The Story of Sealand

This is a true story about events that happened on the NoCoords Minecraft server, told as best as I can remember it for it has now been months since the events took place. Eventually if I remember more details or Jason reminds me of something I will edit this.

There was once a magnificent flourishing city called Sealand on the NoCoords server. ijkl started it from nothing more than a small 2-4 block wide island in the middle of the ocean and expanded it using lava buckets to cover a vast area. Dirt, animals and other resources were imported and it became a fully self-sustaining civilization, eventualy accumulating 13(? must check residents list screenshot) permanent residents and a few non-permanent passer-bys that would occasionally help out around town. Creativity was encouraged and there was no specific building style, which in a way became its own building style. The city, though small, was a beautiful construction and its members all worked together to create, maintain, and expand it. After 1.9 came out, a number of members disappeared under mysterious circumstances and most of those left behind were not as familiar with its history and culture, but tried their best to maintain it. I myself, a resident of Sealand since only a couple weeks after it was founded, had been taking a break from vanilla for a while as most of my services were not needed at that time, most of what I had built could be maintained with minimal or no effort by the others, and I was really into modded survival on Legion Network's Legion of Factories.

One day I get a message from mattvision that LegitYarik (the server owner, a vanilla fanatic and a very good player) and a team of 10ish veteran players are declaring war and I was being summoned to support the cause (I am extremely OP on NoCoords and a well known and respected vet player). During my absense a newbie (supposedly also new to Minecraft, though you wouldn't know due to his high skill level) named AIMERS2 had joined the server, claimed Sealand as his own, threatened to (and did) burn down the city (the wooden constructions at least, basically most residential buildings which he considered useless wastes of space), heavily "tax" (forcibly kill/loot if non-compliant) remaining residents, and kick out those that fought back.

On top of that he was generally just an asshole, held grudges against players he knew next to nothing about, made false assumptions and held massive double standards... Basically if you combined Hitler and Stalin into a Minecraft player, you'd get AIMERS2. So war happened and after most of the war team abandoned the trail when Aimers went into the nether, Jeuv and Jason(_the_M1n3r) were the only two chasing him. I had only been summoned the night before and had a lot of prepwork to do before I could fight, being that I hadn't been online in months, and by the time the battle started I was only starting my journey from my base to Sealand. Aimers had an endercrystal fetish and frequently tried to throw a few down and blow them up as we got near, and unfortunately, the first time he used the trap, it worked - he killed Jeuv - leaving Jason in a 1v1 in a godgear fight to the death in the nether. Jason, naturally being a god at pvp, could easily survive, but since this was a godgear fight the person who's armor lasted the longest would be the winner. Luckily, I was in the process of trying an unconfirmed nether route to Sealand to save time and happened across the two fighting.

The battle became a 2v1 and with twice the armor durability now fighting him, Aimers slowly succumbed and died after being knocked into the lava lake and shot while burning by Jason, breaking one of his armor pieces and rendering saturation regeneration useless. We sorted through his stuff and returned to Sealand, and so did Aimers with a new set of godgear. At this point most of the war party (unaccustomed to wars) returned home thinking "the battle is done, so is the war", but me, Jason, Yarik and a couple others were there to chase him back into the nether portal. At this point we knew of his ender crystal tactics and opted to just send some TNT through the other portal to break it, not wanting to risk him trapping the nether-side exit, which failed due to what I can only imagine was a bug (or unknown feature) that prevented Primed TNT from entering portals.

It was true, the battle was over, but the war far from. After Jeuv's death it became clear that Aimers could kill with some effort on his part and a slight slip up on ours, and most of the war party did not want to engage in another battle (though most of them hardly or didn't engage in the first). I saw only five ways to end the war. First, Aimers could be a nice guy and just leave or live in peace. Being HitlerStalin though, he openly declared that he wanted war, and through some rather impressive (though flawed) social engineering, tried to turn the vets and regulars against each other. Me, Jason, Yarik and maybe 2 others could see straight through it and tried our best to counter his arguments and statements. Aimers also revealed that he wanted to build an army, much bigger than ours, but in that plan lied a fatal flaw which no doubt contributed to his eventual downfall and - as it sits today - permanent absense from the server. He wanted to build an army - of noobs. I straight up told him his plan would fail because their loyalties would only continue as long as they were winning, or as long as Aimers supplied them at best, which he tried his best to do. Unfortunately for him I had a better strategy (more later).

End-of-war option two, we continue fighting battles until Aimers runs out of resources and gives up. Two problems with that: first, our war team was broken and hardly dedicated to start with and didn't want to fight once they knew what it was like (with the exception of a few of us of course); and second, he already knew where Sealand was, and once a location is known nothing can prevent a player from returning.

Third option: ban him. But as good as he was he was a legit player and that would be massive abuse of god power and no honest admin would ban a player based only on hatred for that player.

Fourth, the war would have to be fought differently. Indirectly. In the shadows. This is my specialty and personal favorite way to deal with a problem. To this day no player, including Jason, a close friend, knows the extent to which I work in the darkness. They might have clues, even full details about some of my dark operations, but nobody knows everything. (I'm pretty sure not even I do, too much shady stuff, I'm pretty sure I've lied to myself about certain things to the point that I've made myself believe them. I've conciously done it before to the point that the lies eventually became truths so there's no telling what I even know).

So back to Aimers' plan. He wanted to build a noob army, and actually started to become fairly successful. He'd play nice guy with the newbies making them love him, and even supplied some of them with good stuff if he trusted them enough. But they were still noobs. To this day only one person, now a regular and vet player himself, was both a skilled player and allied with Aimers. The rest were a mix of cheaters which got banned quickly (never really stayed long enough to get good stuff from Aimers sadly), one pacifist who is actually a good player, but a pacifist so never engaged in fights, and fairly unskilled or unknowledgeable players. Of course, following the logic I presented earlier, noobs only stay loyal while they are either supplied or winning, so while Aimers was offline and unable to protect them, me and a few others would take them out. In this we found out that the full diamond gear the trusted ones were supplied with was mostly shit tier (badly or not enchanted) - making them easy kills against godgeared high skill players. I can't even list the names of any of these players because once they lost their supply (because their supply wasn't online) and realized they were outmatched they basically gave up and most didn't stay on the server for more than a week, none are active anymore besides the two higher skilled players (the pacifist and other mentioned player who is now an ally of me and the other vets). This left Aimers mostly on his own to defend "his" island town and as he wasn't able to spend nearly the same amount of time as I was online, much less match time zones and sleep schedules with me, I was basically free to do my part with minimal interference, and as everyone knew what his target was and he knew nothing of us, it was easy to deal damage and take almost none. Still, this wasn't enough to drive him out and he'd still be leaching off our months of hard work.

That left me with option five. Drastic measures. Another specialty of mine, but I prefer to only use it when necessary or when it will go unnoticed by most as it could lead to the possible reveal of my secrets and I might not even like the devastating results. The day after the battle I knew it would eventually have to come to this, I just hoped - a dying hope - that it wouldn't, and my frustration that Aimers would just be leaching off mine and the others' hard work was no help. I had a plan to get a message to Sealand residents and veterans to loot the city for all it was worth, then after a week I would destroy it. I told few people about it at first, but as time went on and it became clear that the other options were not going to work, I was forced to tell others. I still didn't want to start the timer (and in fact didn't know an efficient way to get a message to the other players), but eventually it became unnecessary.

Without my knowledge a couple of regulars/veterans including another Sealand resident had formed a small (2-4 person) griefing team to destroy Aimers' work and the remains of the city, but none of them had known about my plan. It seemed that I was not the only one with such a plan, mine just included the extra detail of preserving valuable resources.

That day I was actually in tears (in real life), remembering the great city that used to be, and left with the thought that it would all be gone soon. The griefing team did their part but in comparison their efforts were meteocre at best. Nobody on the server (or probably on any server for that matter) had seen my work or dedication to a griefing job, and as a self proclaimed professional griefer I felt it was time to give it everything I had in hopes that the inability to carry out his plans and the realization of the power his opponents have would drive Aimers far away, and maybe even off the server.

Fueled by my hatred for the player I was at war with, the sadness that Sealand would never be a place I could truly call home - no matter what I did from that point forward, and the anger that this seemed to be the only option, I spent two hours removing every last block of obsidian (over an inventory full) from my miniature castle, then proceeded to dismantle anything with precious resources (lapis lazuli blocks, expensive redstone machines, slime blocks (because slime is extremely rare to spawn) and more), then set to work on the endgame. Total destruction of the city - removing it from existence.

Over the next two to three days I blew up builing by building, broke block by block, until finally the main island was nothing more than a couple leftover waterfalls and lava flows with some scarce low value blocks and scattered stone in the ocean - leftovers from the lava used to create the island and hard to efficiently remove, even with my explosive capacity.

Sealand doesn't exist anymore. All that is left are some old memories, maybe a screenshot or two, and some low value scattered blocks, strewn about in the general area that the island used to be, floating in air and water. The great city is gone.