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 naturally generate in the outer islands of the End.

Generation
End cities naturally and randomly generate in 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.

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 (making End cities the only place where they naturally spawn), and act as traps to careless players. 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 62% chance for an "end ship" to be generated outside of 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 upper deck is relatively empty, with the only significant objects being a ladder that leads to the top of an empty crow's nest, a single staircase that leads up to the poop 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 treasure room.

In the treasure room are two chests that often contain highly valuable loot, and an item frame holding an extremely rare elytra – all of which are guarded by a single shulker. The floor of the treasure room is lined with obsidian.

A dragon head can also be seen at the bow of the ship, making this currently the only natural way to obtain the dragon's 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 "endcity/StructureName", 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.png missing texture block.