After deliberation within the staff team regarding this issue, having gone over the details carefully, we've come to the conclusion that removing KnightMarco's claims and rolling back their builds is not a fair solution to this dispute. These are the facts, as we see them:

- both of you have settled in your respective areas very early within the start of the 1.20 world. (you having arrived there 1 day after the reset, and Marco having arrived there 2 days after)
- KnightMarco has been working on their base on the other side of the mountain ever since having settled there (the current progress on the castle wall was built within two days of arriving in the area), whereas you only set up a few chests and made four small claims in your zone; two of those claims seem to serve zero purpose as they don't protect anything, one claims your chests and furnaces, and one claims part of the hole you've started digging 8 days ago. These are clearly an attempt to abuse small claims in order to prevent others from moving into a seemingly unclaimed area. By this metric, we consider it an accurate assessment to say that KnightMarco's *base* is actually older than yours.
- having been in this area for over 2 weeks and not having explored your surroundings for the direction you wanted to expand in is entirely your fault, as at any point between 15 days ago and 3 days ago, you could have gone towards the mountain's other side and have seen that someone is already building a sizeable base there. Not only that, but a pillar marking the corner of KnightMarco's claim has been there for 4 days before this ticket was created; 4 days worth of time when you could have noticed that someone else may be in the area.
- further investigations have led to the discovery of an island ~500 blocks away from your 'base' which you attempt to take as your own by building massive 1-block-wide stone pillars and claiming them with a total of 9 small landclaims. This practice is very scummy and ***does not*** entitle you to ownership of the area in question - something which has been this way on Acorn since 2020. This leads us to believe that you would have been willing to try and drive out anyone who were to want to settle on this island by saying it's yours.

With these in mind, we cannot in good faith grant you the unclaiming and rolling-back of KnightMarco's area. We know this is not the outcome you were hoping for, but either you and KnightMarco work out a compromise together, or you move to another area and set up your base there. And we also request you cease this practice of making huge pillars with small landclaims in an area to attempt to lock it from others. If you want to take an area as your own, you must claim it in its entirity and construct something substantial enough that it can be reasonably seen by others as an active settlement of a player.