Soul Forged Steel and Explosives pointless?

[Timeslice]

The more I think about it, and the more I watch other people play, the more I feel like locking SFS and gunpowder behind the end makes it all pointless. By the time you've killed the ender dragon you've already obtained all of the rare items (enchanting table, brewing stand, dragon urn), automated as much of your farming as possible (if you're smart) for trading, set up an overworld, pigman, and wither skeleton farm, and beaten the wither. Through all of that you've probably conquered most of the wilds, collected a large number of resources, and have basically mastered all of the challenges the world has to offer. After killing the ender dragon, what need have I of better tools, better enchantments, better automation, and easier mining? I've literally already won at that point.

I put this up here so that I can be educated by the community. Am I wrong? Am I right? Is this only a temporary issue?

[Epsilon]

You might want to Change your perspective on the subject.
SFS Tech is not a tool on the way of beating the game (Honestly imo Minecraft is not a game that "can be beaten", and neither is BTW) but is the reward you get for mastering all the challenges the game offers. Once you mastered all of them you are rewarded with powerful Tools, you can use to accomplish what ever you came up with.

But as FC mentioned at some Point. If you want to build a huge medieval style village, you wont even need iron tools, basically you can do it with stone tools. It just gets way easier the higher you are on the tech tree.

[FlowerChild]

I think you may be running into a chicken and egg scenario here too:

Should the end game or the rewards for the end game come first? If there are no rewards for killing the dragon, what's the point in fighting it?

I think if you take that logic far enough, you'll just unravel the whole tech tree from the top down, and have everything available at the start, winding up playing something similar to vanilla ;)

[Timeslice]

It seems to me that *getting* to the end should unlock the SFS/explosives tech, which I can then use to improve my life. Then with that tech I can summon the ender dragon, fight the final epic battle, claim the dragon egg, build a monument to my glory, and claim my rightful place as ruler of the world, or whatever.

Perhaps the egg and portal can already be present in the end when the player gets there, but they could make a SFS beacon or some such with the egg placed on top (or inside) to summon the dragon. Preferrably something that makes a dangerous mess of the end like nether groth does to the nether. Some kind of hardcore What Have You Done?

[FlowerChild]

Uh huh. Please take your ideas to the suggestion sub-forum...which doesn't exist.

[Timeslice]

No, I think this is something I can pull off with command blocks. I'm going to have to give it a try.

There's no reason to get silly and "unravel the whole tech tree". It will be nice to have something interesting to do with the dragon egg, and will give me an objective in lieu of the final endgame release, if that ever happens.

I still want to get other player's perspectives on the subject. What are some of the projects you like to engage in once you have access to SFS? As Epsilon says, maybe I'm just looking at it all wrong and could use some ideas.

[FlowerChild]

I still want to get other player's perspectives on the subject.

That is about to become slightly problematic.