How to Beat an Enderman

1. 1
   Wear a carved pumpkin

   Equip a carved_pumpkin in your helmet slot. While worn, looking directly at an Enderman never aggros it, you can stare, line up, and approach with zero risk of the teleport-and-hit cycle.
2. 2
   Pin it in a 2-tall nook

   Enderman are 2.9 blocks tall, so a 2-high overhang stops them teleporting onto open ground. Lure it under a 2-block ceiling (an obsidian or end-stone lip), it can't warp up and out.
3. 3
   Drop a water block

   Enderman take damage standing in water and try to teleport out. Place one water source at its feet: it either takes contact damage or wastes teleports relocating, buying you free hits.
4. 4
   Strike on the crit window

   It has 40 HP (20 hearts). A diamond_sword crit deals ~10.5; a Sharpness V netherite crit deals ~13. Jump-attack for crits, 4 clean crits end it before it recovers stagger.
5. 5
   Re-acquire after a warp

   If it does blink away, don't chase blind. Look down/away to break aggro, reposition under cover, then re-aim. Never fight one in open End void terrain where it has infinite warp space.

Why a 2-tall roof pins it

An Enderman is 2.9 blocks tall. When it takes a hit it tries to teleport, but the landing has to be a spot it physically fits in. It can try up to 64 times to find one, each attempt landing within about 32 blocks on every axis, and it skips any spot that is blocked or sits on water.

Put it under a 2-block ceiling and almost every nearby target is too short. It burns its teleports going nowhere while you keep swinging. That single number, 2.9 against a gap of 2, is the whole trap.

Calm walks, angry sprints

The moment it aggros, an Enderman speeds up by half. Bedrock uses two speeds: 0.3 calm, 0.45 angry, a flat 1.5x. Running is not an option once it is on you, which is exactly why the fight has to happen against a wall and not in the open.

Calm0.3 JAVA + BEDROCK

Angry0.45 BEDROCK

What water actually does

Standing water and rain hurt an Enderman the same way fire does, and any tick of that damage sends it into the teleport loop.

The clever part is the escape it cannot use. It refuses to teleport onto a wet landing spot, so a puddle at its feet is somewhere it can neither stay in nor warp away from cleanly. A thrown splash water bottle is the ranged version: it deals a flat 1 damage to every water-sensitive mob it splashes, tagging a whole group at once.

Rain does the same contact damage out in the open, which is why a storm turns an Enderman hunt into a panic of teleports. Fight under cover, and bring the water to it.

The ender pearl math

Most people fighting Endermen are farming pearls for Eyes of Ender, and the drop is stingy. Java gives 0 to 1 pearl per kill, plus 0 to 1 extra per level of Looting JAVA. So bare, you average half a pearl a kill.

You need roughly 12 pearls for a full set of eyes to find and light the End portal (each eye is one pearl and one blaze powder, and a few eyes shatter on use). At Looting III the ceiling rises to 4 per kill, cutting the grind by more than half.

Quick answers

Checked against Java 26.2 and Bedrock 1.26.30, August 2026.