Ender pearl loading

Ender pearl loading, commonly known as pearl loading, is a technique that involves throwing an ender pearl into unloaded chunks, then loading it later to activate its teleport. Because distance on 2b2t is often in the scale of hundreds of thousands of blocks, pearl loading provides a simple method of instant travel.

Setup and Implementation
To set up an ender pearl to be loaded later, all one must do is throw an ender pearl into an unloaded chunk. As the ender pearl enters the unloaded chunk, it too gets unloaded, and will stay as it is until the chunk it's in is loaded. If the player who threw it is online when the pearl is loaded and hits the ground, they will be teleported to the ender pearl.

The utility of the glitch comes from the fact that anyone can load a pearl - therefore, it's possible to leave a pearl at a location (for example, a base) and travel away, then ask someone else to load the pearl for an instant return. On 2b2t, it lets people in far-off bases easily access spawn, by providing an instant return method. Large group bases, such as Mu, often have designated areas to set and load pearls for the base members.

Before 1.13, ender pearls operated using a player's username, not their player ID. Therefore, it is possible for a player to set a pearl, have another account change their name to that player's username, and be teleported to the loaded pearl instead of the player who set it, since their username matches the one who threw the pearl. This exploit has been used to transfer accounts and items long distances without requiring them to set a pearl first.

History
Many are familiar with redstone-based "enderporters", which were created by Youtuber EthosLab in Episode 405 of his Minecraft Let's Play series in April of 2015, and became popular in 2020 as the design was perfected. However, the method of pearl loading described in this article is considerably older, described in a December 2011 Minecraft Forum Post. Pearl loading became a common method of travel back to a base in 2017, as large bases were being built further and further from spawn. Pre-2016 travel using pearl loading was relatively unheard of.