Table of Contents
The Sky Dimension was the beginning of The End. It wasn't The End, but it was the inverse of The Nether, the opposite of hell, a heavenly dimension, a peaceful dream world composed of floating masses of grassy hills. It wasn't entirely planned and its world generation was left unused.
At the time, there was a popular mod that took advantage of this aethereal generation. The Aether was indeed a dreamy, heavenly world above the clouds. It was dotted with mobs - passive, hostile, and even bosses - it could be considered a second Overworld.
Never implemented as originally envisioned. A technical difficulty arose: slowdowns caused by the presence of light. The obvious solution? Full brightness was off-putting, ominous, and eventually scrapped.
Notch had just added "new dungeons" without clear purpose to the public, and a great red dragon was supposedly underway. An "albino" cobblestone was also added, and there had been fuss about the Sky Dimension.
The Sky turned into The End as Notch wanted the game to reach full release, an End to the Beta cycle, and End the list of missing things from Minecraft: an ending.
The original inhabitants were derived from a creepypasta popular at the time: Slender Man would stalk his victims for years, causing them to generate paranoia and mental sickness before attacking.
The End is a dimension of Void. Devoid of anything but nothing. Its islands? Barren, empty lands. Unwelcoming, unforgiving, and uncaring. The sky is a starless window into the Void, above, below, and sideways. No obvious path home, the omnipresent Void and distance from familiar terrain inject overwhelming alienation and a deep sense of remoteness and isolation.
Endermen reinforce the isolation. They exist, they are sociable in their hauntings, but look at them and they turn aggressive toward you. In cases where mob spawning is off or the mobcap is taken, the lack of endermen is eerie on the next level: you are the only living being in all you can see.
Shulkers and their floating cities unaffected by gravity are only lootables, a reward for venturing the depths of The End. Chorus trees don't take from the challenge as its fruits are specialized food, and the flowers hard to get.
This unique environment is thus overwhelmingly alienating: hydroallergic teletransporting bodies, tree trunks behaving like upside-down roots, artificial buildings floating in the sky and organized like trees, boxes that emit implausible anti-graviton particles[1], and an infinite distance from home.
The End is a dimension for the end of the game. The Player has done everything they wanted to do in the Overworld and the Nether, and will take it to the End of the World. Reaching The End is the reward to The Player for proving their preseverance and strength. The End is an empty space for The Player. An entire dimension for The Player to manipulate.
Additionally, The Player is also rewarded with incredibly overpowered items as lootables: diamond armor and tools well enchanted, potions of healing, Enderman-style on-demand teleportation fruits, and wings of glide - all of which are only dreams in the minds of those who can't yet reach The End.
Though it may have been rushed to provide an ending to a videogame, its design is not random. Falling into the Void in The End means the end for your belongings, and your body - you will die and not even the Totem of Undying will help you, your items will too fall into the Void, to forever be lost.
Landmasses lack features because any features would be somethings, and somethings are not nothings. Trees are somethings and not nothings, and the Void hungers on somethings. Chorus and shulkers float upward, away from the immediate danger that is the Void, Endermen teleport away. They are native to this land, they have grown used to danger and have the ability to evade it.
There are very few ground truths about The End. Of those truths, we know The End is its own separate dimension, and it's the home of the Endermen. It may be safe to assume that The End has never been prosperous and that it will never be.
Players eager for an update to The End, claiming it is empty, duly so, but they may not understand the meaning of The End. Indeed, some player creations paint it as a bright and lively dimension (paulevs, 2020) (JDoesStuff, 2020), others make it prettier (Shrimpsnail, 2021) (BlockyBoi, 2021), some import and combine different existing biomes to outrageous results... Abridging for brevity, very few players understand the atmosphere of The End (_humanoid, 2021) (Starmute, 2021) to impressive results, often exceptionally.
Gamewise, The End is a land of conquest, merely a stage for pillaging. Elytra, shulker boxes, and Jane's egg. The greatest advantage of The End is not to visit it: many strongholds and the proximity of the Fountain to the spawn platform make The End an overpowering one-way teleporter. Builds exist to streamline this.
Though its atmosphere is forboding at first encounter, it is largely ignored by players.
The End shouldn't be updated to be prosperous as it is devoid of something. Any items and blocks exclusive to The End must come from nothing, they must feel alien as we only know matters from something, but The End is matter from nothing.
Indeed, this is a sentiment shared by Pearce (a.k.a. kingbdogz), though as a fan, stating he'd like The End to "feel like an ethereal, end-of-all-things place"[2], not all hope is lost.
1: gravitons (G) are the theorised, currently hypothetical quantum particles that enact gravity. It's currently hypothethised that there are no antigravitons because a G's antiparticle is itself, and that it also can't have any equivalent with negative mass (if that's even possible) as G's are massless. A shulker's bullet, even at the most liberal interpretations, is physically implausible.
2: Scicraft Discord guild, snapshot discussion channel, source message.
*: I'm a massive fan of The End, it spooks me and it amazes me.
NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT BLOG POST. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT