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Comment by minikomi | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone remember something about a minecraft server which is never reset.. and turned into a desolate stripmined wasteland around the spawn point, where you have to hope to luck into a food cache just to survive..

Edit: it appears the server is called "2b2t" .. searching for it brings up a ton of interesting stuff:

https://imgur.com/a/bt3zi

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Yes, there are these two completely fascinating posts from a guy wandering around on one of these servers. The original posts are on imgur but there's good context in the reddit comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/xcpit/exploring_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/xodzv/exploring_...

http://mcgs.crummy.com/

The ultimate Minecraft "abandoned virtual world" is the Minecraft Geologic Survey, by Leonard Richardson of the New York Public Library (assisted by the wonderful Joe Hills). The survey archived over 170,000 Minecraft maps (2TB!) from various public fileservers.

A[1] map called "The Reef" (which is available at the link above) was created from those maps, by using the Python libraries from MCEdit to select a heuristically "interesting" chunk[2] from each map and grouping them (approximately) by ground height and other features into a single map. Each chunk has a chest added with a single book inside it, containing the bibliographic reference.

Joe Hills introduces the map with Richardson in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpkdtv68DYU

If you found the Reef interesting, you may also like the "Sign Dungeon" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPNysdgIbQY ), which was created from all of the written signs from the same MCGS archive, again filtered by a heuristic which is discussed in the video.

[1] Actually several maps of various sizes.

[2] Minecraft stores the world data in 16x16 block wide, 256 block tall "chunks" ( http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Chunks )

This server reminds me of when I first tried dayZ (arma2 mod). You spawn with nothing, have no idea what to do and there are zombies and bandits everywhere that wants to kill you.

It took me a few tries before I managed to sneak out of the "spawn zone" without getting killed or starving to death. Then I traveled for hours until I finally found and area where no-one had built. And made a nice base there.

It's a shame they didn't show the inside of the spawn "cube".

Last time I went on there, you spawned atop an uneven cobble floor, those huge cobble walls surrounding you.

Exiting the cube is hazardous. It's dark, twisty, and full of deep pits that open up just around corners as you try to escape.

As a 2b2t player, I would say that whilst it initially appears to be rather difficult to exit said 'cube', it is in fact rather easy to escape. One must simply be willing to try a few times and meet new people. Why go near people who are potentially hostile? There is no loss: one simply restarts with the same amount as before (0), but one could make a friend which will provide one with food etc. in order to facilitate easier arrival at 2b2t Immigration. 2b2t Immigration's officers are rather ... variable. Some will kill on sight (KoS), whilst others will give render assistance. However, the main factor which has lead to 2b2t spawn becoming easier is the road system. There are roads every multiple of 400 blocks up until the 1200 orbital, for the most part, thanks to the efforts of several players. The roads lead to portals, which in theory allow you to get to over 100k overworld by walking along nether paths. Within the 1200 radius there are a multitude of farms, and within the latter radius there are far more indeed. After about 1k the landscape appears to be vaguely naturally generated, and after 5k all destruction of spawn like intensity ceases to be.

Don't you have to spawn at the coordinates 0,0, or at the so called "spawn point". How did you start at 5000+?

I'm assuming you used an offline version.

In the first few years, people always spawned at 0 0. This was a large box, sometimes full of withers, which was difficult to escape. I believe that after some people completely covered 0 0 in cobblestone, rendering escape de facto impossible, the random spawn point system was introduced, in order to make it more difficult to cover all spawn points.

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