Gateways to Eternity Mod Guide: Summon Waves & Get Endless Loot

The Gateways to Eternity mod is one of the most rewarding mods you can add to Minecraft. It lets you summon escalating waves of mobs through craftable gateways, and if you survive every wave, you’ll walk away with massive amounts of loot and experience. In this guide, you’ll learn how to craft each gateway, how to read their wave details, how to activate them, and what to expect — including what happens when you fail.

What Gateways Are Available?

To see every gateway available in the mod, open JEI (Just Enough Items) and search for gate. By default, the mod includes the following gateways:

Blaze Gateway

Enderman Gateway

Slime Gateway of the Emerald Grove

Endless Blaze Gateway

Gateway of the Overworld (the Unites)

Gateway of the Hellish Fortress

Each gateway has its own crafting recipe visible directly in JEI. If you are playing inside a mod pack, the mod developer may have changed which gateways are available or altered their recipes. The gateways listed above reflect the default installation of the mod.

How to Read Gateway Wave Information in JEI

Before you craft and activate a gateway, it’s worth understanding exactly what you’re getting into. Using the Blaze Gateway as an example: hover over it in JEI and hold Shift to reveal its wave breakdown. You can then scroll through the wave details to see what each wave contains.

Wave Breakdown Example: Blaze Gateway

The Blaze Gateway consists of 5 waves, each progressively harder than the last:

Wave 1: 3 Blazes — rewards 10 Blaze loot rolls.

Wave 2: Blazes with more health, armor, and damage — rewards 15 Blaze loot rolls.

Wave 5: 7 very powerful Blazes — rewards a large amount of experience.

Completing all 5 waves earns you the Key Reward: 75 loot rolls from Blaze loot tables. Each wave scales up in difficulty, so be prepared before you begin.

Gateway Rules and Modifiers Explained

Some gateways come with special rules and penalties. For example, one gateway applies a blindness penalty for 20 seconds and summons 2 witches if you fail to complete it. Understanding the rules of each gateway before you activate it is essential.

Here are the key rule settings you may encounter across different gateways:

Default Spawn Range: How far from the gateway mobs are allowed to spawn.

Leash Range: How close an entity must stay before the out-of-bounds rule triggers.

Dimension Rule: Whether entities must remain in the same dimension.

Player Damage Only: Whether mobs must be killed by the player specifically, or if other damage sources count.

Entity Disappear on Fail: Whether mobs vanish if the gateway fails (usually true by default).

Fail on Out of Bounds: If an entity strays too far, the entire gateway fails.

Allow Discarding: Determines whether entities marked as “discarded” count as valid kills.

How to Craft a Gateway

Each gateway has a specific crafting recipe visible in JEI. Simply look up the gateway item you want and craft it using the ingredients shown. The recipes differ between gateway types, so double-check the recipe for whichever one you’re targeting.

How to Activate a Gateway

Once you have a gateway item crafted, find a suitable open area with plenty of space around it. Right-click the gateway item on a block to place and activate it. A message will appear at the top of your screen indicating the gate wave is starting, along with a countdown timer and the number of enemies in that wave.

Defeat all enemies within the time limit to complete each wave and progress to the next one. Between waves, you’ll have a short window to recover and pick up any loot that has already dropped.

Loot Tips: Use Your Looting Sword at the Right Moment

This is one of the most important tips in this guide. When a wave ends and the gateway distributes its loot — specifically when you kill the final mob of a wave or complete all five waves — the game checks whether you are actively holding a sword with the Looting enchantment. Simply having the sword in your inventory is not enough. You must be holding it in your hand at the moment the loot spawns to receive the bonus rolls.

The same principle applies to Fortune depending on what you’re killing. Make it a habit to switch to your looting sword just before you land the killing blow on the final enemy of each wave.

Completing All Five Waves: The Loot Payoff

If you survive all five waves of the Blaze Gateway, the gateway structure will disintegrate and release a large pile of Blaze Rods along with a significant experience reward. As an example, going from level 16 to level 25 in a single completed gateway run is entirely achievable, making these gateways one of the most efficient ways to farm both materials and XP.

What Happens If You Fail a Gateway?

If you run out of time on a wave, or the gateway cannot spawn mobs correctly, the gateway will fail. A dramatic bolt of lightning will strike the structure, closing the gateway permanently. Any penalties defined in that gateway’s rules — such as blindness or witch spawns — will then be applied to you.

The Endless Gateway: How It Works

The Endless Blaze Gateway works differently from the standard gateways. Rather than having a fixed number of waves, it continues indefinitely. However, it uses an Endless Modifier that applies every 5 waves, up to a maximum of 3 applications. Each time the modifier applies, it reduces the maximum wave time by 40 seconds and also shortens the setup time between waves.

This means the Endless Gateway won’t run forever in practice. As the modifier stacks and the time limits become increasingly tight, you will eventually run out of time on a wave. When that happens, the gateway closes in exactly the same way as a failed standard gateway. Think of it as a survival challenge — push for as many waves as you can before time runs out.

Summary

The Gateways to Eternity mod is an excellent addition to any Minecraft modpack, offering structured, high-risk, high-reward combat encounters. Here’s a quick recap of everything covered in this guide:

Search gate in JEI to find all available gateways and their crafting recipes.

Hold Shift on a gateway item in JEI to preview its wave structure, enemy scaling, and loot rewards.

Pay attention to each gateway’s rules — especially out-of-bounds failure conditions and penalties for failing.

Right-click the gateway item on a block to activate it in an open area.

Always hold your Looting sword when the final mob of a wave dies to maximize loot rolls.

Completing all waves of the Blaze Gateway rewards 75 loot rolls and substantial XP gains.

Failing a gateway triggers a lightning strike and closes the portal — some gateways also apply penalties.

The Endless Gateway runs indefinitely but becomes progressively harder every 5 waves until you inevitably run out of time.

Whether you’re a player looking to farm resources or a mod developer considering including Gateways to Eternity in an adventure pack, this mod delivers a genuinely exciting and scalable combat experience. Good luck surviving the waves!

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