The End

The End is one of the three possible dimensions that a player can travel to in the world of Minecraft. It is a vast void where the infamous ender dragon resides, where 90% of the endermen population resides, where islands of end stone are as far as the eye can see, and where end cities are.

Pertaining to 2b2t
The End has always been a problematic issue on 2b2t, mainly for Hause, because of the rarity of portals. First of all, when the world was updated to 1.0, only three end portals were available in the entire world. Eventually, players found them all, and since during the really old days there were a variety of normal ways to destroy them (such as simply using TNT), they were all griefed. Additionally, portals themselves have been artificially created by players using hacks.

These issues have caused Hause to remove and re-enable the end multiple times, and in later years, to build and maintain end portals near spawn. Hause even destroyed portals himself in several instances, in order to ensure players did not reach the end when it was disabled. Hause's "official" end portals near spawn were removed and/or blocked off regularly, by players who used dragon eggs to delete portal blocks, and bedrock to cover them up. Eventually, he installed a plugin that would automatically replace any end portal blocks that were removed, and installed a plugin to make bedrock unusable by players so they couldn't use it to block off portals.

The End has been mostly barren and largely inaccessible for several years, leading to a relatively small population of players that have ever reached the end and an even smaller population of players that have ever lived in it. For a long time, most people didn't care much about the End, due to the dangers it posed, the lack of portals to reach it, and the general lack of content.

The main area where the ender dragon resides has been lavacasted, withered, and largely destroyed multiple times, with the damage growing constantly over the years and up to the present. However, despite the griefing, the central area of the End has mainly retained its former structure, with the end stone landscape still being largely visible and many of the obsidian pillars still being intact.

With the 1.9 update, the end was largely expanded, and this prompted a rush of exploration into the distant unloaded regions of the end in order to obtain Elytras and Chorus Fruits. Several skybases were abandoned and/or griefed because of this, including Space Valkyria and the DFC. When Shulker Boxes were added in 1.11, another rush of exploration occurred so everyone could get Shulker Shells, which was bigger and more heavily publicized due to the rusher war happening at the same time.

Trivia

 * There have been two End dimensions in 2b2t history. The first was generated upon the release of 1.0, the second came in 2013 after Hausemaster wrapped up some maintenance of some sort. iTristan and several others killed the Ender Dragon.
 * Since the end has been occupied by players through all versions since its addition in 1.0, it is a strange mismatch of old and new end terrain generation. The central island has the randomly placed pillars that were originally generated in 1.0, plus the circular ring of pillars generated in 1.9 when the end was revamped. Both the portal originally created when the enderdragon was originally killed, and the new portal at the middle of the aforementioned ring of pillars, are present. There are large sections of totally empty sky in the space beyond the central island where players explored before 1.9, which abruptly transition to the post-1.9 network of floating landmasses once you veer off the paths the original explorers took.
 * Many years ago, a glitch caused huge plains of flat bedrock to be generated along the bottom of the end. A number of bases were built on these bedrock plains.