My History with Minecraft

The Beginnings

I originally heard about it back in December 2010 in Machinima's TopFTW games of 2010 (sadly the video is no longer available), and thought it looked rather fun. One christmas later and the game has stuck around with me ever since. I vividly remember having a friend stay the night that December and we would take hour long turns playing on my laptop in one of my first worlds. We stayed up all night, as we were hooked.

First Survival Server

I'd go on to explore various different servers, staying on MineRealm for some time. I didn't have much, but I remember my friend, CreeperCrossing, and I started the "Creeper Repair Service" and would fill in the creeper holes around spawn to make it look better. One day, the server went down and one of the players opened their own server temporarily. My friend and I enjoyed it so much, we stuck around even after MineRealm came back online. The owner happened to find us on his server, saw what we were doing, and decided to make the server public, which was the start of 8BitRift.

A video the owner, GL1TCH, took of our first town that started it all.

I stuck around 8BitRift for years, I made my first online friends through that server, we'd talk nearly every day, making many different bases together. It was the first server that really felt like a home for me. It's now been lost to time, with the original owner leaving little trace behind after all these years. While the original world was lost, I managed to keep the world seed, so the world itself remains. If you'd like to experience it, the world was made in Beta 1.3, with the seed: 980616060108312262

The Era of Mini-Games

What made me leave the server was the age of mini-games. The first Survival Games map released, and I was hooked. Back when that video first came out, people we posting servers in the comments for people to play together. I joined in a couple and had a great time. After a couple of weeks of doing that, I decided to make my own server, Firework's Survival Games.

I ran this for about half a year, and we had pretty good numbers! We had a solid group of 10-20 of us that would play regularly, communicating through Skype for updates and to get groups of us together. I was running the server on the same laptop I was playing on, and honestly I'm surprised it ran as well as it did. Over time people moved on though, since well, the server was down most of the time. Man though did I learn a lot, setting up a server, installing various plugins and configuring them, it was a neat setup!

With my own server now behind me, I was really into the mini-game mood. I was playing on MCSG, back before it had a Hub Server. Met a couple of friends there and we'd all join in the same server to play (good ol' us26!), regardless of it was in the middle of a match or not. One of those friends I continued to talk with years and years later. Miss ya man, hope you're doing well!

My second Survival Games video, where I met my friend Eric for the first time.

After that, it was kind of a mixture of games for a while. Played a ton of Trouble in Mineville, which was a nice change of pace from Survival Games. PvP was still involved, but could have some role-playing elements tied in, since there was a lot of downtime. The was a bit of a time where I played on a creative server, which I met my close friend SquirrelNose. We talked a ton on that server and beyond it, and still close to this day! I learned about Hypixel and found Quakecraft to be tons of fun. I'm a big fan of point-and-click shooters, and it was right up my alley. For the time, I thought I was pretty good, getting quite a few perfect games and all. I even took the time to make some montages.

Then at some point, I returned to MCSG, or what had become MCGamer. I spent some much time on this server, as this was its hayday. All my online friends at the time were on there and we'd play all the time. Met so many people and made so many memories, I could make a whole page just about it, so just some mentions:

The College Times

At this point, I just started college. I lost a lot of my available time to my studies, and I couldn't play as much. As a Computer Science major, it was stressful keeping on top of everything, I needed an escape. December 23rd, 2017, I made a single player survival world called Continuous Horizons 3.

World tour of Continuous Horizons 3 in 2019

The name Continuous Horizons came to me in it's first iteration. I needed something timeless, something that no matter how much time passes, there's always something new to discover, or experience. With minecraft being an infinite world, it felt fitting. The first two worlds didn't have a lot of work done on them, mainly would quit once I got to the grindy portions of survival. With this world however, I used the custom generation tools at the time to increase the ore and dungeon generation rates greatly, to reduce the grindy portion of the game and focus on the world itself.

It worked great! I managed to get two whole towns built, with roads connecting to each other, a main base with a storage vault I was incredibly proud of at the time. It was my world to go to and forget the worries I had during college. It was relaxing.

As I finished up college, the world was at the point shown in the video. It was a ton of fun, but was missing something: people. It was fun building up this world and connecting it all together, but having that social aspect of meeting other players and seeing them leave their mark was something I felt like I needed. Especially at that time, since I just graduated, got a job in my field, but was living away from most of the friends that I had made in person. So I decided to return to my roots, and create my own server, Continuous Horizons.

Return to Survival Multiplayer

In February 2020, I launched Continuous Horizons, a semi-vanilla survival server with the goal of being that interconnected world I wanted from my single-player world, but with other people living within it. It did manage to get quite a few dedicated players, and we had a lot of fun building our bases. During it's time, the 1.16 Nether Update dropped and we had a whole server event of everyone jumping into the nether at the same time, to explore the update all together.

A build showcase I took for some of the bases on the server, seven months after it opened.

From that server I've met some more people that I still talk to. We had build competitions over different infrastructure aspects of the server to make it feel even more connected. It helped connect my brother and I even more as we worked on our large city project together. However, the server grew stagnant. Not many new people were joining, and the regulars slowly ended up moving on to other games. 1.17 came around, but unlike the Nether Update, barely anyone joined to experience it. By 1.18, only one player was still active, and it wasn't me. With a big update on the horizons, I didn't want to go through the update process for one person, so November 2021, I announced the closure of the server. It's ironic, for in the build showcase video, I said "whatever you make here will stand the test of time." As much as it doesn't seem like it, lots of things change over time.

With the closure of the server, that didn't stop me from playing. 1.18 was around the corner, a huge update! Instead of hosting the server myself, I decided to look for a server with the same ideals. I explored various different small SMPs, but ended up sticking with Oldies SMP. They had just opened the server for 1.18 and planned to keep the same world as future updates dropped. Sounded like a fit for me, applied, and started a new base there. I was enjoying my time there, and reached out to the one active player from Horizons and invited them over, in case they were looking for a server. She joined, and we met a wonderful group of people that we got close with.

From Oldies grew the OG Crew, consisting of Thumpermeyers and myself from Horizons, and Stara, Dr_Nick, piperbunny, gembembabii, flynn1597, Nyx, and xAboveAveragex from Oldies. We would talk in the discord server often, just talking about our day or what our current project is, and all became close friends. Eventually some drama broke out on the server and ended up server hopping for a bit, but eventually we ended up making our own server, to keep a world for the long-term, but not run into the issues that public servers tended to bring.

The Present Day

That brings us to today. Our small group has been on the same SMP for over a year now, with a couple new additions of players. The world has become a place filled with builds and different ideas from each of us, but still connected to the overall feeling of the world. It has been relatively quiet lately, but everyone still holds the world close to their heart that it will be around when we feel the urge to play again. I have been playing a bit of modded minecraft lately too (Vault Hunters is really fun!).

Overall, Minecraft has been apart of my life for the last 13 years. I've met so many cool people through it and have had experiences that I would never have had if it wasn't for this game. As I continue to go through my old videos, world, and pictures, I'll update this with more information. It's wild to think about, and that there's plenty of surprises beyond the horizon.