Insight: How did I get here?

Do you wonder how it all started? When the universe began, it was made of very hot and tiny particles mixed with light and energy. Those tiny particles started to group up and-- Okay, I won't go that far.

As you may or may not know, the server officially started on December 14, 2019, with some firework show prepared by TecThor. The server started to get some more attention as more content has been produced, and we evolved a lot since our first day. In this blog post, I want to talk about how the earlier days of VMC-Tec was, mostly from my perspective. Thus the series name "Insight"

Old ender chest shop, old bone meal shop and old gold shop.

Before VMC-Tec
I used play on anarchy servers a lot. Killing the innocent, looting duplicated items and griefing someone else's work is fun under correct circumstances. However, that's not a one-way relationship with your environment; instead, you are under threat at all times. You have to watch your back to see if someone's running at you with their speed hack. You must accept your fate when you wake up to a wrecked house. At some point I get tired of all, then started to search for a much more peaceful server.

It may sound like an easy task when said, but I remember getting chased by stacked players five minutes in, in servers supposedly similar to Hermitcraft. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to find one with two nice people who greeted me by offering some essential items, instead of watching me suffer. Phantomboy and TecThor were acting friendly towards me, so I wanted to stay. I guess that is how it started.

I will not give the server's name. All I can say is, I hated how it was regulated. Firstly the spawn point was a terrible-looking quartz build, and that is not the best way to welcome anyone anywhere. Not even mentioning the fact that there was spawn protection. You had to swim for hundreds of blocks to reach to the closest tree. Secondly, it was not whitelisted. I had to fight people with killaura and be aware of looters myself until I got admin perms. Even after that, we had to be watching actively to make sure no one was griefing places. And lastly, we did not have any control over the server and it was not possible for us to fix those problems.

I have to give credit when due: As much as we banned people, we have also met great people along the way. RavenSkies was already a member of the server when I arrived. Wolfboy248, oreo3455, Nimerodel and Ryenalie came later than me; but they contributed to the region around us quite a lot. We had a shopping district, a tree farming area, some roads and so on. It was going well on that part.

TecThor's beautiful village with his shaders (credit: him)

One day, an illiterate cabbage (I will call them Cabbage in this post) ignored my "Claimed by XiadMabsax" signs and decided to be my close neighbor. That ruined my base plans and I was extremely annoyed. Later I suspected that my items were changing places, disappearing and sometimes reappearing. Through admin tools I have noticed my 8 stacks of gravel along with some other building materials were stolen. My annoying neighbor Cabbage never admitted stealing. I had to force them to bring back some materials. I threatened to ban them if they continued stealing stuff, but they did not stop. Annoyance was next level. He got banned temporarily.

I think that was the breaking point for us, because we started to talk about how cool it would be if we had our own server. TecThor checked the logistics of running a Minecraft server, while I was learning how to make a Discord bot. Both seemed possible, and we decided to actually start up a server. We invited the people we enjoyed playing with, and started to talk about what kind of a server we want.

That was around when that old server shut down. It was an interesting coincidence. During all of these, Cabbage was still banned. The server was already down when his ban period ended. (Press F to pay respects)

Creating VMC-Tec

The plan was simple: Make a server that is capable of running Minecraft Java 1.14.4. Setting up the rules went smoother than expected, as we just wanted some vanilla gameplay. The seed was a harder question. So, we opened a Discord channel to ask everyone to describe what they expect from the seed in one sentence. Then TecThor ran a script to find potential seeds to later eliminate manually. Meanwhile I bruteforced MineAtlas myself and proposed the seed 14122019 (the date the server was planned to launch). It was a cool idea, but we voted on a seed TecThor has found. (Not saying the current one is bad at all... but imagine having the date of starting as our seed!)

I had a lot of fun during that process, though. Everyone was suggesting some stuff, we were debating on why we should do/reject that. For example, it was fun to see everyone suggesting datapacks for everyone to try out. We decided to pick the ones that does not change the gameplay. We had a clearer idea of what we want as time progressed. Then TecThor, TecLoki and I ran test servers to see how powerful our machine is. The server never let us down, until I put NBT-tag items inside NBT-tag items inside NBT-tag items inside...

We decided to split the land so that everyone had the space to build whatever they want. It worked in a closed, small community. However as more and more people joined, some also decided to leave. Then we stopped claiming land to make sure everyone has at least some space left!

(My) Early Days

Time for an anticlimactic sentence: I missed a lot of it! My computer used to have a problem with its fans. They were working too hard five minutes after booting, then screaming very loudly. To picture how hard it was to play like that, I will leave this here: My roommate shouted at me from downstairs, asking me to turn off my laptop. Apparently he was trying to watch a film and my laptop's noise was too loud to deal with. I could wholeheartedly empathize with him, because my laptop was indeed a portable headache machine. (Fun fact: I took a programming exam with the same laptop at the date, turning off my laptop every three minutes and wait ten minutes for it to cool down. I passed with an astounding A+. I am still proud.)

I was there at the starting event. TecThor built a small wall of instructions where he explained some datapacks and went through the rules once again. He also made a firework show. We started to spread out the land, and then my laptop crashed :(

Did I wait until my laptop was fixed? That'd be smart. I'm not that kind of a logical person. As it was very close to the winter/Christmas holiday, my roommate left. That meant no one to complain about the sound. I was already one day behind, and I wanted to see what other people have done. I decided to visit every single base. Please mind the situation: No nether portals, no food, no armor, an extremely loud fan, and phantoms. It took me three days to reach to TecLoki's base. I'm so glad she still keeps my signs there!

It was nerve-wrecking.

 

When I was back, the community was already shaping itself. On the contrary, I was surprised to see there were no shops just yet. You'd expect me to talk about how I started the diamond business, but no. It was time to start building my castle with no diamond tools or enchantments. Huge thanks to Nimerodel and Ryenalie for helping me terraform a 130x90 area with iron tools! They then supplied a lot of stone/cobblestone for the building. I guess I can't thank them enough.

Before even TecThor realized diamonds were awesome, I had built the first shop on the server. It was nothing impressive, and it made 4 diamonds in 1.5 months. It was so bad that I had to rebuild it twice. the familiar rib cage used to look like an Apple Store with a wool roof. And even before, an abomination:

You can guess why no one shopped there

After that, more and more shops started to pop up. Then the communal buildings like Crafting Table and Mail Office appeared. Later we got our hands on a nether tunnel system. If you fast forward enough, we are where we are now :)

I actually have a lot more stories: The day I led people to die in the void, the day we kneeled before our bee overlords, the day I destroyed and rebuilt the spawn, the day we had to ban our first (and only) hacker... But I want them to have their own blog posts. For now, that was the story of how we decided to start VMC-Tec and what happened first. I am excited to share more insights very soon!