Now that HardTimez has been banned, things have suddenly become very quiet! We should liven up the forums a bit.

I’d like to tell you the story of my first server experience back when I was as green as a cucumber and about ten times as n00by as I actually thought I was. Until that point I had only really played survival Minecraft in single player. The time was ripe for the jump into multiplayer madness!

The server I chose was, in hindsight, a bit insane for a first-time player – a survival server with the lockette plugin to protect your containers. There was no such thing as a safe base unless you built it out of furnaces and plastered it with signs. It was a griefer’s wet dream.

The first thing I did was very wise, I ran and ran until I was away from spawn… Only kidding! I first tried to build a base bang slap next to /warp east and got my a*se handed to me. Then I built a boat and traversed four oceans until I thought I was safe (though in reality I was still only a measly 2000 blocks from warp). I spent my time as a cartographer, investing hours mapping every pixel of the world around warp.

I set up little stashes of goods all over the place in case of emergencies. I also built some secret locations with hidden valuable chests as treasure hunts for other players. One such stash was hidden on a lonely church on a tiny extreme hills biome in the middle of an ocean.

Of course, I met other players along the way. Most were very big n00bs like myself. One guy in particular was getting raided 24/7. The people killing him were such thoroughly unscrupulous bullies that they make the 0utlaws on this server look like teletubbies. The mods didn’t do much about it as far as I could tell. I helped the dude by helping him build a weird and complex skybase above the ruins of his war torn home. We fought many battles there, though most deaths were caused by landing in a splatty puddle 100 feet below.

I also found it funny to make trapped houses all across the map. What a horrible person I was!

But I also managed to do productive things, such as getting the community together to dig a really deep quarry down to bedrock. Don’t ask me why, it was a bit crazy. But there were like a dozen people working on it at a time, some of them were even enemies with each other. There were quite a few “mining accidents” along the way. 😛

But that wasn’t the most crazy thing I decided to do by a long stretch. I gave up my hermit life and founded a village – on a quasi vanilla server! I honestly don’t know what possessed me. Blind idealism most probably. I thought to myself: What was the point of playing on a multiplayer server if you lived alone? My architectural abilities were a bit limited back then and I always looked up pictures of things on the internet to build, lol. >.<

Two of my town members didn’t get on with each other. They both didn’t know that the other person had also been inaugurated as a citizen. I took great pleasure in giving them the same house to live in… It took them a week before they found out! Priceless, haha!

After that they got on better with each other though. 🙂

Unfortunately, I chose to build my village within 2000 blocks of spawn. Every other day I had to do repairs and replant my crops. This went on for two or three weeks before a devastating griefer raid completely annihilated every building in the village.

As mayor, I had had enough. I set out on a nether expedition to look for greener pastures and ordered my townsfolk to come with me. At the beginning of this post I mentioned that you could build “secure bases” using containers with signs placed on them. They were completely indestructible, which is why I chose to encase my new, hidden nether portal in a protective layer of furnaces. It worked! Noone ever got to my new town via nether travel.

It was at this time one of my townsfolk made me aware of a glitch in the market system. I mined tirelessly for ores and building materials, and the dude came up to me and said: “You do know you can get unlimited materials at market, right?”. The staff had made a grievous calculation error. 1 log could be bought for $2. 2 sticks could be sold for $1. As you could make 8 sticks out of one log, you could basically fill your inventory with logs, turn them into sticks, sell them, and have twice as much money as you spent on logs. With a bit of patience you could abuse this to make millions. Naive as I was, I didn’t realise this was probably not ok and even openly talked about it in main chat. I used the “stick trick” to get chests full of bricks and build myself a giant warehouse.

It had so much space I never managed to fill every chest in it for the remainder of my time on the server.

One day, one of my townspeople teleported in one of the most OP players on the server and mugged him. The OP player was really pissed and swore he’d return some day to burn my town to the ground with his two really, really OP friends. He said he’d taken a screenshot of my coordinates. I was scared sh*tless and realised I needed to act fast to save my town. I started buying tons iron and gold ore at market and smelting them in a large furnace room I powered with lava. With this I started gaining XP to create God armor and gapples. This took a lot of time, remember back then you needed 30XP to make one piece and then had to start again from scratch!

There were so many iron blocks left over I didn’t know what to do with them all. I built a modern iron house in my town and decked it out with modern furniture. I liked how it looked and decided to build more like it.

I got a nasty shock once when a mod decided to play a “joke” on me. He deleted my entire town with world edit and let me fall to my death. I was horrified at first, but he restored it after five minutes. Dunno if he wanted to make a YouTube video or something.

I also built an army of iron golems. Because why not?

This is where things turned sour, however. I caught the guy who had tpd in the OP player doing suspicious things, such as breaking random windows, hanging around with well-known griefers, setting his spawn at their base and generally being really annoying. He accidentally sent me a private message saying he was “getting ready for a siege”. I laughed it off with him. But when he logged off, I started to encase the place where he logged off in a cube of protected iron ovens. I knew he was going to betray me.

I was the only town member online when he logged back on ten minutes later. He saw what I was doing and immediately started teleporting in his griefer friends. Wearing my semi-God gear I dispatched them with ease. One guy managed to set home in my cube, however, which mucked up my plan. A half-an-hour-long battle ensued with me trying to finish the protected cube and the griefers trying to break out. I had to resort to dumping lava around after a while to hinder their progress. After a ferocious battle, one guy managed to escape into the town and all hell ensued. My iron house proved an irresistible target. They started dismantling it immediately to my great annoyance. I hunted them down and slaughtered them mercilessly like Pooh Bear would do to the Honey Monster.

As fate would have it, this is the exact moment team OP team arrived. They ambushed me from behind using invisibility potions and overwhelmed me with poison. I lost my best diamond gear in a couple of seconds. My town was pretty much lost from that point on. I grabbed some ender pearls and teleported around town, watching the devastation unfold around me.

The story does have a happy ending however. I talked a bit with team OP and got friendly with them. They agreed to help me kill the griefer scum, which they did gleefully. And that was that. I was left with a pile of ruins to myself, and a couple of days later the server reset, ending my first experience on a multiplayer server.

I hope you enjoyed reading my story and I look forward to further great experiences with you all on the PirateCraft server! If you have a tale of your own you’d like to share, feel free to post it below! It’s fun to hear how other people started out on their own pirate adventure. 😀