7 years ago today in Minecraft Survival...

DOS622

Well-Known Member
I'm not up to the point where I started taking screenshots, but I'm pretty sure I was living in Mooville on the 1.8 beta server. It was nice and safe from serious grief, at least at this time. Not like the area around spawn, where I started before SvenBoogie rescued me from my life of trying to hide my meager possessions from griefers, and repairing the grief to my ugly cobblestone box every day when I logged on. I say SvenBoogie rescued me, but he actually sent someone else to bring me from spawn. I can't remember his name, something wizard? Sorry! It'll probably come to me later.

Back at spawn, my shack was near what I'm pretty sure were the remains of StTheo's build - it was a big stone thing, I think an oval, and I seem to recall a lot of the floor inside and around it had been removed, and it was dark and full of mobs which would come out and harass me. I wasn't far from an island which I'm pretty sure was "Lacar's labratory" as referenced in this post: https://forums.team9000.net/threads/was-stolen-from.13686/#post-125127

I'm planning to use this thread to force me to write down some of my memories from the various survival servers, posting screenshots when the time is right. The first screenshot will be in about 3 weeks. Feel free to share your memories too.
 
About the guy who came to get me from spawn and escorted me through the nether (which was scary, I'd never been there before), I remembered a bit more about him. I'm pretty sure his brother's name was lucius something (I think I have some screenshots with his name full name) and he had built a light house on Sven's island that was red and white striped. I think his name might have been FlamingVizard. I think @Tsysin will remember lucius's brother's name.

I was so worried about ghasts in the nether, probably from hearing people complain about them, but didn't see a single one! I still wasn't tempted to go back there by myself at any point during the remaining time we had in this world.

By the way, I think my story from this world will be a lot different from everyone else's. A lot of people were living closer to spawn in towns that were frequently hit by griefers, and I just passed through those towns briefly. Maybe it will be interesting for some people anyway.
 
We lost the world files, so here's what Mooville looks like today, just like the day it was founded I suppose, taken from the hill where my fort was:

2018-10-15_19.55.42.png


I remember SvenBoogie's house was on the river front on the right-hand side. I don't have a screen shot of that exactly, but he posted a picture of what I think was his model for it somewhere on the forums. I saved it somewhere but can't find it right now.

I'm pretty sure there was a fence around the town to keep the monsters out, but that ended at the bottom of the hill I'm on. I was happy to have my fort outside the fence so that I could lure monsters into the ditch around my fort and then kill them. I think on the opposite side of the NPC village, on the other side of the perimeter fence there was a tree farm, and a little to the left of that was a rail that headed somewhere, Bull's Head maybe? I never had the guts to take it by myself, I figured if I died I might not find my way back, so I never paid much attention to where it went, I was just following someone.

When I was there, there was a mooshroom on top of the well. This was a stunt orchestrated by both SvenBoogie and Tsysin if I recall correctly, to hint that someone had found a mushroom biome. More about that in the next few days!

I think my first neighbour to the left might have been FlamingVizard. Not much further up, someone (Anaxo?) had a house that said "THE GAME" on top, in reference to that game where if you think about the game you've lost. I didn't get the reference :D In fact, it might have said "ANAXO" as well as "THE GAME". I think either FlamingVizard or Anaxo accidentally burned their own house down, I vaguely remember trying to help put the flames out.

A bit further away to the left was I think a mansion belonging to DutchCheese. If I recall correctly, at this point in Minecraft's development you could pick up monster spawners with silk touch pickaxes, and someone (SvenBoogie?) put one in his house as a prank.
 
Oops, I'm a day behind! 7 years ago yesterday I finally took my first survival screenshot, in Mooville, and of all the things in Mooville to take a screenshot of, this was the ugliest - my fort:

2011-10-16_19.41.35.png


I guess this might have been before SvenBoogie gave me the advice that (to paraphrase) "people generally think that structures build out of cobblestone are ugly". It was only my second survival build (excluding one in single player), so no surprise it was ugly, right? It had a central staircase, and big windows that wrapped up to the ceiling on the east and west walls so I could see where in the sky the sun was. I wasn't concerned about how it looked as much as how it worked, and I suppose I might not have known about making clocks at this point in time.

I think the signs were to warn people off falling into the trench.

Note ThaProfessor (there's a name I haven't seen in a long time) had just said "ohh damn, I forgot all about the damn wipe". I guess this was getting to the point where people were starting to wonder whether it was worth building anything because there might be a wipe to update the server to 1.0 any day now.

I guess I took this screenshot because SvenBoogie was about to come and take me to The Island, and I wasn't sure if I'd ever see Mooville again, since I'd been in Mooville for a while didn't have the courage to go back to spawn to see my first fort, and The Island was much further away.

As it turned out, after I left Mooville I caught one more brief glimpse of this fort just before it was gone forever, but that's a story for another day.

I remember one other piece of advice SvenBoogie gave me, and this was definitely while I was still in Mooville. I didn't venture very far out of town above ground, and mostly stuck to mining under my fort. Not having much coal yet, and having found a lava pool, I figured it would be great for my staircase that spiraled downward under the fort to have a flowing lava channel next to it to provide illumination. Naturally I eventually felt into the lava and since I only had iron armor (if any) I died. When SvenBoogie saw me die and I explained what happened, his suggestion to me was to always keep a bucket of water with me when playing with lava. In fact, as a rule I keep one on me almost 100% of the time now. My experiences later around The Island taught me about some other things I should always keep with me in case of emergency!
 
oh WOW that reminded me of when the Professor try to contact me for the cords for mooville. We had no clue who he was' and told him to go fuck himself ...he got so pissed offed ...... it was epic.
 
oh WOW that reminded me of when the Professor try to contact me for the cords for mooville. We had no clue who he was' and told him to go fuck himself ...he got so pissed offed ...... it was epic.

He did a total 'Do you know who I am' thing
 
OK so I'm going to be the asshole... our 'clan' commonly called the_empire is more active here than anyone else. Prove me wrong...bring your a game.... and yes I already know about the discord channel and am a member.
 
Still a day behind - 7 years ago yesterday, @SvenBoogie came to collect me from Mooville for our journey to his island, or "The Island" as he called it in a reference to the TV show Lost. Unlike the journey to Mooville, this would not be via the nether - to try to protect The Island from griefers, there were no nether portals near it so it was less likely that anyone would find it. Instead there was a long tunnel, the entrance to which was hidden in a desert quite close to Mooville. Sven led me to three cacti in a "V" shape; the entrance was buried 2 blocks below the sand block that was surrounded on 3 sides by the cacti. It looked very suspicious, like this (reconstruction):

2018-10-18_11.17.57.png


I don't think it would have made a very effective disguise for the entrance, but perhaps that's not how it was marked most of the time. After we went down the ladder, Sven took care of covering it up again: perhaps he didn't leave three cacti there, and that was just a trick in case I told someone else "you won't miss it, just look for the three cacti" :D

As we neared The Island, the tunnel passed through a huge ravine not that far from our destination, which was home to @Tsysin's spider XP grinder, and a stop on the rail once a rail had been installed.

At the end of the tunnel there was a fairly bare stone room with a water feature which bore an inscription in memory of the mooshrooms who died in making it, since if I recall corretly the water feature was used to get mooshrooms down from ground level to the tunnel for transportation to Mooville for the stunt where they put one on top of the well. A screenshot Sven posted of it:

waterdrop.jpg


I seem to recall that this was a very dark room, which had plain stone walls, and which you couldn't really see much of because it was built a bit lower than Y=12. I think I remember Tsysin or Sven telling me the lesson they learned was to build tunnels at Y=12 in the future because then when you come across lava lakes they're at the level of your feet, instead of spilling down onto your head from above.

I followed Sven up the ladder, not having a very great impression of the place yet, but eventually we came into a nicer-looking stone brick storage area which I think he said Tsysin was building (of course he was building a storage area!), and then a bit further up to what he said was Tsysin's temporary home:

2011-10-17_20.23.24.png


And here's another picture I took a few minutes later:

2011-10-17_20.35.52.png


Tsysin's temporary home is the stone brick structure on the left. I thought it was weird to have a bed in an area open to the air, but I hadn't gotten used to the fact that this was a mushroom biome so there were no mobs to worry about.

The observatory on the right was built by Tzelmoth (@TZM). He confessed that he built it using one of those online tools, maybe https://www.plotz.co.uk/, which show you where to place the blocks. He would have done all the decoration himself though, I wish we still had him around for that kind of thing!

At this point in time, I can't remember how you got into that thing - I think you had to swim across the waterfall - but later he built a winding water escalator and a piston elevator. The latter was a bit dangerous but it was all pretty impressive to me!
 
Worse minecart tunnel ever...was literally 8000k blocks long and we only made it 1x2 high which was very buggy if you logged or lost connection (think you died).

But yah I remember that island... the hard part was keeping it a secret from other as I felt I was being dishonest but I promised Sven not to share unless he gave the approval. Sven and the rest of the world didn't always get along which made for interesting politics.
 
Here's what I remember about 1.8:

My first home was at coordinate 0, 0. It was a cylindrical tower that went to bedrock (as was every tower I built there). Being so close to spawn, I eventually abandoned it to avoid grieving. A couple months later, I returned to see what had happened to it. It was heavily damaged, filled with mobs, and at some point had become the new spawn point of the world.

I had built a couple temporary towers after that one. One where I had stayed a few weeks was in the middle of the ocean, then I moved to a snowy town closer to spawn. Those were kind of boring, but I found a few ways to entertain myself. At one point, I was shown the beautiful city of Petra, built into a ravine. Using the coordinates, I constructed a portal much closer nether-side to the overworld portal and built a player trap around it. The trap consisted of a pressure plate in front of the portal linked to a piston and lava source behind the portal. Walking on the pressure plate would release the piston, allowing lava to break through the portal and burn the now trapped victim. Since the portal was broken, going through the overworld portal wouldn't bring the victim to the portal next to his/her corpse. I got some free chicken from that trap. :D

Eventually I overheard discussions of a hidden city, far from the grieving plaguing the areas closer to spawn. At one point Sven accidentally posted the coordinates from when he was halfway to it. I went to those coordinates via the nether, then in the overworld kept going in the same direction I had come from. I used reeds to determine if the area had been travelled through - if the reeds had been fully grown, players had been in those chunks. If there were any 1 block high, I had strayed from the trail. I eventually found the edge of Mooville and let its surprised citizens know I was there. As I founded a tower in the mountains nearby, Tsysin told me to "wipe that smile off your face".

Things were quiet for a few weeks after that. I had built an extensive underground base that an enderman was kind enough to supply grass to, I had a decent chicken farm and zombie grinder, and had a little path to Mooville when I wanted to visit. Eventually, the good times being a neighbor to Mooville had come to an end, and flaming swastikas took the place of the charming town. I mostly stopped playing after that, waiting for the arrival of the 1.0 world.
 
Worse minecart tunnel ever...was literally 8000k blocks long

Yeah, I remember that figure being thrown around for how long it was. Whenever I look at the coordinates in my notes:

The Island: 2275, 12700
Mooville: 4747, 7498

it doesn't seem like 8000, but I did the math and it's just under 7700, so yeah, it was long. Oh and the first time I went down that tunnel there weren't potions yet, so we just went at normal running (and jumping slightly) speed!

and we only made it 1x2 high which was very buggy if you logged or lost connection (think you died).

I had some trouble with that which I'll get to later!

Sven and the rest of the world didn't always get along which made for interesting politics.

Yeah, in fact people might be wondering why it was that he brought me to his island! I helped him in classic somehow when I was a builder or whatever one of those lower ranks was and he was a bit newer than me. I don't even remember what I did, I don't think it was much! In fact he brought me to the server, because I had gotten on the 1.7 beta survival server, not found anyone there, found it pretty boring, and gone back to classic. He eventually saw me on classic and said how great survival was and that this 1.8 server existed!
 
My first home was at coordinate 0, 0.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that that was where your build was. That's how I knew it was yours - you'd mentioned in some previous post that you had a stone tower at 0, 0, and going back in single player more recently I figured out where that was in relation to my build.

At one point, I was shown the beautiful city of Petra, built into a ravine. Using the coordinates, I constructed a portal much closer nether-side to the overworld portal and built a player trap around it. The trap consisted of a pressure plate in front of the portal linked to a piston and lava source behind the portal. Walking on the pressure plate would release the piston, allowing lava to break through the portal and burn the now trapped victim. Since the portal was broken, going through the overworld portal wouldn't bring the victim to the portal next to his/her corpse. I got some free chicken from that trap. :D

Oh man, I never knew that you were one of the people that Sven was protecting me from :D
 
OK so I'm going to be the asshole... our 'clan' commonly called the_empire is more active here than anyone else. Prove me wrong...bring your a game.... and yes I already know about the discord channel and am a member.
Probably. Most of us have lives now...and those of us still playing Minecraft moved on to other communities with their own discussion areas.

Hell, I'd wager you're more active than wootybooty these days... Used to be that was a joke since he was always silently watching, but lately you gotta wonder....
 
Probably. Most of us have lives now...and those of us still playing Minecraft moved on to other communities with their own discussion areas.

Hell, I'd wager you're more active than wootybooty these days... Used to be that was a joke since he was always silently watching, but lately you gotta wonder....

I should probably be offended or such...nah not so much..hope you, the missus and kiddo are doing ok
 
Real life interrupted, so I have some catching up to do!

Here was the beginning of my lighthouse 48 hours after I arrived at The Island:

2011-10-19_20.59.38.png


10 days later (7 years and around 5 days ago), it was no longer made out of cobblestone (and also note how we were getting closer to version 1.0!):

2011-10-29_14.32.12.png


I must have decided that day that I should take some more screenshots. Here's Sven's house:

2011-10-29_14.55.47.png


and then my lighthouse again:

2011-10-29_15.00.24.png


There are some more names I haven't seen in a long time!

Maybe I took those screenshots because I was about to go on a little journey and I wasn't sure how well it would go, because as it turned out it didn't go very well:

Worse minecart tunnel ever...was literally 8000k blocks long and we only made it 1x2 high which was very buggy if you logged or lost connection (think you died).

I took that (now-built) rail, but at some point a chunk didn't load (my Internet connection was pretty bad back then), and my minecart went over the edge, and I figured I didn't want to end up in the void and die, so I logged out, hoping that when I logged back in it'd load all the chunks and I'd be okay. When I logged back in I was definitely alive, but here was a screenshot I took 74 minutes after the last one of my tower:

2011-10-29_16.14.24.png


I logged back in at ground level, in the middle of the sea! I think I had to swim for a fair while just to find this spot where I could stand with my head above water, and could finally see an island. Now I almost never go anywhere without a boat, just in case I find myself in the middle of the ocean again! Eventually I managed to swim to an island that actually had trees and got home. I think I discussed it with Sven at the time, he didn't want me to dig down to the tunnel in case someone found their way into the tunnel and found The Island. I was quite happy to not have my home being griefed like the rest of the server!

7 years ago tomorrow I took some screenshots from the top of my lighthouse:

2011-11-04_21.10.34.png


The flat ground at sea level just up and to the right from the crosshairs had some pens with mooshrooms if I recall correctly, and then I seem to recall that there was a door in the cliff leading to an underground room with more of them.

The smaller area of flat ground just visible at sea level, lit up, to the right of the crosshairs was a staircase down to a mining area and a tunnel to another nearby island which was of a regular biome type, which was handy to go to for trees.

Sven's house was off in the distance somewhere above the crosshairs, I think.

2011-11-04_21.11.11.png
 
I should probably be offended or such...nah not so much..hope you, the missus and kiddo are doing ok
Nah, not meant offensively. Some people enjoy their hobbies enough to leave other, more typical pursuits by the wayside. And there's nothing wrong with that. Besides, I'm one of the ones still playing Minecraft, just elsewhere.

Actually, yeah, daughter just turned 4, son is turning 3 in a month.
 
So far behind..

November 10: Looking across the water from the base of my light house to the main storage area and automatic chicken farm (the glassed-in area just above the waterline):

2011-11-10_20.13.55.png


At this point in Minecraft, breaking a boat gave you a plank and a stick or something, so to avoid waste I had that little area with doors to keep my boat(s).

November 13: I have a screenshot from creative where I was testing some stuff with rails which says "Minecraft Beta 1.9 Prerelease 6".

November 18:

I built this weird rail thing where your minecart would stop on a slope, you'd get out and set a switch for your desired destination, and then go and get back in your minecart and hit the "continue" button. The plan was that multiple minecarts could stop at the same point so I could take storage minecarts, but that never worked properly.

2011-11-18_19.20.20.png


Not all destinations were linked to that system. You had to go downstairs to get to this rail which the sign says goes to "1. Tsysin's spider XP grinder", "2. Mooville" (yes, the rail to there had been built by this point, but certainly not by me). I'm not sure what 3 was - something about NPC village and mob grinder.

Other rails went to my lighthouse, the storage area, some kind of mob grinder under Sven's house, and the tree farm islands.

2011-11-18_22.23.04.png


Looking at my lighthouse from near the storage area:

2011-11-18_19.23.23.png


The storage area was behind me in the above picture. This one is from the other side of the storage area, which is on my left:

2011-11-18_19.31.11.png


That's FlamingVizard's lighthouse peeking above the cliffs in the distance.

I'm still around 20 pictures behind! November 19 was a really exciting day, I'll try to get to it tomorrow.
 
November 19:

The rail to the islands with our tree farm had a stop..

2011-11-19_12.23.05.png


..for my lava storage and obsidian production facility:

2011-11-19_12.23.27.png


I didn't store lava in buckets in chests, that would be a waste of wood and iron!

I think there's a post somewhere on the forums - maybe from tbarius - saying that he saw all this lava stored by someone called "DOS" and he was suspicious that that meant I was a griefer :D

The same stop from the other side; on the left side you can see that there was more than one room for lava storage, and you can also see mention of our old friend:

2011-11-19_12.23.43.png


I kind of took an Amish approach to Minecraft back then, so instead of moving water sources for obsidian production, I built a channel to get the water from a source in a nearby cave:

2011-11-19_12.24.02.png


I probably felt like being able to pick up a water source and move it was too easy :)

Minecraft 1.0 is released, visitors arrive

The next screenshot shot doesn't say "RC2", and there wasn't a later release candidate, and this is the day that Mincraft 1.0 was released, so I assume that in the 80 minutes since the last screenshot, we upgraded to version 1.0.

Sven decided that since we'd be upgrading to 1.0 soon and the world would be reset, he would invite selected guests to come and visit the island. Here was our first visitor, @bothan13, next to the storage area and chicken farm. Aww, the panda is sleeping in a bed, he thinks he's people :3

2011-11-19_14.42.16.png


The first thing for our visitors to do was sleep in a bed so that if they died they wouldn't have to repeat the long journey. That didn't work in bothan's case because the server crashed and rolled him back to before he started the journey, and he didn't feel like doing it again, so I don't think he saw very much of The Island :(

Much later that day

FlamingVizard's brother came to visit too, and managed to stay longer. I remember we were suspicious of each other at first. He went over to the island where his brother's lighthouse was, and I went to Tzelmoth's observatory to keep an eye on him to see what he was doing! But it wasn't long before we got to talking, and I mentioned I'd been hearing weird noises which I thought might be slimes, so he came to check it out and we started working on a slime farm:

2011-11-19_22.33.28.png


I was wondering in chat if that dead skeleton was going to come back to life because it had been there for a while. See, here's another screen shot where we've cleared the area out more, and the skeleton is still there!

2011-11-19_22.37.00.png


Version 1.0 quality!
 
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