Block of the Month: Ender Chest

Minecraft has a lot of options when it comes to storage. There are chests, of course. There are barrels. There are trapped chests, and chests in boats and minecarts and on donkeys. There are shulker boxes, in all the colours of the rainbow. But my favorite of all is the Ender chest, which just so happens to also be our block of the month.

Ender chests are really, really handy. Put some stuff into one, and you can then access that stuff from any other Ender chest in any dimension – including an Ender chest that you’ve brought with you and placed down solely for that purpose. Effectively, this means your lesser-used tools (e.g. hoe, flint and steel, shears) and building materials, or your most valuable finds, can sit in a single inventory slot so you can carry home more cobblestone from your mining trips.

Ender chests were added to Minecraft in August 2012, alongside emerald ore, golden apples and wooden slabs. They were based on a design suggested by Redditor soapawake about a year beforehand. Soapawake’s original recipe called for an ender pearl surrounded by wooden planks, but user @fivedollarlunch suggested in the comments it be surrounded by obsidian instead. Jeb then tweaked it to require an eye of ender – and that gave us the recipe we have today.

As well as their dislocated storage potential, Ender chests have a few other interesting qualities. The contents of an Ender chest are unique to each player, meaning that they’re a great way to secure valuable items on a multiplayer server – if a thief opens one up, all they’ll see is their own Ender chest inventory.

Ender chests also emit a small amount of light, but on the flipside they can’t be made into a double chest, placed onto donkeys, mules or llamas, or pushed with pistons. Be wary, too, of opening one up near a piglin – they’ll want to know what’s inside, and they can be very forceful when they want something.

You might not think that there’s any real-world equivalent of an Ender chest, but you’d be wrong. Once upon a time, if you wanted to hear a piece of music, then you’d need to be in the same place as the musician and they’d need to want to play it. 

Then along came recording technology. People figured out that you could capture the vibrations in the air produced by a sound and capture them on paper, wax, or soft metal. Later, they figured out that they could copy these recordings, and reprint them onto vinyl and then magnetic tape. Before long, a musician could perform once and could then be heard millions of times, all over the world.

But then something else happened. People figured out that you could digitise those recordings – turning them into long strings of 1s and 0s, like a redstone pulse. Today, you don’t need a vinyl record, or a cassette tape, to listen to music – the Ender chests of the real world are data centers where you can store more music, or photos, or movies, or documents, or Minecraft worlds, than any one person could ever experience in a lifetime. 

In fact, it’s thanks to a datacentre that you’re reading these very words – and I think we can both agree that it’s very much preferable to me coming round to your house and shouting in your ear about how great data centers are. So profound thanks go to both datacentres and to Ender chests, for saving us all a lot of bother.