Chain 172: Minecraft

Chain 172: Minecraft

Location: The Nether
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+1000] Wither

[Free]      Rei's Minimap
[100/2000]  Strength of Steve
[200/2000]  Crafting Table
[300/2000]  Iron Chests
[500/2000]  Not Enough Items, Recipe Mode
[1500/2000] Not Enough Items, Cheat Mode
[1600/2000] Multiplayer Server: Demona and the Conspiracy
[1700/2000] Multiplayer Bonus Chests
[1500/2000] Public Multiplayer Server
[1700/2000] Hack/Mine
[1500/2000] Horribly Cursed Ring
[1900/2000] IndustrialCraft
[1700/2000] Gregtech
[2000/2000] Mystcraft

Well, didn't expect to go from one near-empty world to another. On the other hand, this did mean that with the thousand-man Conspiracy, this is a truly massive Minecraft server ...

Wait, what do you MEAN that this isn't even in the top twenty?!

Ugh. Anyways, still probably the largest modded server. Which of course means that it draws attention accordingly, and the general population that comes in includes a fair share of trolls. Of course, there are ways to get around this, even in vanilla - primarily obscurity, but building with obsidian helps also. Of course, it's a little trickier to build with obsidian when the start point for the server is in the Nether, because obsidian doesn't exist down here and frankly it's dangerous, but everyone can fly in one way or another so coordination isn't terribly difficult. Tearing down Nether fortresses provides enough resources to keep moving and everyone still has tools from Terraria, so tearing through the netherrack to find what resources exist isn't impossible, but it still makes getting out of Minecraft's version of Hell that much more complex than it needs to be.

Speaking of complex: getting out of the Nether requires an obsidian portal, and again, obsidian doesn't exist in the Nether. A limited selection of materials DO exist, so some industrial upgrading is possible, but... okay, who am I kidding, nether quartz and glowstone won't work alone. (Largely because we're playing it straight, not just going full cheat mode as we did in Terraria.) And then we lucked out: after destroying what was probably the fiftieth Nether fortress, we found enough resources to start opening Mystcraft portals. Even if the worlds on the other side were unstable, they had things that we didn't in the Nether - water among them. Sure, water can't exist in the Nether, but you can bring lava FROM the Nether and then you've got all the cobblestone and obsidian you could want, to say nothing of mining.

And with that, you've got your ticket out, and into the Overworld, where the Wither was waiting outside the portal and respawns on a monthly basis, the players complain that the server is broken because they didn't spend weeks in the Nether trying to scrape resources together to escape and instead had to contend with the Wither being a jerk to them up until now, and the only players who stuck around were the trolls who were thoroughly committed to wrecking everything.

That's okay, though. I can troll back, doing things like setting traps in the overworld, attacking their own bases, or leading them into getting trapped in a Mystcraft sub-world. It at least makes for an interesting way to spend the time, other than exploring, considering none of us have our REAL homes on the overworld surface as most would.

The dorms are underground near bedrock, hidden beneath the sea far from land.

Mystcraft portals are handy.