Piece's rambling

A Biased History of Zero.minr.org by Pieceofcheese

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Chapter 1: Before Cheese (B.C)
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Almost a decade ago now, there was a fascinating new game gaining popularity: Minecraft. The internet was still pure. All of the memes we might now call stale were yet to hit their stride. Nobody knew what a fidget spinner was, and Donald Trump was still a reality show host.

On a particular day in October 2010, a man by the name of c_dric decided to open a multiplayer server to play Minecraft with others.
I'm not sure on the details here, but it may have been whitelisted at first and then opened to the public after some things were built.
Whatever the case, the server saw a thriving community creating an entire city (that we now call X.) It was probably good fun, although there might have been some trouble-makers and whatnot that caused them to reconsider the access people had to building.

Their solution was such: Make them spawn in a maze, and they need to find the exit to get to the outside world. This was
a pretty novel approach to building rights in a server, and with it came the whole identity of the server. What started as a way to filter out trolls became the attraction itself, as people were joining to see if they could conquer minr's maze. The server was quite popular in this time, contrary to what you might think. As more people joined, the server admins started to realize the TNT trials and Jiga's maze weren't enough to hold back the trolls, since people were sharing answers
and leading others through the maze.

What later became known as Hardcore was beginning to take form. In early 2011, certain greens (members with build rights) had
created their own challenge courses, including a peculiar type of challenge called parkour. Minecraft was not intended to be a platformer, but they found a way, and it turned out to be a great idea. Some of the earlier jump courses you may recognize are Hell Parkour (which was actually functional, using FalseBook), Mineco, and J's Jumpcourse. There were also some rather devious design decisions in the maps as they were created mostly to be challenging and not entirely fun. The classic "choose from one of these many holes" found in Drahmee's maps and Hatter's dangerous lava maze come to mind.

The redesign of Hardcore featured a plethora of new challenges to choose from, resulting in 10 total maps required to complete before being able to build on the server. The map lineup was not exactly balanced, but it was much less exploitable. Since there were also very few maps on the server at this time, some of the courses featured in this Hardcore iteration weren't exactly of good quality. Stone Maze, for example, was just a small maze made from stone blocks and used FalseBook teleports ([lift up] and [lift down]) in weird ways. This is likely the version of Hardcore that some of the oldest server members completed. (AJ, yeroc, jkjk, etc.)

This was a very experimental time in the server's history as members with build rights weren't totally unified in their goals. Some wanted a survival server, and some just wanted to expand the server's collection of challenge maps. For the survival players, there was an economy plugin that allowed users to trade and set up shops. The old city Fortuna was made during the height of this plugin's use. If you wander around old areas such as F you might also see some of the old shops people set up.

More and more people, however, were joining the server to give a shot at the challenge maps. It was, after all, what set Zero apart from the other various servers of the time. Admins realized this, and opened up an entirely new area where anyone could play the server's parkours and mazes, and appropriately called it Free For All. The airship that was built for this hub was majestic and stood for years as the heart of Zero. Around this time was when things really started to take off, and the server's identity had been found. The economy plugin was eventually ditched and players left the survival life to make some rad maps. People branched away from X to find their own tender land to build their stuff. Greens were, however, still in survival mode. So even though the server's focus had shifted to making maps, people still needed to mine and farm to get their materials. This resulted in large sheep farms and huge strip mines, and is also why a lot of these old maps are made of stone.

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Chapter 2: Zero's Golden Age
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FFA was a success and started to fill up with maps. Some were good, and some were bad. At this point it didn't matter and they were all thrown together. The path to build rights was also extended, making users complete five maps before being allowed to enter HC. This resulted in the creation of an intermediate rank: the Blue Fish. Every map, good or bad, easy or hard, rewarded one FFA point on completion. This was, as you would expect, problematic. Many people demanded to know the easiest levels so that they could get the Blue rank and start Hardcore. A lot of greens got tired of this and started to troll them by recommending difficult maps such as Aqueous. (this exact thing happened to me as a white. I was very confused.) Hardcore also saw its second redesign, forming what I would call its
most definitive iteration. The seven-level HC was full of classics such as Lava Maze, Pixel Parkour, Aquarium, Wolly Mammoth and Elusion. It was also the longest standing Hardcore, lasting from late 2011 until early 2013.

And here's where I come in! Well, sort of. I actually joined almost a year after this Hardcore system was put in place. It was August 2012 and when I first joined the server my first words were probably "where's parkour" or something of the sort. I had found the server through a popular post on the Yogscast forum which was the main source of the server's popularity. While it doesn't usually get over 30 players these days, back then it could exceed 80 people. In fact, the server limit had to be bumped up to 100 to accommodate for this. It was absolutely chaotic, but in a good way... I think. Almost every map in the FFA airship had some people running around in it and I liked having company while doing the maps. It didn't take too long to get the blue rank since there were still plenty of easy maps and I only needed five points. I remember doing nuffie's leaf maze, old level 2, and J's jumpcourse. Not sure about the others.

My run through Hardcore was an odd one. I was lucky to join in the brief period after the 1.3 update when water breathing was broken, making Aquarium and Elusion unplayable (two of the hardest levels in Hardcore.) I did HC 2.1, which went as follows:

Lava Maze -> Pixel Parkour -> Wolly Mammoth -> Aj's Maze/The Face/Dark Parkour/Soarer's Door Maze -> Paradox -> The Big Egyptian -> Jiga's Clay Maze.

Despite my advantage, I was a whiny one. It took me almost a whole month to get out of the first level because I kept falling into the lava and quitting. Embarrassingly, the only reason I escaped the lava maze was because someone showed me the way through. (I know, scandalous. Don't ban me!) After beating HC1 though, I gained some motivation and beat the rest of it probably within a week. I was super into it, and it was some of the most fun I'd ever had in a game. HC4 gave me some trouble because I picked Dark Parkour at first and quit pretty fast. I chose The Face second, and this was the one I beat. This was by far the most memorably HC map for me, though not necessarily in a good way. The maze took me forever, and there was no food so I had to walk it the whole way. Then I got to the end and made a horrific discovery; the last jump before the end required sprinting. I was furious, because I had thought that I was finally freed from the Troll Face looming over me. I may have spammed the chat a little bit. jkjk ended up giving me a server mute because of this. Anyway, here's another shocking reveal: I cheated. But I was justified! Having no food in that map sucked. I didn't use hacks, but I punched the stone block at the end of this jump and used a block glitch to get up onto the ledge. I think I deserved the win because it was actually a pretty hard maneuver. I needed to punch that stone block for a solid 30 seconds and make the perfect timing on my jump to glitch onto the ledge.

By HC5 I was a little impatient and pestered SofaLoafer (one of the admins at the time) to give me a hint for one of the puzzles. Being the kind soul that he was, he actually helped. I owe that man. HC6 was really rough with the pillar parkour, but I pulled through. This was the second most memorable map for me because it was probably the best looking one. It was a pretty new map at the time. After this, it was just a run through the clay maze and I was free! Because of how many people were beating HC at this time, it took a few weeks for the admins to actually get to reading my logs. I was lucky enough to get SofaLoafer to read mine, and he was amazingly lenient. If it was anyone else, I might have been banned. But hey, then we wouldn't have gotten all of my super cool maps! All's well that end's well, right? :)

By this time there were quite a lot of greens and there were more and more maps of questionable quality being produced. A lot of the old maps on the valley are from these days, mine not excluded. You might find the classic "The Tunnel" on there, which was an early attempt of mine to make a maze collab map. My very first map, however, survived. You wouldn't know it, but Frosty City was very different when it was first put into FFA. In fact, it wasn't even called Frosty City. It was called Cobble City. And everything was made of Cobblestone. God knows how they even accepted it. I spent my early days as a green living with eagg2112, who escaped Hardcore around the same time as me. I built "Cobble City" next to our house while he worked on his own stuff. The reason why Frosty City exists is that Yeroc, feeling generous, opted to help me redesign the map so it didn't look like complete garbage. He made so many changes that he may as well be the co-author of the map. Eagg and I also made Fusion around this time, which turned out surprisingly not bad.

My time as a green is very nostalgic for me, and is why I named this section The Golden Age. It's when I met some great characters such as Pottermon, Benji, zingo, Mathwiz, Alpha, and others. The most notable person I met was Iananth, who is still a good friend to this day. It was also a simpler time. All we had was FFA, Hardcore, and the outside. There was also still a weird quirk where instead of getting food from checkpoints, you needed to punch leaves to get apples to drop. It was really weird, but that was actually the way to get food in these maps. It's why you might see some random leaf blocks in some of the old maps.

This was when Zero was its most popular. I'm talking 80 people online for almost the whole day. Minecraft was at peak popularity and the server was at the top of google when you searched "minecraft parkour server" because of the Yogscast forum post. The staff decided that more moderation was needed and I was one of the lucky few in March 2013 to be awarded the role. I believe MrSnerp was the other one who was promoted at the same time as me. I went mad with power and banned everyone! ... well, not really. But I did abuse it sometimes. I used the compass to cheat in parkour maps sometimes and often teleported to blues in HC while vanished and followed them. Not helping, of course, but following pretty closely and growing attached to their progress. It was kind of weird.

In terms of what was changing on the server, new features were being added to expand the server's depth. FFA+ opened in late 2012 to showcase the best maps on the server, and the museum also opened some time the following year to showcase some of the best builds. The valley was also created to clear out some room in FFA, as there were a lot of really bad maps that were still in there that needed the boot. Greens were still building maps in survival and getting all the materials by hand. Asking admins and mods for materials/worldedits was very common, and while we weren't encouraged to give it to them, we did anyway.

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Chapter 3: The Beginnings of Modern Minr
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2013 was a great year for Zero, we saw huge improvements in the quality of maps as well as the server's growth. HC finally got updated to reflect the need for a more difficult green barrier (as by this time there was a huge number of new greens), and introduced themed paths such as Fire and Moody for blues to choose. This was probably the most hardcore that HC has ever been.

My favourite change of the year was probably Mathwiz's quartz spawn. Compared to the old desert spawn, it was massive and grand. Its grandeur really made this spawn a special one, and it's by far my favourite spawn that we've had. (Although the current one is great too.) This time was also what I would call the "spleef age", when there were regular spleef tournaments among the greens. If you visited the quartz spawn for the Easter event, the spleef temple was the one immediately to the right of the spawn point.

During this time, I also built the maps I'm probably best known for. (MYTH and Viemort.) Getting mod powers thankfully also came with the ability to spawn in any blocks I liked so I was excited to use this to build something that was actually creative and not just made of stone. My first mod map was freezerburn, which was okay but a little weird on the design. MYTH was my attempt to make something spooky after playing the sanitarium map. It's not quite as bone chilling as I may have hoped but it was well received. Viemort came probably at the end of the year, taking some design inspiration from MYTH and applying it to puzzles. The unfortunate downside of becoming staff was that it was expected that my maps would be a bit more "grand", which meant that I had big ambitions for a lot of maps and they sadly just didn't get finished because I ran out of motivation or creativity. This kind of pressure also kind of doubled down when I became admin, which is why I don't dabble much in map making these days.

Another downside of becoming staff was that some of the wonder I had about the server started to die. I could use the compass to go anywhere I wanted and I could teleport to anyone and get any materials I wanted. This was still before greens had access to creative mode, so it was a huge difference. The restrictions while green were sort of frustrating at times, but it was also part of the fun. And it felt amazing to finish building somthing. It pains me to say it, but I got kind of bored sometimes. Of course, I never quit the server outright, and I tried to remain in contact with the other staff if they ever needed me. I never really started to feel this way though until about a year after I was promoted and the community started to die down.

To continue on that point, we move into the equivalent of the black plague for the server. The Yogscast forum post was removed, and there was another update to Minecraft that we could not move to for a long time. We still used Bukkit and it stopped being regularly updated and a lot of our plugins were also becoming outdated. The combination of these two events killed off the majority of our users. Greens were still mostly active, but a lot of whites and blues just left forever. It was also probably two years or so after Minecraft started to gain popularity and it was becoming more of a kid's game. A lot of our server's playerbase was more mature players,
and they probably either grew tired of the server or of the game entirely. The following couple of years were sort of depressing for me, since I have a lot of memories of playing around on the server with dozens of people, and then I looked at the player list and there were two players online during peak hours on a weekend.

So what else changed in these years? For one, we saw the rise of HC12345's events such as Ninja Warrior and The Amazing Race. These were great fun and reminded me a lot of my time as a green on the server. There was also a new feature that was added for greens to more easily get materials for building called Resource Parkour, which started out small but eventually grew into a monster full of secrets and challenges. If there are any newer greens who haven't checked out the Resource Parkour, it's really a great place. It has no purpose now, of course, but it's really fun to explore. We also started a map reviewing process called The Board, with the aim of standardizing which maps got published. In its origins The Board was literally an underground hallway made of bedrock with a few warp signs to the maps that were being reviewed. Staff members could compass underneath and write review books to place into the chests, then the reviews would be given to the creator so they could make changes before the map was published. The system started out strong, but eventually dwindled because of staff's lack of willingness to constantly write reviews for maps. There were also just not that many maps being made.

To reflect the server's changing map standards, there was also a space on the FFA+ ballot to vote for which maps should be taken out of FFA and put into the valley. For a long time the valley was accessible to everyone, but eventually it was made greens only since there was little reason for whites to want to play the maps in there. Although the commmunity had died down, the maps had definitely gotten better. Greens were making more and more impressive things that put most of the server's older maps to shame. My favourite example of this is MrSnerp, who came out of nowhere and left just as fast, but left behind some real sights to behold. (The biggest shame is that
he had an airplane map he was making that he never finished.)

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Chapter 4: Where are they now?
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(Sorry if this part goes by a little fast, the past few years have been a blur for me)

The server was mostly stagnant for a few years, with HC changing around and some maps slowly coming out. There was a new forum created at some point that replaced the archaic one, and a lot of the community was shifted from the server onto the forums. This was probably a good thing, since we could still interact as a community even though the server was often dead. Some great traditions such as Minr Mafia were born from the forums. Even though I didn't log on much from 2014-2015, I still checked the forums pretty regularly.

I was promoted to Admin in 2015 after making Spectrum, and it was a pretty great honour. I won't be the judge on if I actually deserved it, but here we are. Not too much changed from my abilities as mod except for being able to fly around and use a wooden axe. Well, sure, I had permission for a lot more commands, but I never really took advantage of that. Global permissions were also a bit of a pain sometimes if I accidentally destroyed something while in a map in survival mode. But I digress. I tried my best to up the scale of my maps further after being granted worldedit abilities, but I never truly felt like I could reach the creative ability I had with MYTH and Viemort again. Maybe it's just that the sheer amount of time I've spent in this game has fried my brain's ability to think of new things. I'll probably make another map at some point.

A person I would like to thank for the server's semi-revival is Ricky, who put a lot of effort into reorganizing the server's inner mechanisms to better adapt to the ever-increasing changes that were being made to Minecraft. Better scripts and a better checkpoint plugin made for a more efficient server. With these updates also came some more opportunities for server features. There was resource parkour, as well as a mimic HC for greens to play the current version of Hardcore, eventual server challenges such as daily challegnes and Hexa, and recently the addition of new worlds.

The most radical changes to the server came within the past year or so. The biggest, of course, was Theta. Greens could finally build in this new world with creative mode and not need to rely on Resource Parkour. Delta was also eventually added as a pure survival world. There were some small QOL changes such as being able to join a map directly with /join and blues being able to switch between Hardcore mode and FFA mode if they want to take a break from HC. The FFA airship also flew its last voyage as FFA became a part of the spawn. The board, as well, moved onto the forums as review books turned out to be really constrained and clunky to use. The difficulty system was also recently overhauled and the Black difficult as added to accommodate for the increasing level of difficulty that some maps took.

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Chapter 5: The future of Minr?
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Even though I'm not the most active person, I'll never truly leave this server until it shuts down for good. I have probably a couple thousand hours in Minecraft and I bet this server takes up at least 70% of that time. I'll never forget the time I spent as a green and mod, and the people I met on the server. The community is still good, being overall pretty positive and helpful.

As for the server itself, I have no idea. Minecraft is still a popular game, albeit not nearly as much as it once was. But some servers still get thousands of players on at once. It's entirely possible for us to get back to 50 people on at average with just one great source of publicity like the old Yogscast forum post. I would really like to see that happen, but obviously I'm not anticipating it. I still have fun logging in every once in a while and checking up on what the community is up to. The events are always a treat to see and breathe some life back into my interest for a short while. (for example, the easter event is what caused me to write this thing.)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who will be sad when the server eventually dies. I don't know when that will be, but all good thing eventually end. Unless you're the Simpsons. For now I'm still glad there's a community around to continue Minr's legacy, even if most of the old players I met back in the day aren't active any more. I just finished playing some of the Adventurecomp maps and they were some of the best I've seen on the server. I'm excited to see what else you guys can come up with and I hope we can see some more innovation with the coming of the 1.14 update. Maybe we'll even see a new piece map. I can't guarantee anything though.

Anyway, that's about all I had to say about the time I spent on the server. There's a lot of things I missed, but as I said I missed a lot just by being slightly inactive. Also, a slight disclaimer that this was all off the top of my head and there are likely many inaccuracies in here. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading my perspective on the server, and maybe even got something out of it. I would wish a happy Easter or something, but it's too late for that. So... have a good day!