It’s Time to Slay the Dragon
Entry 14 ()
’Bout time!
There wasn’t much left to do but grab the supplies I’d already gathered for the occasion – the usual combat essentials, plus some potions and a totem for good measure. I also upgraded Trueshot to perfection and decided to put my idle netherite ingot to use on my leggings. Steeling my nerves, I made for the stronghold, where I’d left one last eye of ender for the big day.
This world’s End was generous with its spawn platform, burying it safely inside the island. Glad the fight didn’t have to start with bridge‐building.
It was generous with the end crystals, too – the caged ones were low enough to easily take out from underneath, and I even managed to get most of the others from the ground, only having to make the climb up one of the tallest pillars.
But I’m pretty sure those were just lucky shots, because I was downright abysmal at hitting the dragon herself after the crystals were down. Such a waste of that newly‐upgraded Power and Punch 😔
After some more dancing and flooding away a couple endermen, opportunity came: She needed to rest again… and this time I remembered I’d brought a Strength potion along.
Yes!
Day 1,410: It took 47 game months, but we’ve made it. The End is freed!
Ah, but there’s so much adventure still to see…
After enjoying the end poem and an hour of credits that I have since learned you can speed up, I found myself back home in Roam, having forgotten to hit the bed next to the end portal. This revealed a flaw in my railway setup: It really relies on always departing from the same station you last arrived at. I didn’t have a cart because mine was still at the stronghold, and even if I just used a new one to get there, the station would be blocked and I’d just bounce off it and back up the line.
Oh well; with any luck, soon there’ll be plenty of room in the ender chest to just always stash the cart there after use. I regeared and walked back down the track – being very careful not to fall descending the ramp – and returned to the End to look for our first gateway. Locating it off to the northwest, I towered up and made a platform to crawl through from.
I also stashed nearly all my stuff in the ender chest. Really not a fan of void bridging.
The End was not as generous with this gateway as it was with the spawn platform, dropping me on the very edge of one of the small islands. But hey, that’s what the ender chest precautions were for, after all. Head pumpkined and butthole clenched, I began slabbing my way across the void towards a larger island in the distance.
I continued north, but didn’t make it far before running out of terrain. It didn’t look like there was much to the east, either, so I turned west – and soon saw land’s end there, too. But beyond that…
Thankfully, no shulkers were close enough to take notice, and I could take my time digging through the ender chest to regear.
Didn’t even make it to the front door without getting levitated.
The first few rounds climbing the towers actually went pretty smooth, and it wasn’t too long before I’d cleared the way to the dock.
Reaching the ship would mean crossing over the void, so I downed a Feather Falling potion and got to bridging.
And that was the hardest part of the pirating, really. These ships are honestly kind of anticlimactic – hiding arguably the most game‐changing item in Minecraft behind basically no defenses other than a whole three of the exact same shulkers that guard the rest of the city… two of which can often be taken out at a distance anyway.
Still, that didn’t make the treasure any less sweet.
Tasting dessert would have to wait, though, as I wasn’t even halfway through the city. Without so much as trying them on, I put the elytra away in the ender chest and got back to pillaging, loading up on as many shulker shells as I could.
The rest of the raid wasn’t all smooth sailing. Towards the end of the night, I found myself absolutely under assault trying to scale a large tower. I had the brilliant idea to just ender pearl up to the top so I could recover and work my way back down – but I glitched through the ceiling and… just kept going. I held onto the totem just in case, because it was a long way down once the Levitation ran out and I’d already used my only Feather Falling potion taking the ship.
Finished up in the city, I decided to pack up and return to the Overworld, leaving the second city for another trip. But there was one more thing to grab before jumping through the portal…
Safely back at home, I looked over the night’s spoils.
I wanted to test out the elytra, but those things are pretty fragile and I wanted to get them protected first. Mending was simple to add, compliments of my Mending guy in Intersylva, but I was fresh out of Unbreaking books. One afternoon of fishing and enchanting later, I warned myself, “Careful Icarus..”
I did make one more trip back into the End – to do a little mapping and also check out that second city near the first one.
It was unimpressive.
Then, on the way out again, I ran into some trouble. At the outer gateway, I built up a platform with a ladder and trapdoor to match the one at the inner gateway. (I really hadn’t felt like bothering after the big city raid, so I just ender pearled back through the first time.) Coming through this time, I glitched into the bedrock and started suffocating! I couldn’t move, and ender pearls weren’t working either – I had to resort to turning cheats on and escaping via spectator mode.
I retried a few times and consistently got stuck and suffocated every single time coming back. I assume it has to do with crawling, and I speculate it also has to do with the southeast rule (we’ve had no trouble with the trapdoor method on my friend’s server). But I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time experimenting, so I just moved the platforms away from the gateways and reverted to using ender pearls for now.
Anyway, once I got home I made sure to put the trophies on display, proudly above the jukebox.
So what’s next? Good question. More exploring for sure, but specifically…? I’ve got that ocean explorer map to follow, and there’s plenty of uncharted territory inside the Halo, but I’d also love to see more of the Halo itself and the new stuff beyond… all solid choices! And now that I can better survey the world from above, I’d like to do some more building, and particularly to challenge myself to go for form over function.
First, though, I’ll be stepping away for a bit. I’ve averaged over an hour a day since I started playing this world ten months ago (to the day, actually, as of this post) – and that’s just play time, not even including the time spent generating it and putting it together, nor repairing it a few times, let alone working on this stupid thing… and while that’s not exactly an unhealthy, glued‐to‐the‐screen number or anything, it is a lot for me personally – especially for just one world on one game! Usually I kind of just drift from interest to interest and don’t fixate on any one of them for more than a few weeks, if that.
Probably making this site a project as I (re)learn to code has helped it stick. But I do have other projects I want to work on, and I’m starting to move focus from HTML/CSS to actual programming, which is less applicable here since I don’t exactly want to load this place up with unnecessary JS. Anyway, it will probably be longer than usual until the next update, and that update probably won’t offer much in the way of content. I’ve got some cleanup to do now that I actually sorta know what I’m doing.
Until next time!