I think I figured it all out.

I think I just pieced together the Minecraft Lore, especially regarding the End and the nature of the End.

As a disclaimer, I will be using a lot of ideas from Game Theory’s video on the complete story of Minecraft. If you would like to watch the video, you can find it in their channel.

But summarizing what the video says, the Minecraft timeline begins with the Piglin Invasion from Minecraft Legends. The Hosts, the gods of the Overworld, summon a group of humans from the future to fend off against the Piglin forces. Then, when the war is won, the Hosts leave the humans to their own devices to “explore new worlds”.

Those humans would multiply and multiply, eventually splitting into tribes and kingdoms, the most notable ones being the Desert Kingdom and Savannah Tribe. They began to experiment with the world’s resources, which really ruined the ecosystem, flooding the entire Savannah Tribe as they searched for a way to bring back the gods with what we now know as the Ocean Monuments, but to no avail. They would go on to become the Drowned.

Noticing how things were on a downward slope, the Desert Tribe forged an alliance with the Illagers, who taught them the power of soul and how to harness it to create life, examples being the Guardians, Blazes, and Breezes… more on the Breeze later. They invaded the Nether a second time, hoping to collect Soul Sand and create a new God out of soul power; one who would magically solve all their problems. The result was the Wither, which chased the people into the underground, where they built the Ancient City. Using what the Illagers taught them, they created Breezes and built the Trial Chambers in an effort to train an army potent enough to kill the Wither.

But it failed. The Wither easily blasted through the army, and the nameless kingdom was forced to activate a portal to the Sculk Dimension. This brought in the Warden, which killed the Wither, but also began killing hundreds of people for making noise. That’s why the city is covered in Sculk… because it absorbs soul. The remaining survivors that escaped the Warden built the Strongholds and ran away to the End, where they were corrupted into Endermen over time. The other ancient builders slowly died off too, becoming the Zombies and Skeletons.

The Illagers, idolizing the kingdom that had fled to the End, waited in the Overworld patiently for their heroes to return, but to no avail. So they began doing whatever necessary to bring them back, building fake replicas of the End Portal and other such structures. Eventually, this led them into violence, pillaging the Villages of the Overworld, kidnapping Villagers and injecting Lapis into their brains to turn them into Vindicators, distorting other Villagers into Ravagers, merging Allays into Vexes, et cetera.

Thousands of years later, Minecraft takes place. You uncover remnants of the ancient civilizations you come from, and ultimately what happened to them. Nothing of importance happens in Minecraft, since it’s more sandbox than story.

This is where Game Theory’s ideas end. Now it’s all me.

After you defeat the Ender Dragon, things start to change. The few remaining humans begin to repopulate slowly, and technology greatly advances. Cue Minecraft Dungeons. Hypnotized by the power of a mysterious orb called the Orb of Dominance, Archie the Arch-Illager united the Illagers in an attempt to conquer the whole Overworld… but a team of brave heroes stops him in his tracks. The Orb of Dominance then takes matters into its own hands, revealing itself as the “Heart of Ender”. The next few DLCs, culminating in the Echoing Void DLC, revolve around the heroes chasing down the Heart of Ender to stop it once and for all.

See, this is a satisfactory narrative of the Minecraft storyline, but I always had one question.

How on earth did the ancient builders find their way into the End? There was no sign of the End even existing in the Overworld, unlike the Nether, which left behind its broken portals and such. Moreover, in the book “The Rise of the Arch-Illager”, it is the Heart of Ender that tells Archie how to build Highblock Castle, then the book specifically states that it felt as though the castle had always been there… as if it were ancient.

This means that the Heart of Ender had seen Highblock Castle before in the far past, and knew how to rebuild it. But wait… how is that possible? The only people we know of that were under the grasp of the Orb were the Piglins and the Illagers… right?

Well, the book mentions that the castle was always there. The real question is, who built it? One might say the ancient Illagers did, but they couldn’t have. The book explicitly mentions that the Illagers had never really handed together under one leader before Archie came along, and therefore it wouldn’t make sense for them to have built such a large castle, with a throne room. So if not the Illagers, who? Only one viable option remains…

The Ancient Builders.

Stay with me now. Here’s what I propose.

The humans, after defeating the Piglins in Legends, took the Orb of Dominance from them… they were mentally stronger than the Piglins, right? They could handle the orb… but as they advanced in technology, the Heart continued to speak to them and influence them, making them ruin the ecosystem. It foiled their attempts to bring back the Hosts by melting ice caps and flooding the Ocean Monuments, it ruined ecosystems, it rarified ores like Diamonds and Emeralds, et cetera… until finally, getting the builders desperate enough, it taught them how to access the End. There they were corrupted into Endermen, who are canonically trying to bring about the collapse of every dimension (according to the 2019 book Minecraft Game Design). Then the Orb returned to the Overworld, patiently waiting for a new unfortunate soul to come up so it could cause further destruction to the Overworld… and it found one in Archie.

This leaves one last question. Why???

The answer is simple. The Heart of Ender is called, well, the Heart OF ENDER. Ender’s Heart. And what are the Eyes of Ender called? Eyes OF ENDER. Ender’s Eyes. The one behind the schemes of the Heart of Ender is none other than the owner of the Heart itself, some mysterious figure named Ender.

We know nothing about Ender. But based on what I’ve mentioned above, we know two things… for some reason they shattered into different parts, including the Eyes and the Heart, and that its Heart is hell-bent on ending the world.

What if the entire Minecraft storyline, at the end of the day (no pun intended), is about this “evil host” Ender trying to expand the End to all dimensions, including the Overworld, Nether, and more, maybe in an effort to re-assemble itself?

The idea doesn’t seem too far-fetched, at least to me.

Hope that made sense to you all! If you don’t believe my theory anyway, I at least hope you found it amusing to read!

Thank you, and God bless 🙏🏻