End City

"End Cities, replete with End Ships, Chorus Plants, Chorus Flowers and Purpur blocks. Not all is as it seems, however - some blocks may conceal Shulkers, limpet-like enemies who fire homing rockets. Take a hit and you’ll take damage and experience something new, too: levitation! Elytra are essential to avoid an uncomfortable landing."

- Marsh Davies

End cities are structures that generate on the outer islands of the End. They are inhabited by shulkers and hold among the most valuable loot in the game, including the elytra and the dragon head.

Generation
End cities naturally and randomly generate on the outer islands of the End, which are accessible via the end gateway portal that generates after killing the ender dragon. They are fairly rare; one can travel for thousands of blocks without encountering a city.

The generation works differently in the Console Edition, in which there are only four outer islands. All four islands have a chance to spawn a city, but only one of them is guaranteed to have one. In the worst-case scenario, players may have to respawn and kill the ender dragon three additional times before finding a city.

Structure


End cities consist of tall castle or tree-like structures constructed primarily of end stone bricks, as well as purpur blocks and their variants. An end city may generate as a single tower by itself, or as a sprawling complex of inter-connected towers and pathways branching from a main tower. End rods are the only source of light. Many shulkers spawn around the city, and guard the city's various treasures. Decorative banners wave outside of the tops of some towers.

One will find several types of rooms in an end city, including:


 * Base rooms, which are empty rooms found at the base of each end city; they are three stories tall, with each room wider than the one below it.
 * Small rooms with banners hanging on the outside, and a shulker hanging from the ceiling.
 * Large rooms with complex staircases often leading up to another tower or a loot room.
 * Loot rooms that consist of two chests with valuable loot; some rooms may have an ender chest as well as a normal chest.
 * Empty rooms that have nothing in them at all.

There are two types of towers:


 * Small towers that are hollow, consisting only of a single purpur slab staircase.
 * Large towers (three times the diameter of the smaller towers) that consist of a treacherous double spiral staircase made of purpur slabs, shulkers, and end rods.



End ship
There is also about a 65% chance for an end ship to be generated alongside end cities. These floating structures are built similarly to classical pirate ships, and are made of the same materials as end cities. End ships often generate in front of a pier, which is simply a bridge with a small open arch at the end, from which one can throw an ender pearl to reach the ship.

On the outside, the main deck is relatively empty, with the only significant objects being a ladder that leads up the mast to the viewing point, a single staircase that leads to the upper deck, and an entrance to the cabin below.

The inside of the ship is rather small. The first room inside the ship contains only a brewing stand, with two potions of healing. A staircase leads below deck to the ship’s “hotspot”: the treasure room.

In the treasure room are two chests that contain highly valuable loot and an item frame holding an extremely rare item that cannot be found anywhere else: the elytra. The floor of the treasure room is lined with obsidian. Three shulkers spawn on the ship – one on the edge of the top deck, one behind the brewing stand, and one which guards the pair of elytra.

A dragon head can also be seen at the bow of the ship, making this currently the only natural way to obtain the dragon head.

Technical details
One may access the individual structures of an End city by utilizing structure blocks to manually load city structures from the  folder in minecraft.jar. To do so, set a structure block to Load mode, enter  and press LOAD. The names of these structures and a small description is provided below:

Trivia

 * Some end city rooms are structured similarly to traditional Asian pagodas.
 * This may refer to the Summer Palace since Jeb has visited there before the release of 15w31a.
 * The banners atop the towers have a magenta and black pattern that resembles the Missing Texture Block.png missing texture block.