The 2b2t Blog

The base had been visited by Pyrobyte on his alt, Cryobyte and he had spammed the base and subsequent area with at least 2,000 giant and regular spruce trees. As well as TNT'ing the underground farm... Over on J_eb I had found a nice bit of land and marked out the area for a wonderful base. This base would have all the machines needed to survive without moving. It would have all the mobs and all the mines too.

All well and good until I died without sleeping or writing the coords down.

Back to spawn J_eb went.

I eventually bought J_eb out to around 150k where I built a very small base with a house and farm on top of a Savannah hill. This base was named New Zimbabwe and is still untouched today.

Back on James, I had met up with two players, Victor96 and Stotto. We had decided to turn a small patch of spawn into a nice base of sorts. After finding some half-decent terrain we settled at x:300 z:-300 and named it the 300Base or 300 Tower. This lasted for quite a while considering the location.

We made a nice grass patch, built a storage house, erected a tower and made a sweet wheat farm too. You can still see the remains of this base today.

The lag was becoming worse and worse. The same rollback lag I spoke of in Part 1 was back with a vengeance. Trying to build anything or mine anything was a massive task. The player count was steadily falling. I decided to go over to 700Base and found that someone had left me the 2b2t calling card on a lavacast.

And then, without warning, 2b2t was gone.

2b2t had either crashed again, or was taken down. At this point no one knew what was going on. We then received notice from the 2b2t homepage that the server was being taken down so the admin could work on fixing this lag. But the admin insisted most of the issue was just down to the way Minecraft servers run and not anything else.

With time, a temporary map came online sometime in march. This temp map changed the way 2b2t would be forever. It created new relationships and partnerships between preexisting groups.

Then April came and with it the 'April Fools Map'. This is a yearly event (2015 was an ISIS themed one with music and everything) where the 2b2t map is taken away for a few days and a smaller confined map is put in it's place. 2014's was done as a 'hack', where 2b2t.org showed a page saying it had been hacked and the map deleted.

2014's April Fools map turned into a skirmish between two group bases, 'TOPKEK' and 'WOODSTOCK'. Cobblestone bases were formed on opposite corners of the map and we spent days griefing and raiding each others bases, destroying as much as we could. This was great fun as usual for an April Fools map (apart from the one we all got put in a bedrock pit just like The Pit from the Dark Knight). This was also where I met a player who I still base with right now as I type this.

The map then changed to a free-for-all on a larger map when mobs such as Ghasts and Blazes were set upon us.

Once the yearly map was over, it switched back to Temp Map. We had by this point become a new group, adding the others we met from April Fools into it. Here we made a base near the spawn and then once it got found, we moved further out and made a more stable base above ground.

This lasted for quite a while though, we had various food and animal farms, tree farms and walls were being constructed.

The members of this base stayed together once 2b2t came back, which was around the middle of April. We have made and been at many bases together including Gape 1 restoration, Gape 2, Fenrir and Asgard II.

2b2t was now back to the normal map with hardly any lag. This meant that the players started to come back and the average online rose nicely. I was then back on J_eb exploring further out near my base I had made, which now had a small base of it's own nearby.

I had taken refuge at the recently lavacasted 700 Base around this time. Well, more like made it my home; I had restored most of the terrain and fixed up some of the houses. Hell, I even started to make the lavacasts look nicer. Something about this base had always struck a cord with me and to this day I'm still not sure why. Perhaps because I had found it so close after it had been abandoned, maybe it was because it was the closest thing to a base this close to spawn after all this time. Either way, from what I could tell I was completely alone inside these (still standing) walls.

This is what 700Base looked like in its prime. (Most of the old renders you will see in this series were made by XCC2.)

But one thing was for sure, I needed a better farm. What was left was not in good condition and with the lag, I knew I'd need a nice big plot so the harvest cycles provided me with endless food. So I walked though this familiar base and found myself a nice central lavacast and began my work.

Luckily this used to be a farm when the base was active. As you can imagine though, having lava thrown all over it and then water for a handful of times kinda ruins any crops. I harvested all the melons I could find and turned half to seeds, ready for when I got the ground ready.

Oh God though, the lag. By mid-December the lag was causing rollbacks every 30 seconds or so. This means you would mine for a good 10 seconds with no drops, and then all the blocks would reappear and you would have to start again. This was happening every 30 seconds.

Soon enough the farm had really taken off. I'd even had some visitors, most friendly, some I had to fend off. Logging in to find the farm half rekt was not uncommon. But I would not be shaken, I would not be forced out of a place I'd already spent months at, even if it was practically spawn.

After completing this I built a staircase inside the lavacast and made myself a little room overlooking the farm. Somehow this remained ungriefed for quite a while, well into the year. More visitors came, mostly new players whom I admittedly took advantage of. I started this game where I would allow them to eat as I watched over them, sword in hand. As they left I would ask them the same simple question: "Did you pay your melon tax yet?" 

As you can imagine, this was met by confusion: "What melon tax?" "James wtf?". At this point I would declare that the tax payable was not part of their food nor their items. The tax item was their very life! With a few sharp blows I would send them into the next life and collect their goods. I must admit, this was quite fun and after all, just doing to them what had been done to me by famous spawn patrols like POMPANO and Fubster.

I had also started working on an underground farm restoration that had been completely TNT'd. This was going really well but as I have the tendency to do, I was working on everything at once and got nothing done. So I took a break. I looked around the base in more detail, checking every little corner. I made my way up high onto the sky highways, running along them hundreds of meters above land. This was really fun and something I have missed doing in recent times, just discovering unseen things.

This cycle basically carried on right though December and even January. I roamed spawn and kept an eye on changes to bases. It turned out that someone was living in 700 Base on the other section of it! Eventually we met and after a while, they left onto their own adventure.

January came and was almost over. This was when I met with Pyrobyte, who had managed to get himself up on the Nether roof, something that was very common for players to do around this time period. Pyro had managed to get his hands on some pig spawners, completely illegal items in Minecraft let alone online. We made a nice little pig farm on the roof, right at 0,0 in the nether.

This lasted a good few weeks, exploring the roof, making portals to far away lands and travelling much much further as we could set autowalk on and just leave it for days. Something I regret from this is not walking out to somewhere ridiculous like 20mil and making a base. Sure enough, the exploit was patched and now a plugin resides on the server stopping anyone from going above the ceiling of the nether.

That is a brief summary of my time on 2b2t.org during these months! This series will continue right up until present day and then become my live journal. Up next will be February onward, where I meet some interesting people and work on some awesome projects.

Thanks for reading!