Block of the Week: End Stone

Journey to the End and you’ll find a dimension of eternal, starless night - a gently fizzing purple void in which float sallow islands of… what exactly?

Well, according to Jens, end stone is just an inverted, tinted cobblestone texture - but don’t let that stop your imaginations! I personally think of it as some porous, coral-like substance, naturally accruing from unseen spores that float in the haze of night. It certainly has stranger properties than cobblestone: slightly more resistant, invulnerable to the attacks of the ender dragon, and impossible for endermen to displace.

One central island of the stuff is surrounded by an expanse of nothing, then encircled by more islands, where you will find the mysteriously crooked end cities and shulkers, clustered among the purpur.

But it was not always so! Originally the End was going to be the Sky Dimension - a world not unlike that of the Overworld, but torn free of the bedrock to float in chunks in an endless expanse of blue. But it ran into problems.

“It didn’t work so well because of how light is calculated,” says Jens. "The Sky Dimension originally had this top down light that the Overworld has, so you get like shadows in caves and such. But performance wise, it didn’t work - it was extremely slow. So we removed the sun – now everything is evenly lit unless you’ve got a torch.”

And what about the mysterious material of end stone itself? What fabled history lies behinds its creation? What strange secrets does it hold? What dark machinations did its developers have in mind?

Oh.

Um.

See you next week, Block of the Week fans!