
A Minecraft world that has been played for 3.5 years - rocky1138
http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123/?worldname=playground&mapname=surface&zoom=6&x=-109.6183436789116&y=64&z=-17.340908734067128
======
zalzane
Pretty big world, but it doesn't even compare to 2b2t in scale.

For those who havent heard of it, 2b2t is an anarchy survival server that's
been around for about the same period of time, 3-4 years, with no resets.
Virtually the entire map from the spawn point to 5km from spawn is a desolate
wasteland littered with ruins griefed bases, castles, and megastructures.

With the introduction of the hunger system everything got a lot more
interesting, requiring new players to make a mad scramble from spawn and try
to find some source of sustenance. It's not uncommon for new players searching
for food to duck into a 2-3 year old base that's been long abandoned but has a
few precious pieces of bread left in a chest.

Typically players will build their bases anywhere between 10-500km away from
spawn, and when they do, they build some of the most impressive bases I've
seen in the game. One favored hobby of many regulars is to go hunting for
these gems that have usually been abandoned years past.

Google it and you can get a good idea of exactly how old the map is, but the
pictures really don't do justice to the absolute carnage of spawn.

~~~
petekp
Here's a video tour of 2b2t for those interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIlcLPJqvvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIlcLPJqvvA)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Just watched that and came away a bit confused. I'm not a minecraft player,
but I understand what it is and have seen videos of people playing. I guess my
question is, in the case of this, did someone go around a build that whole
world just to mess with players or is it the work of a lot of different people
who want to make a difficult world?

I suppose I just don't get what they are going for.

~~~
ANTSANTS
The latter. The admin takes a completely hands-off approach to running the
server (I'm not even sure if he plays on it). So the condition of the spawn is
purely because many people over the years thought it would be funny to make it
as inhospitable as possible.

I guess it's an acquired taste, but there's something fun about trying to
survive in such a hostile world. How many game servers have 200+ page comics
written about them?
[http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/](http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/)

~~~
rocky1138
We should carve out a small section of land, right at the spawn. One chunk,
say. Fill it with useful things like farms, farm animals, resources. Then,
guard it 24/7 by using a rotating staff system. See how long we can keep it
defended!

~~~
ANTSANTS
Oh, people have tried. It never lasts.

[http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/comics/104/](http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/comics/104/)

EDIT: Looks like I've gotten sucked in again. Feel free to message me if you
want to try.

------
stevebmark
Seeing things like this, and others in the thread, honestly depresses me. I've
wasted months of my life building in Minecraft, huge structures that I can do
nothing but look at, alone. Months where I lost social interaction and self
maintenance. Nothing good ever comes of these worlds, and they are self
destructive to their creators.

Minecraft, Reddit, Imgur, Facebook, all things you will eventually have to
block from your life if you want to achieve anything real. Don't let it
consume you. The only winning move is not to play.

~~~
solistice
I know this sounds harsh, but you seem to lack self control which I can
emphatize with. After all, I've spent nights where "one more thing" has kept
me up till early in the morning.

I don't have the end all be all advice on the topic, but you might just need
some people looking out for you. If you choose to play, play on a small server
where you know people, and people know that you are struggling to pace
yourself. If you're feeling guilty about playing, don't. Building huge
structures you aren't proud of doesn't do you any good. If you're playing
compulsively, but you're not enjoying it, it might help to shut it out
entirely. Deinstall your client, give your account to a friend, block imgur,
reddit and facebook, and forget they ever existed.

Sometimes that doesn't solve your problem though, it only creates a void in
your life. Empty time is horrid, and we try to fill it up no matter what.
Unless you make a conscious effort to fill that void with things you do enjoy,
you'll just end up filling it with whatever is convenient. If you don't know
what those things are, you might need to do some testing and sampling. Maybe
it's contemporary dance or building miniature railways or helping people learn
to code that you'll stumble across and start to really enjoy.

Also, if you, in the process of doing that, stumble across something you
absolutely love, but tell yourself that it isn't productive or important,
you've got problems with who you think you should be. You might be telling
yourself you'll be happy if you're the guy in the 10,000$ suit sitting in his
blacked out tesla, whilst you just stumbled over the fact you might be happier
if you're the guy that's sitting in his basement watching tiny trains go on
laps.

If you think that that will make your parents or friends or whoever you care
about think of you less, what business do they have of deciding what makes you
happy? They shouldn't have a stake in whether you're gay or straight, who you
fall in love with, whether you want children or not, and certainly not in
whether you get to lead a fulfilled life or not.

Anyways, I'm just drawing this from similar struggles I've been having, and
maybe some of these points will help you crack out of whatever problem you're
having. Honestly, I can't either say that I have implemented everything I'm
preaching here, but it seems like a step in the right direction for me.

~~~
rthomas6
Another technique is to make empty time less horrid, which in turn reduces the
need to immediately fill it, which in turn allows you to choose better
activities instead of scrambling for what is the quickest and easiest
distraction.

Empty time doesn't have to be a void in your life. If you can't sit alone and
do nothing for an hour without a lot of anguish, that indicates some internal
turmoil. Eliminating the feeling of emptiness during empty time is freeing,
because in my experience it lowers the bar for your own contentment. While
living, instead of worrying about meeting your needs for present gratification
AND productivity of an action, you usually only have to think about the
second, because you know you'll be fine, and even happy, regardless of the
"fun" of the action you choose, as long as the action seems rewarding in the
long run.

This is easier said than done, but I've found some success in being content in
the present through reading up on both mindfulness practices and Stoicism. A
lot of people have found success through mindfulness meditation specifically
(so check that out), but I've found it more useful for me to mindfully and
meditatively carry out mundane tasks, such as dishes, instead of sitting
meditation.

~~~
solistice
I'm certainly plagued by some internal turmoil, and I feel free to admit that.
I'm at an uncertain period in my life, and I do not know whether I will be
sucessful at achieving any of my goals. My past record has been littered by
public failures, and successes noone close to me wants to recognize.

I've failed at getting 3 businesses started, my academic track record is
meager at best, and whilst I consider myself intelligent, I do not know
whether I'll be able to perform as expected in college, which is what I'm
looking at right now. I have trouble moderating myself, and even though I've
spent the last couple of years working on my skillset, I'm not sure whether
that will cut it for what I want to do in life.

I'm struggling with the amount of social expectations that I'm being handed.
For one I have friends who expect me to do great things, and they are on track
to do great things. I also expect myself to do great things. They're all in
college now, I'm not. One kid I helped with bio homework back when I was in
9th grade and he was in 11th grade now studies Biomedical Engineering at
Columbia University. There's another former classmate at NYU who I'm helping
with physics and programming problems, and he looks up to me as an example.
Can't say that about myself.

But then, if you look at the way I've been performing, you'd expect me to fail
in a spectacular manner. C student from the get go, then after changing
schools oscialating wildly from getting straight As and straight Fs. Only
student in the entire school that managed to get on academic probation with a
GPA of 3.19. Then I got kicked out of that school as well. I'm not proud of
that. I'm not proud of the school I managed to graduate from either.

Then college right now. I'm not sure which school I'll even get into. Ideally,
I'll get into a respectable school abroad, perform well, finally get to use
the skills I've been honing for years, make some money, transfer to one of the
schools I was told I should be in, that I could be in if my life wasn't such a
mess. That's a long shot though.

Then there's the less than rosy but equally possible probability that I'll
ascend astronomically for the first semester and crash and burn within
semester 2. Get kicked out second year, no job, no degree. My health in the
gutter because I overworked myself and couldn't quite cope with the workload.

It's quite the conflicting, uncertain situation to be in, and I don't think
I'll be any less anxious about it before I figure out how well each of the
bridges I've got to cross hold up. They look shoddy, but you never know. I
don't think meditation will help me with that.

~~~
jamesisaac
Something that can really help with this is getting out of the mindset of
identifying yourself by your achievements. You talked about stoicism and being
in the present, but it sounds like you're very preoccupied and anxious over
how others will percieve your potential success/failure.

One of the aspects of experiencing the present moment is cutting away that ego
- realising that ego isn't actually part of conscioussness, it's just
something you're choosing to cling onto and identify with.

That doesn't mean that you can't pursue goals and achievement - just that
you're not tying them to your happiness. To quote Power Of Now by Eckhart
Tolle (which you may want to consider reading):

"Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or
fail in the world? // It matters to you as long as you haven't realised your
inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may
continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail
completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your
inner purpose. Or the other way round, which is actually more common: outer
riches and inner poverty, or to 'gain the world and lose your soul'.
Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to 'fail' sooner or
later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things.
The sooner you realise that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting
fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer
purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you
happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose."

------
ykl
Way awesome! It's really amazing what people can build in Minecraft even in a
short period of time, let alone a long stretch.

Here's a map from a server I play on. This map represents only 6 months or
work (we reset our map every 3-6 months) and was done 100% in survival mode:
[http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/61/64/-42/-2/0/0](http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/61/64/-42/-2/0/0)

~~~
prezjordan
Where on earth did you get so much iron?! That's what the spaceship is made
of, right?

EDIT: Silver -> Iron

~~~
ykl
The spaceship is made of iron and is the only thing on the map that wasn't
player-built. The spaceship was pre-made by the server staff to serve as the
spawn point. However, iron is extremely abundant because we figured out how to
exploit villager spawning mechanics to construct enormous machines that
generate free iron by slaying and regenerating iron golems. A bunch of these
machines can be seen all over the map; here's a notable example:
[http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/-1188/64/148/-2/0/0](http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/-1188/64/148/-2/0/0)

~~~
prezjordan
Oh my mistake, I meant iron! Very cool technique, thanks for sharing.

~~~
solistice
If you're intrested in vanilla minecraft resource farming, i'd reccomend
giving a couple of these videos a look, i've built a number of those back when
i was still playing vanilla.

    
    
      Mumbo Jumbo 
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZYgfmLCrek&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] High Efficiency Sheep Farm
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zWbXLa4LKA&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Wither Powered Furnace Array
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-dzsMtVYk&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Mega Cactus Farm
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xzbx7vFqqE&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Supersmelter 
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gb4VUT_HLU] Automatic Tree Farm
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wx766O4tKQ] Simple Blaze Farm
    
      Xisumavoid 
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR6oATNOFSw] Wither Nether Farm 
      Redstone Jazz
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPwPpaPKFnc] Gold Farm
      Tango Tek 
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw] Iron Titan Compact Iron Farm]
      [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvYKtL822E] Automated potion brewing.
    

Even if you don't play minecraft, some of those builds are either awe
inspiring in complexity or size.

------
Macha
Server worlds can get impressive pretty quickly. One of my wallpapers is this
render from one of the old reddit server worlds:
[http://i5.minus.com/im5gOe.jpg](http://i5.minus.com/im5gOe.jpg)

On the other hand, my single player world which is about 4 years old isn't
nearly as impressive.

~~~
cgore
I migrated my single player world (dating back to Beta 1.8) to a server so
some of my coworkers at the time could play too. It's not really huge, but I
am strangely emotionally attached to it. My server was down for a few months
(and I wasn't playing at the time), but I recently brought it back online.
Minecraft seems like one of those games that I'll play forever, like Super
Mario Bros.

[http://minecraft.cgore.com](http://minecraft.cgore.com)

------
ashark
The ring roads are the most impressive part, IMO.

Between material-gathering, going to the work site, clearing the path ahead
(largely avoided here by elevation, but still) and actually laying down the
road one... block... at... a... time... roads are very slow to build in
Minecraft. They take a large amount of investment before they start to pay
off, unlike most buildings, and they can't really be fully appreciated except
from map views like this site, so they're kind of low-reward for the people
doing the work, too.

I only run a vanilla server, so I don't know how mods might affect that. Were
these tool-assisted in some way? I just can't wrap my head around that time
involved if not.

~~~
rocky1138
They were initially built by WE, then manually filled in over time. It's taken
quite a while and you can still find some with holes.

Relevant comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649733)

------
cdr
Stuff like this is pretty fascinating. I've only really played Minecraft
singleplayer and intermittently. I almost always end up starting a new world
with each update, too, since it bugs me not having the new
blocks/structures/etc in already created chunks. I've never even made it as
far as doing the enderdragon, usually getting caught up building some ill-
advised structure or clearing some endless cave network. I wish the devs would
slow down with the new features, the complexity is kind of out of control at
this point.

~~~
scoggs
That's the best part about minecraft:

"the complexity is kind of out of control at this point"

Because on the surface most people who don't already own the game probably
didn't buy it because they thought the game looked stupid and "simple". Haha,
what a pleasant surprise Minecraft is.

------
Hawkee
Here is a world I've been running for 2.5 years. Spawn has been moved several
times, so the world spans tens of thousands of blocks. If you look carefully
you can find large settlements from continent to continent,
[http://treestop.com:8123](http://treestop.com:8123)

------
robinhoodexe
Very impressive. How many days in total have been spent playing this world?

Also, some gems in there[1].

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/RFDD5lZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/RFDD5lZ.png)

~~~
RBerenguel
I wonder which was first, the pyramid or the TIE. So as to find what went on
the head of the builder "look, he made a pyramid... let's build a huge TIE
Fighter!"

~~~
jbigelow76
To anybody reading the above two comments thinking _" TIE Fighter? That sounds
cool, I want to see that."_ The TIE Fighter is south east of the giant penis
rocket.

~~~
uptown
That's my mistake. I always take a left after the giant penis rocket. Thanks!

------
Mandatum
Wow, the performance of this website is really good. How is this so fast?

~~~
joelhaasnoot
They're just rendered PNG tiles in a Javascript slippy map library.

EDIT: Just checked, it's leaflet
([http://leafletjs.com/](http://leafletjs.com/))

------
rakoo
I have a _really_ hard time believing you built those concentric pathways by
hand and not through some level editor...

Very nice world otherwise.

~~~
rocky1138
They were built using Worldedit. The precision of WE is pretty bad, though, so
they had holes from where WE rounded the numbers. I've been traveling along
the roads over the past few years, filling them in by hand. It's quite
meditative, to be honest :)

------
nacs
Another large server map that's from a 1+ year old map that's 12000 blocks
wide. Players' towns are marked:

[http://imdeity.com/map/](http://imdeity.com/map/)

------
jostmey
I know almost nothing about mine-craft. How many people played in that arena?
I ask because it would be kind of sad if one person did all of that. However,
it says something pretty cool about humanity if it was constructed by random
people passing through, which is that people will naturally work together. In
other words, no centralized set of rules are required in order for people to
collaborate together to build a (virtual) city.

~~~
rocky1138
I'm not sure which arena you're speaking about, but a few of our arenas were
very popular when we were running the Spleef plugin, which automated
restarting of rounds after the last player stood, etc.

The best part about having so many players build over a period of several
years is discovering little things they built that no one saw. Signs with
personal notes. Graves for players who never came back or dogs that died. This
kind of thing.

~~~
codeulike
I think by 'arena' he meant the whole world.

------
agmcleod
Wanna play minecraft now. I have a save that is one i continually work on.
Nothing super impressive, still dont have the enchanting table surrounded by
book shelves. But it's been a fun project slowly growing.

------
edem
The server has enormous lag because of this post. I managed to find a castle
full of melons just a minute before I would have starved. I guess I'm lucky.

~~~
rocky1138
The map is toast. I got a notification from the server host that it was
consuming hundreds of megabits per second so it was taken down :S

The server itself is back up and running though!

------
jchonphoenix
As someone who's never played minecraft, my first response is "I wonder if I
can build Jurassic Park in this thing?"

~~~
digi_owl
It's not Minecraft, but i have seen some strange things in Trove club worlds.

------
rocky1138
Neat bit of trivia: Notch's wife, ez, was kind enough to visit once and leave
a sign. "ez was here" :)

~~~
1qaz2wsx3edc
Well, come on, at least link to it!

~~~
rocky1138
VERY hard to see from the map, but you can.

[http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123/?worldname=playground&map...](http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123/?worldname=playground&mapname=surface&zoom=8&x=-69.77729597643204&y=64&z=26.91955635082833)

See the area in the centre with the red and yellow flowers? In behind the
glowstone is the sign. You can catch the edge of it.

------
emilioolivares
There are some very impressive things created in Minecraft. This one of them:
Westeros (Game of Thrones) built in Minecraft. Simply amazing, I bought the
game just to check it out:

[http://www.westeroscraft.com/](http://www.westeroscraft.com/)

------
NAFV_P
This could be an extreme version of "Where's Wally".

~~~
alanfalcon
I never knew it wasn't called Where's Waldo originally. I agree, this would be
an intense WW search. I wonder if he's already in there hiding?

------
Narishma
A black page? The website doesn't seem to work in Firefox.

~~~
incompatible
I got in Firefox:

This address is restricted

This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other
than Web browsing. Firefox has canceled the request for your protection.

It wouldn't even try to connect until I set
network.security.ports.banned.override to "8123" in about:config. But now that
I've set it, it seems that the website is unresponsive (overloaded?) anyway.

------
rocky1138
Another bit of trivia: I set the map to do a full render a day or so ago and
it's still going. The map is at 1657200 tiles and counting.

------
edem
The link is not working for me :(

~~~
rocky1138
I think my server host blocked port 8123 after this hit the front page :)

------
mkaroumi
My question:

How many hours/day did you sit with Minecraft? (or whoever has made this)

~~~
rocky1138
Thousands. Most of my work, though, as admin, was building a great griefer-
proof system, promoting people, working with newbs, editing configs, updating
when new Bukkit + plugins came out, etc.

We've had thousands of players over the years. It's crazy because some of the
people who were kids when they joined are now quite grown up. I'm proud to
have run a server so long and (hopefully) been a positive memory in so many
kids' lives.

------
Immortalin
Doesn't anyone on HN play feed the beast modded minecraft?

~~~
solistice
I do. Our server is kinda looking for new people actually. We're running
modified monster with some additional tweaks to difficulty, such as Hunger
Overhaul, Spice of Life, Zombie Awareness and Special Mobs.

------
notastartup
I wonder wouldn't such map invite trolls and griefers that would just come to
destroy everything in sight?

~~~
Macha
Most large servers have plugins that allow them to rollback specific sections
of the map by an hour or a day to undo damage from griefers, and to log who
made changes to blocks so that the griefers can be banned.

This is however a problem for 1.8 as the server API most of them were using,
Bukkit, has disappeared in the wake of some drama that occurred because it was
licensed as GPL invalidly (it distributes Mojangs All Rights Reserved code
bundled with itself), and a former contributer unhappy with the fact that
Mojang now owns the project DMCAed it.

~~~
rocky1138
Yeah, we run LogBlock and McBans, and have a pretty solid newbie filter that
turns away all but the most dedicated of griefers.

------
alexperezpaya
I can't even imagine how much penises they had build in this time

------
timetraveller
What a waste of time.

~~~
solistice
I'd like to disagree with that because Minecraft ends up turning into a
different experience once you're working at that scale.

Similar to EVE, which goes from spaceship simulator to corporate management
simulator depending on how deep you get into it, Minecraft turns from house
building simulator into project management simulation if you're building
things of such size. There's a planning stage, there's a stage in which you
aquire resources, people working on the project together need to be
coordinated, the area needs to be prepared, and the actual building has to
take place. Regarding large projects, this might also require preliminary
buildings, such as stone generators, xp farms to improve tooling, complex
smelting setups to create glass or lumber farms.

Modded minecraft will bring even more complexity to the table, from automated
mining rigs, power production, ore processing, large scale agricultural work
and making a disjoint set of technologies from different mods do exactly what
you want them to do.

The project I'm working on on our server right now is building a world
spanning road network (we have a 30km x 10km world) with safehouses every 500m
and access points every 100m. After researching options and testing several
designs, i arrived at a design that is both feasible and secure. One of the
things I worked on before that is full automation of food production where I
took this [[http://imgur.com/Np6Ftaj](http://imgur.com/Np6Ftaj)] and converted
it into a factory. Or building a computer controlled pebble bed reactor.

But since "that's pretty neat" isn't an argument, my experience managing
personal projects outside of the game has also broadened considerably. It's
taught me to vigorously test sub components, track figures and validate them,
to detail the entire process before jumping into it, and a whole range of
other useful planning skills.

I think for something that calls itself a game, that's a lot of use I'm
getting out of it.

~~~
Havvy
Safehouses every 500 meters seems like such a small scale...why did you choose
that number and not something more distant? I'd think 800 meters would be a
better distance.

~~~
solistice
I'm playing on a server with additional difficulty settings, which means you
most likely want a bed closeby if any one player gets stuck somewhere at night
(we have monsters form into mobs and being attracted to light sources). 1km
seemed too distant, and 500m divides evenly. Also, preliminary testing has
determined that running 1km on the road will deplete your hunger (I'm planning
to put down 70k MFR road blocks, which make you run incredibly fast), and we
don't want players accidentally running too far and dying due to starvation.
Also, the cost of safehouses is almost negible, 3 beds and an ender chest for
food and supplies.

~~~
VLM
Thats interesting, my first guess was something along the lines of a chunk is
16x16 so your "five hundred" is actually 512 at exactly 32 chunks and you're
deploying chunk loaders along the road to keep the road loaded (and maybe also
farm fields or trenches full of mobs or pipelines full of liquids or the
worlds biggest applied energistics network or ...) Or something like each
player can ask for a 128x128 "deed to the land" along the side of the road for
megaprojects and there's exactly 4 along each side of every road segment.

~~~
solistice
Our server isn't quite as dense, and people usually settle several hundred
meters apart from each other. We try to keep people settled close enough for
interaction but far enough away from each other so that there are no
neighbourhood conflicts. Considering we have 15km^2 of worldbordered space for
less than 30 people, density isn't yet an issue.

We allready have a functioning nether road system for all 4 cardinal
directions, the new road is mostly designed for overworld exploration and
finding a place to settle for new players. Also, since we're running ATG with
Biomes of Plenty, the landscape is truly stunning in certain areas, with rich
sloping mountains and d̶e̶a̶d̶l̶y beautiful valleys. Due to the dangers on the
ground at night (full powersuit won't safe you baby), there's rarely much
exploration going on in this stunning landscape.

Also I'm absolutely running out of big things to build, having set up a 11x11
chunks base with 60 blocks high obsidian walls, and built the majority of the
nether roadways. The project afterwards would most likely be a tokamak reactor
or something if i could get the thing working in creative.

