toward the stronghold. Extra eyes are useful if supplies allow, but the route only works if enough remain for the portal frames.

10. Enter the End

Search the stronghold for the End portal. Chests can provide armor or supplies, but do not over-loot unless survival depends on it.

Place eyes of ender into the empty portal frames, then jump in.

11. Defeat the Dragon With Beds

Speedruns often kill the dragon using bed explosions. Beds explode in the End when a player tries to sleep, and those explosions deal heavy damage if placed correctly.

The usual beginner method is to wait for the dragon to perch, place beds near the portal fountain, and trigger them at the right moment. Around six good explosions can kill the dragon.

What to Practice First

Beginners improve fastest by separating the run into drills instead of repeating full attempts every time. Practice lava pool portal building until it feels automatic, then practice looting villages without backtracking. After that, run Nether drills focused on saving coordinates, spotting fortresses, mining gold safely, and trapping piglins quickly.

Dragon practice also matters. Create a separate world or use practice setups to learn bed timing before trying it at the end of a real run. A clean Nether section followed by missed bed explosions is a painful lesson, and speedrunning already provides enough of those for free.

For official submissions, check the current rules on Speedrun.com before recording. Category requirements, allowed versions, timing rules, and verification standards can change, so confirm the rules before chasing a personal best intended for the leaderboard.

After the First Finish

Completing a first run is only the starting point. From there, practice faster resets, cleaner lava portals, safer bastion routes, better blaze fights, and more consistent dragon beds.

Players who want to practice routes with friends can run a vanilla Minecraft server through HolyHosting and reset worlds as often as needed.