#endstone

First of all, honeycomb weathering needs saltwater. This is because it erodes sandstone kind of like how ice erodes rocks, the salt crystals solidify and loosen the sandstone particles. There is no ocean in the end, and even if there was, it’d have to splash the end islands like millenia-roasting rotisserie chickens for full coverage.

Endstone takes 50% longer to mine than both cobble and sandstone, meaning it’s likely much more resilient. Honeycomb weathering is common in sandstone in the first place because it’s such a soft sedimentary stone! 

So it’s not honeycomb weathering. What else could it be?

Maybe all those pockmarks are caused by space debris hurtling through the end, like on asteroids and moons. But that must be a lot of debris traveling at high speeds for no reason, for the End islands to have around 12 craters per square meter! You’d think it’d be dealing constant damage to the player! That doesn’t explain why the insides of the end island have the pits too. And if you really look at the surface of an asteroid, it’s just a normal sterile rock field!

(Image courtesy of the MASCOT Lander, 2019)

So perhaps the end islands are igneous rocks like pumice? Those are filled with bubbles caused by their rapid cooling as they exit their volcano of origin! They’re even yellowish sometimes like endstone! But there’s a problem.

These holes are too tiny. It’s already a stretch to make pumice form at all, let alone at such a huge scale, without writing some nuts theory about an enormous planet-sized volcano that had its geothermic energy harvested by the Old Builders™ to fuel their dimensional gateway experiments, which went horribly wrong resulting in an eruption that literally tore the universe into thirds... ok maybe somebody should write that. I digress.

Geology has failed me. Let’s get into biology. “But Neato,” you say, “we’re talking about what kind of weird rock endstone could be. Surely, that doesn’t have anything to do with biology!”

Don’t call me “Shirley.” anyway it’s bones

ok ok hear me out. Coral skeletons.

They construct their own skeletons out of limestone, which is left behind when their soft tissue rots away. I’m not necessarily saying that the End islands used to be enormous coral colonies, but I am saying that they certainly could have been alive. They were alien creatures, able to create such structures on such a large scale, so is it such a stretch to suggest that their built-in mechanisms for doing so were refined enough to turn resources into a biological cement harder than stone?

It seems like every dimension other than the End has fossils. Ribcages, pretty large, yet recognizable as something that could have once been alive and distantly related to you. But the End is utterly alien in every way.

 Maybe you just don’t recognize that you walk upon the remains of something greater than you could have ever comprehended.

(Edit: these theories were written pre-1.19! Would you like to check out this post’s new sequel, “Endstone Theories 2: Deep Dark Boogaloo?”)