The End Needs A Nether Update

The Nether got a really nice update lately. What was once nothing but Netherrack and lava is now… almost a paradise. Alright, sure, the Nether is literally a hellscape. It’s designed to be a dangerous place full of scary, gloomy monsters. But the Nether at least now has some variation. The End could do with something similar.

The original Nether was mediocre.

Up until the Nether Fortresses were added, there was no real reason to even go to the Nether, aside from traveling. Distances in the nether are one eighth of that in the surface world, so you can use the Nether to make highways to travel long distances. With the release version of Minecraft, the Nether became vital, as you need Blaze Powder to make Eyes of Ender. And those Eyes of Ender lead you to the End Portal on the surface.

The Nether update made it so the Nether is actually interesting. You no longer just rush in, kill some Blazes and then rush out again. There’s different biomes with different environments and soundscapes. Heck, if you want to, you can live entirely in the Nether.

What was once a barren waste of nothingness and lava is now a genuinely cool and interesting place.

The End is like the original Nether.

Funnily enough, the End is actually a lot like the Nether in a lot of ways. You need a portal to get to it, there’s unique enemies and blocks there and it’s gone through a similar development cycle. It was originally an empty space with very little to it apart from some boss-level enemies. Then, like the Nether, the End did get a bit of an expansion and its own structures. While the Nether has Nether Fortresses, which spawn semi-regularly, the End had… End Cities. Which were more like large, purple towers, jutting out of an otherwise rather flat landscape.

There’s nothing really in the End.

Okay, I get it. The End is the opposite of the Nether, islands in a void rather than an eternal cave. But the End has nothing to it. Once you’ve beaten the Ender Dragon and can wander around, all you can see are, well, Endermen and End Stone. Taking the portals that spawn will take you to more End Stone and Endermen, as well as the only type of plant in the Nether. If you’re lucky, you’ll find an End Ship or End City and get some Shulkers. Once you have your Elytra and Shulker shells, you don’t really need anything else.

And you certainly won’t SEE anything else. Most of the End Cities look the same and the End Ships are all identical.

Now though, the End needs a facelift.

The End needs Biomes.

What makes the Nether so cool and fun now is that there’s different biomes to explore, and that you can live in the Nether indefinitely. Heck, all we need is a way to access Strongholds and you could theoretically beat the game without leaving the Nether. The End can’t compete with that.

The solution is honestly pretty simple. Just add some new biomes to the End, as well as ways to properly live in the End too. Add some sort of new tree, some mobs that provide meat and maybe some Enderman-based traders. Heck, the overall theme is pretty well set up already for the End, so it’s easy to build from. The most important thing though is to add a basic wood-like resource so you can build your own tools, as well as a way to access iron. But that shouldn’t be too difficult, especially since End Stone is easy to mine through.

There’s an added bonus.

When you update Minecraft and get new biomes, you’ll often get ugly borders, where old and new meet. But with the End, most of it is empty space! This means that the straight edges between biomes won’t be nearly as pronounced as they are in the Overworld or the Nether.

So why not? Why not make the End as great as the Nether? After all, it’s such a cool premise, it’d be a shame to leave it as it is.