#end crystal

[banicraft]

End crystal

[izuchannisfan]

Day 19 of the Life Series Advent Calendar

Day 19: Boogey

There was a lack of Mumbos in this Calendar, I had to do something about it x)

[ninebaalart]

Endermite Daisy

last of the end princesses. all the backgrounds were taken from panorama shots i shot in-game and converted back into something clip could use

[meatballowl]

Day 2: End Crystal

[littlestarkitty2]

Day 4 Magic

(using @the-local-pineapple 's list thingy)

[illmamnim-art]

Always watching

close-ups under the cut:

[xelidonia]

a scientific analysis of End Crystals

The contents of the inner cube are purplish-magenta... like a regeneration potion:

This fits well with its recipe-- which uses a ghast tear, like regen potions do-- and with its purpose-- healing the ender dragon.

Further, the color of the symbols on the side of the crystal is hot pink, like the color of the regeneration particle, but more intense:

So, what does this mean? My guess is that the "End Crystal" isn't a solid crystal at all. What looks like a solid cube is actually another glass shell, filled with pink vapor under high pressure. The letters are formed like particles or swirls in the fluid. Normal potions are made by bubbling the vaporized essence of an ingredient through water, which makes it dilute enough to drink. But in the end crystal, all the healing vapor is kept compressed inside a glass shell, which makes it much more powerful but also very dangerous.

(Also, normal potions can't affect the Ender Dragon. They're water-based, and the Ender Dragon is resistant to water. Biologically, it should damage her like it damages an enderman, but her skin is so thick that the water doesn't get through.)

Why are there multiple layers of glass? Well, the crystal has to be made of glass so that the healing light beam can escape. But glass is a fragile material, and one layer probably wouldn't be enough to contain the vapor. In between each layer of glass, the pressure gets higher and higher, in order to spread out the stress to the limit of what each layer can bear. Breaking the outer layer of glass sets off a chain reaction that shatters all the layers near-instantly.

(This also explains why an End Crystal is so fragile that it explodes even from attacks that don't normally do damage. The glass is already highly strained like a Prince Rupert's drop, designed to deal with constant pressure pushing out from the inside. But when you even slightly poke the outside, that's enough to imbalance the stresses and shatter the whole shell at once.)

If just touching the crystal is enough to make it explode, then we can't have it resting on the ground. It needs to hover. The ghast tear probably helps with that, but the weight of all that glass still has to be supported by something. That's why end crystals can only be placed on obsidian or bedrock-- those blocks are not pushable by pistons, so they're sturdy enough to not shake or move which risks disrupting the crystal on top of them.

Why doesn't the Regeneration vapor stick around after the explosion? It's probably very flammable/reactive, coming from ghasts and all that. I'm guessing that it reacts immediately with air in the blast. Regen potions themselves need to be stabilized with nether wart, or they lose their potency.

[king-psycholyze]

My Endlantis