you don't realize how big the end Island is until you cover the entire thing in a giant bowl
The way this happened is I had planned for a long time to do something to decorate my end island. But I only had one end gateway open. So I though, if I put a lot of effort building something in the end now, I lock myself out of the option to open more end gateways without what i build getting destroyed in the dragon fights. So I spent a day collecting ghast tears, respawning 19 dragons and killing them, just to future-proof myself. So I now had the full circle of 20 end gateways. Then I thought, well, now that I have this beautiful giant circle of portals, I gotta do something with that, right? So I eventually landed on making a kind of promenade boardwalk pathway around them. But to make it make any sense and look good, I had to tie it into the landscape, and suddenly I had tricked myself into building a giant structure around the entire island
What is even worse is that large parts of the circular boardwalk were reaching over the edge of the end island, so in order to have a coherent, solid looking structure, I had to extend large parts of the end island in order to make it look like my giant bowl has something to stand on
I ended up having to mine over 40,000 end stone to do this whole thing. And end stone does not mine very quickly
I do have some ideas for detailing on the building and some sort of alien moon vegetation to sprinkle around to make this looks like a bit of a park on the inside. But the main structure is done. Jesus christ man