#why are my multiplayer servers just mining minecraft

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

My nephew loves watching minecraft videos, but they have given him a very warped view of what the game is actually like. Everything he has experienced has been through the lense of those AI baby-distraction videos of minecraft steve doing tiktok dances or mixing slime with titles like MOST SATISFYING EVER, or those janky fanimations where looney tunes style hijinks ensue. When his mom finally downloaded the game onto her tablet for him to play, he was upset that he didn't begin with armor and tools. He thought it would be multiplayer and that the things that happen in his videos would happen for real ("the iron goblin giveded the king zombie a flower and he sniffed it and was so happy that he jumped a million miles into the air and maked a rainbow come out of him"). He didn't understand that he had to mine and craft, and he would point to every block and ask "is that iron?" No, that's stone. That's also stone. That's more stone. Ask me if you see something different; if the blocks look the same, then they're the same thing.

I really take for granted how many mechanics there are to learn, and how there are no tutorials teaching you how to do ANYTHING! I had to walk him through it step by excruciating step; how to get wood, how to craft planks and a crafting table and sticks and a pickaxe, how to get stone, how to upgrade to better tools, how to dig a staircase, how to lay torches, how to smelt iron ore, it's all so complex and he can't possibly memorize it all. It'll be a very long time before he gets the hang of it, and I just hope he isn't disappointed. I turned it on peaceful mode because he was afraid of the mobs that kept killing him, so he doesn't even know about hunger or combat. He wants to build an iron golem for protection, but he doesnt understand why, it's just a thing that they do in videos.

It's so weird seeing the game through his eyes. Minecraft came out when I was 11 or 12, I started watching minecraft youtubers when I was 15 or 16 and started playing for myself when I was 18 or 19, but my nephew is 5 and he's not watching actual players, he's watching people use the minecraft mobs as action figures to go on make believe adventures. He's using the pocket edition on his mom's tablet, so I can't play with him, I have to either do things for him or be a backseat gamer and give him tips over his shoulder. I think it would be easier to teach him through example in a multiplayer server, preferably on a computer.

[queenjunothegreat]

Hello everyone!!!! I'm here with ANOTHER fic! I cannot be stopped! ( ✿ Ò ω Ó)φ__ This one is based on Minecraft of all things, and is only possible because @im-an-orenj decided to take time out of their day and explain to me how Minecraft works these days. Y'all I haven't played this game since it was a free webgame. I don't even know if it required downloading because my brother was the main one who played, not me.

ANYWHO, this fic was written because the @pjo-equinox-solstice-exchange has opened sign ups for their summer exchange!!! How exciting!!!! You ARE gonna sign up, right? I am. So, to help spread the word, I wrote this! Enjoy!

Now, it is my honor to present this Valgrace Minecraft ontleshot: Pixels and Petals

Leo rolled his eyes and turned back to his game. Then he spied a little purple flower in his inventory and pulled it out to show Jason. “What do you think of this?” “Uh, it looks like an allium.” “Yeah, but where did it come from?” Leo demanded. “Because I didn't pick this thing. I don’t even know where they spawn.” “Flower forests and meadows. There's actually a meadow not too far from here,” Jason reported. “And if you didn't pick it, where do you think it came from?” “I think someone's playing a prank on me. A very weird prank,” Leo admitted. “I've just been finding flowers everywhere recently, so I think someone's sneaking up on me while I'm AFK and throwing them at me.” “Maybe the game is giving them to you, then,” Jason suggested. “Maybe the game thinks you need things as pretty as you.” *** Leo has been tormented by a lot of things over the course of his life, just like all demigods. However, he was fairly certain he was the only one being regularly accosted with pixels and petals.

Leo had a problem. Not, like, a bad problem. Nothing life-threatening or world-ending, unlike a majority of the problems he'd faced in his life, which was a relief, but it was somehow all the more irritating for it. 

It started off small. Annabeth had invited him to join a multiplayer Minecraft server of all things. Everyone had, of course, eagerly joined, though no one took to it quite like he and Annabeth did. As it turned out, nothing delighted Leo more than figuring out how to build resource farms (yes, Piper, he knows there are YouTube tutorials for this. Let him live his truth) and Annabeth was more than happy to exploit those farms to make absolutely stunning builds in scales that sometimes made Leo’s head spin. Everyone popped on occasionally to do their own thing (Hazel had a remarkably expansive zoo that she liked to update periodically, and Percy found a passion for strip mining of all things when he had to listen to his college lectures) but nine times out of ten, it was just Leo and Annabeth in their big lonely world. 

Which is why Leo couldn't figure out where all the damn flowers were coming from. 

At first it was easy to ignore. His main base was in a plains biome, so it made sense to have a few daisies and a cornflower or two crop up in his inventory along with the random seeds and feathers he found in there. It was slightly more confusing when he found them after his trips to the Nether, but hey. He was practically the poster child for ADHD little bastards, so if anyone could somehow stumble upon a sunflower in Minecraft hell and forget about it, it would be him.

He was a lot less understanding when he started finding them in his farm chests.

With a huff, Leo activated the mist fountain he'd installed next to his desk and tossed in a coin. After a moment, Annabeth’s hazy image appeared, absorbed in her computer and completely oblivious to his presence until he loudly cleared his throat, and she spun around in her chair to arch an eyebrow at him. “Yes?”

“Why the hell do you keep giving me flowers?” he demanded. “Don't you have better things to do?”

Annabeth looked just as baffled as he felt. “What are you talking about? I haven't given you any flowers. Because I have much better things to do.”

“Wow. Rude.”

She rolled her eyes so hard it made Leo a little dizzy in sympathy. “Seriously, I haven't done anything with flowers, other than make dye.”

“Huh.” Leo knit his brow. “Has Percy?”

“Well, he hasn't played in two weeks, so I'm gonna guess no.” She cocked her head to the side. “What made you think I was gi ing you flowers?”

“I just… keep finding them. Everywhere.”

“And you don't think you're just picking them up without noticing?”

“I did, until I found them in the item drop for my iron farm.”

“Oh.” Annabeth considered that for a moment before she said, “Wait, aren’t flowers a normal drop for an iron farm? Wouldn't it just be that?”

“Believe it or not, I do actually know how my own iron farm works,” Leo drawled, glancing at the two stacks of poppies in his chest along with a lonely little dandelion. “If it was just poppies, that would be fine, but it’s not.”

“Huh.” Annabeth’s mouth puckered up into a puzzled little knot. “Maybe Piper’s doing it? You did prank her base last week.”

“Maybe,” Leo said, though his tone was thick with doubt. The flowers had been haunting him almost since day one of the server, and Piper didn't come on nearly often enough to pull it off. Besides, she’d been too caught up.with her Pokémon ROM hacks to even realize that Leo had messed with her Minecraft base in the first place, so she didn’t really have a motive. He huffed out a sigh. “It doesn't really matter, I guess. It's just been driving me crazy.”

Annabeth nodded sympathetically. “I'll see if I start noticing anything on my game. Maybe the server's just glitching or something. Daedalus’s Laptop wasn't exactly designed for server hosting.”

Leo snorted at the idea of the mythical world managing to sink its claws into the block game, only to hand out flowers like a terribly confused hippy. “Thanks. I'll let you know if I figure anything else out.” He waved his hand through the image in the rainbow and turned back to his computer, then stifled a scream of pure frustration. 

There, right in the middle of his inventory, was a chrysanthemum.

*-*-*

Aside from Leo and Annabeth, Jason was probably the one who spent the most time on the server, not that you could really tell from looking at his base. Unlike Leo, who had expansive farms for just about every renewable resource in the game, or Annabeth and her obsessively detailed builds, Jason had a simple little acacia wood house a couple hundred blocks from spawn with a bed, a crafting table, and a furnace. 

And that’s it.

The only even semi-impressive thing about Jason’s base was the fact that if you went down into the basement, you'd find his Nether portal, an anvil, an Enderchest, and a whole wall of double chests, each and every one of them stuffed with Shulker boxes and random items. Realistically, Jason’s base was nothing more than a dolled up storage system, and not a very impressive or organized one at that. 

And the simple, obvious, reason for that was because Jason was an adventurer. He didn't bother with making his base impressive or even all that functional, because he hardly even spent time in it. To be perfectly honest, he spent more time at Leo's base than he did his own. At best, he'd stop in to drop off whatever items he'd come across, grab another few Shulker boxes, and then take to the skies again. Sometimes he'd just take off in a random direction to see what structures spawned in for him, but most of the time he was on some fetch quest or another. Leo certainly didn't mind the fact that he never had to visit the Nether any time he needed to make Redstone components, and he was certain Annabeth appreciated being able to request gilded Blackstone and get half a stack of it without having to lift a finger. The only hiccup was that Jason's adventuring sent him a long, long way from the bases, and he had an… interesting way of getting all of his loot home.

“Leo,” Jason said, pitching his tone into that plaintive whine of his as he draped himself over the back of Leo’s chair.

Jason let out a chuffing little snort-huff when Leo didn't immediately acknowledge him, so Leo reached up with his free hand and patted him on the cheek, attention still focused on adjusting the Comparator he was working with. “Hey, Supes. What's up?”

“Did you ever get around to getting your Blaze farm fixed?”

“Uh, yeah, the other day. Why?” Then he froze and twisted around so he could gawk at Jason. “You lost your last Enderchest? Again?”

“Technically, I didn't lose it. I know exactly where it is,” Jason shrugged casually. “Annabeth needed a lot of the small Dripleaves, and I picked the wrong direction. It took ages for me to get a lush cave to spawn, and I had to find six of them.”

“You have an Elytra. Getting home shouldn't be an issue.”

“I ran out of rockets,” Jason protested. “Besides, coming home is boring. My way's easier and faster.”

“You’re a fucking menace,” Leo accused pinching the bridge of his nose. “You've died more than everyone in our group combined. In and out of game.”

“I promised to stop dying in real life. What more do you want?”

Leo rolled his eyes and turned back to his game. Then he spied a little purple flower in his inventory and pulled it out to show Jason. “What do you think of this?”

“Uh, it looks like an allium.” 

“Yeah, but where did it come from?” Leo demanded. “Because I didn't pick this thing. I don’t even know where they spawn.”

“Flower forests and meadows. There's actually a meadow not too far from here,” Jason reported. “And if you didn't pick it, where do you think it came from?”

“I think someone's playing a prank on me. A very weird prank,” Leo admitted. “I've just been finding flowers everywhere recently, so I think someone's sneaking up on me while I'm AFK and throwing them at me.” Then he looked at Jason, eyes narrowed playfully. “Maybe it’s you. You seem to know an awful lot about flowers.”

“It’s definitely me,” Jason snorted right back. I'm for sure the one stuffing your inventory and chests with flowers in my spare time.” Leo barked out a bright laugh, and Jason grinned before humming contemplatively. “You know, the flowers are really pretty.”

“Mmm, yeah, that is the primary purpose of them.”

“Maybe the game is giving them to you, then,” Jason suggested. “Maybe the game thinks you need things as pretty as you.”

“Actually shut up, oh my god,” Leo laughed, the bright curl of pleasure in his chest making him almost breathless. “You’re such a loser.”

“Hey, it’s just a theory,” Jason countered. “And like all good theories, it is based on facts.”

Leo's face felt so warm that he was pretty sure he was going to burst into flames, at least a little, but he didn't care. His cheeks hurt from smiling and his chair was fireproof anyway. “Loser.”

Jason was wildly unrepentant. “Seriously, though, I can try and look into it. I do break into everyone's houses on a regular basis. I can look around, see if anyone has any suspicious amounts of flowers or something.”

Leo beamed up at him. “You, Jason Grace, have earned unrestricted access to the Blaze farm. Make as many Enderchests as you want, baby girl.”

Jason puffed up in pink-cheeked pride, and Leo just laughed. 

*-*-*

Leo didn’t like sitting around waiting for people. Sitting at a cafe table, doodling in the margins of his school books always made him feel weirdly exposed and a little on edge. Fortunately, most of his friends were more than willing to accommodate that for him, and he almost always showed up to meeting places with someone already waiting for him. Jason was especially good about it, and he usually went out of his way to pick Leo up from wherever he was to avoid meeting in the first place.

That being said, Jason was late.

He and Leo were supposed to meet in Jason’s favorite park for lunch, but when Leo got out of class there was no eager-eyed behemoth waiting for him like an expectant puppy. That was fine, though. Leo was a big boy, and he could make it to the park all on his own. In all likelihood, he’d probably wind up running into Jason on the way there anyway. 

Only, he didn't run into Jason on the way there, and when he got there, the park was devoid of any of his friends, much less the one he was looking for. Leo furrowed his brow in frustration, but sat down at one of the benches. If Jason was late, there was a reason for it, and, as much as he hated it, Leo could do nothing but sit and wait.

Sure enough, about seven minutes later, Jason came sprinting towards him, skidding to a halt right in front of Leo’s toes. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s cool!” Leo beamed up at him cheerfully. He held up a Zip-Loc bag. “You want a brownie? I made some this morning using that recipe from Aphros.”

Jason’s whole face lit up like a kid at Christmas as he took his seat by Leo. “Yes, please!” Leo handed over a brownie, and Jason shoved half of it in his mouth, melting into the bench with a blissful sigh. “You’re the best.”

“You talking to me or the brownie there, Superman?” Leo teased.

“The brownie, obviously. You already know I think you’re the best,” Jason dismissed. Then he paused and looked at Leo hard. “You do know that right.”

Leo couldn’t help the delighted flush of his cheeks as he grinned at Jason. “Yeah, I know. It’s not exactly New Rome’s best kept secret or anything.” Jason nodded, like he was satisfied with that answer and went back to his brownie. “Side note, what held you up today?” Jason let out an incredibly put-upon groan and Leo arched an eyebrow at him. “Lemme guess. Temple stuff?”

“Temple stuff,” Jason confirmed sourly. “It’s Minerva again, which isn’t fair because she isn’t even a minor god, but she’s still mad about the whole Parthenos thing, despite the fact that several people, Greek and Roman, nearly died trying to restore it.”

Leo wrinkled his nose in sympathy. “Dude, that sucks. What’s she having you do this time?”

“There’s a library being built in Athens County, Ohio, and she wants me to go there to talk to some of the construction guys and make sure that it’s a proper temple to her,” he explained. “It’s not gonna be hard or anything, but it’s going to be boring, and I’ll be gone for better than a week starting next Monday.”

“Oh.” Leo stared down at his toes and deliberately ignored the way his chest deflated at the thought of Jason being gone for a whole week because acknowledging how much the idea bummed him out would have been super embarrassing.

“Yeah.” Jason seemed equally bummed for a second before he brightened. “Hey, do you wanna come with me? I know I said it would be boring, but if it’s both of us it won’t be so bad, especially if we can take Festus.”

For a moment, Leo thought he was going to burst from the sheer force of his pride. Jason wanted him to come on his boring temple quest. Not for anything useful, either, just because he wanted company, and more specifically he wanted Leo’s company. But just as soon as that hopeful pride flared to life, it was doused by an ice-cold cup of reality. “I can’t. I’ve got a presentation in Ancient Machines Thursday, and if I miss it, I’ll fail the course. I’d ask about rescheduling, but it’s a group project and my partner is going abroad for the next two months.”

Jason’s face fell, but he still offered Leo a smile. “Nah, I get it. Maybe next time?”

Leo once again felt his face and chest warm at the thought of future invitations. “Yeah, man. Whenever you want me, you’ve got me.”

Jason smiled so wide it made his eyes crinkle. “Cool.”

*-*-*

Leo was most certainly not pouting when he stomped into Jason’s room, slamming the door open with a bang. Jason jerked like he’d been electrocuted and arched his eyebrows at Leo’s petulant entrance. “Uh, hel–”

“Pity me,” Leo demanded, climbing into Jason’s bed without waiting for the invitation he knew would come.

Sure enough, Jason made an awkward scramble to shut his laptop, but immediately after that he opened his arms for Leo to settle into, which he did with a huff. “What’s the matter, Houston?” Jason asked soothingly, tugging at one of Leo’s curls like he always did as soon as he had an excuse to get his hands anywhere near Leo’s head. 

“It’s stupid Minecraft again,” Leo huffed. “Someone decided they were bored and griefed my base.”

“Someone griefed your base?” Jason echoed, sounding baffled and a little concerned. “That sucks. You want help rebuilding anything?”

“It’s not that kind of griefing,” Leo admitted somewhat sheepishly. “Honestly, it’s not really griefing at all.”

Jason seemed even more perplexed and interested now. “Then what is it?”

“Whoever’s been doing flower drive-bys on me decided to up the ante. Now instead of just my inventory and chests, they’ve started leaving flowerpots everywhere.” 

Jason blinked at him in shock for a moment before he tipped his head back and laughed. “That’s what you’re complaining about?”

“Don’t make fun of me!” Leo whined. “I’m seriously about to lose it! Today they left me a gray flower in a pot. I didn’t even know Minecraft had gray flowers!”

Jason quit laughing long enough to cock his head to the side curiously. “A gray flower?”

“Yeah, it’s for sure gray,” Leo confirmed. “I thought it might be a Wither Rose or something, but it doesn’t give any kind of Wither effect when I touch it.”

Jason furrowed his brow in concentration as he sifted through all of the Minecraft knowledge he had stuffed in his brain. “Uh, the flower. Is it, like, kind of bulbous? And is the stem gray, too?”

“Uh..” Leo trailed off, trying to remember the details of the flower. “I think so?”

“It’s probably an eyeblossom, in that case,” Jason said confidently. “You should wait til night. They’re supposed to open up then.”

“Huh. I didn’t know those were a thing.” Leo considered that for a moment, wondering how much effort someone would have had to put in to hunt down some stupidly rare flower Leo had never even heard of, just to put it in someone else's base. He shook his head to dismiss the thought. “That’s not the point! The point is I’m being tormented and you’re supposed to pity me!”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m pitying you as much as you deserve,” Jason said in a mockery of comfort. Then his mouth pulled down in a little frown and his eyebrows knit. “Is it… seriously bothering you, though?”

Leo chewed on his lip for a moment as he thought it over. “No, not really, I guess. It’s just kinda frustrating because I can’t figure it out, you know? Like, I have no idea who’s doing it, and if it’s not someone doing it, it’s something and that’s somehow even more confusing.”

“But it’s the kind of frustrated where you’re trying to get a machine to work, right?” Jason clarified. “The kind that makes you want to rip your hair out but when you figure it out, it was fun the whole time?”

“Yeah, exactly!” Leo grinned. 

Jason smiled back at him, and tugged on his curl again. “In that case, I definitely pity you just as much as you deserve.”

Leo just stuck his tongue out at him.  

*-*-*

In all honesty, Leo had never really pegged himself for a “computer guy,” and, realistically, he wasn’t. He much preferred analog stuff, things where he could literally hold his inventions together with duct tape and a prayer, rather than metaphorically. Even in Minecraft, where all his designs were a bunch of ones and zeros at the end of the day, there was all sorts of zany, off the wall solutions that he knew Mojang would weep over if they ever caught sight of them. 

That being said, he was still the guy who fixed things, and being a child of Hephaestus did give him some innate skills that nobody else had, so it wasn’t a surprise to anyone when Annabeth walked up to Leo with a scowl on her face and Daedalus’s Laptop and a complaint that the Chisels and Bits mod wasn’t working properly. He’d of course, taken it with a promise to get everything straightened out as soon as he could, and a warning that he was actually pretty busy with class, so it wouldn’t be until the weekend. Annabeth hadn’t been thrilled about the idea, but she figured sending out a group message that no one could get on the server for three days was better than ruining the builds she’d spent literal days perfecting. 

Which was how Leo found himself here: half past two in the morning, energy drink in one hand and laptop open in front of him. Getting the mod to work had been a pain in the ass, but one he’d managed to complete well over an hour before. Now, he was scrolling through the mess of information and code that made up the Argo III server, trying to figure out what, exactly, had even knocked things out of place to begin with, and what he could do to make sure it never happened again. Besides, he was pretty sure nobody would mind if he tweaked a few things here and there to keep things running butter smooth and squishing any grubs before they got the chance to grow up into proper bugs. Nico, at the very least, would likely appreciate not being overrun by skeletons every time he tried to sleep.

Around the time he was getting ready to call it quits is when he saw it. A tiny little subroutine that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose at all, but which had several item ID tags baked into it, along with the command </give:PLAYER> that he couldn’t help but narrow his eyes at. It probably wasn’t anything important, but if Annabeth was willing to let him design and run a scrubbing program, then maybe…

His thoughts were interrupted by the presence of a pointy chin being dropped heavily on top of his head. “Why are you still awake?” Jason complained, his voice thick with sleep and irritation. “Go to bed.”

“It’s not even that late, Supes,” Leo laughed. “Talk to me when it’s closer to four and maybe I’ll listen.”

“If I’m awake at four in the morning, I’m actually never going to forgive you.”

“No one said you have to be awake,” Leo pointed out. “You can go to sleep at your Princess Perfect Pants bedtime of 8:30 every night, dude. But I, for one, don’t have school in the morning, so I can and will stay up as late as I want.”

Jason was obviously displeased with that statement. “I’ll make you go to bed.”

“I’d like to see you tr– Ah! Jason!”

“You told me to try!” Jason reminded him with a laugh, like he hadn’t just picked Leo up kitten-style and thrown him over his shoulder.

“My damage is your damaged sleep cycle,” Jason countered, still carting Leo to his bedroom.

“You motherfucker, put me down!” Leo seethed, raining a barrage of smacks across Jason’s back. “Seriously, what’s your damage?”

Then the world spun again, and Leo found himself being tossed on his bed, bouncing a couple times for good measure. He scowled up at Jason. “I hate you.”

Jason just grinned at him. “Come on. Please just call it a night? We’re supposed to be doing that party thing with everyone on Sunday, and then I leave Monday. I wanted to spend tomorrow with you, and I can’t do that if you sleep in until five.”

“I only slept in until fivev the one time,” Leo grumbled. Still, he couldn’t deny that Jason’s plea tugged at his heartstrings and stroked his ego. “Okay, fine. I’ll go to bed. But you owe me.”

Jason beamed at him like he’d just been given a million bucks and a half dozen Nobel Peace Prizes all at once. “Yeah, of course. Whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want, huh?” Leo asked, arching his eyebrow. “I’m gonna make you regret that.”

Jason’s smile just got wider. “I know you will.”

*-*-*

Somehow, and Leo was certain that it was a conundrum that would baffle historians forever, Leo had managed to make friends with a bunch of extroverts. Leo liked people, genuinely, he did, and he especially liked his friends, but they were sometimes a bit much. Hazel was just so warm and friendly and liked to be involved in everything, and much as it might surprise people, her brother had it just as bad, Nico just masked it with an absolutely arid sense of humor and an aloof demeanor. Frank and Piper were both alright, falling somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with Piper being a little more overtly outgoing, but Annabeth and Percy were the worst. It sometimes took a minute for Percy to shake off his initial awkwardness, especially in larger groups, but the instant he did he was bounding around the room, shaking hands and talking to everyone who stood still long enough. Meanwhile, Annabeth practically commanded any room she was in and people just fell into her orbit while she gave each and every one of them her attention like any model host would, regardless of if she was the host or not. Really and truly, Percy and Annabeth were the best at throwing parties and everyone had loads of fun.

That didn’t mean they weren’t fucking exhausting.

Leo was very tired of the party, of being surrounded by people, of having to break out all of his social skills and run them on max every time he turned around. He was tired, and based on the tight polite smile and the glazed look in his eyes, Jason was tired, too. Which meant that it was Leo’s time to shine.

Without warning, he stuck his fingers in Piper’s cup of stale beer, ignoring her startled protests, as he theatrically stumbled over to Jason’s side, covertly dabbing beer on his wrists and under his jaw. When he made it to Jason, he put on his widest, most drunken smile and flung his arms around Jason’s waist and slurred, “Heeeeyyyyy, Jaceyyyy.”

Jason looked alarmed for only a second before his eyes sparkled with acknowledgement. “Hey, Leo.”

Leo just kept up his silly smile before he turned and blinked at the two people standing before them like he hadn’t noticed them. “Who’re you?”

“This is Miranda and Toby. They’re in my Astro-Cartography class,” Jason explained. Then he turned his attention to Miranda and Toby and gestured at Leo. “And this drunken limpet is Leo. He’s my roommate.”

“And best friend!” Leo added, deliberately pitching his voice to sound deliberately childish.

“And best friend,” Jason agreed. Then he gave Miranda and Toby an apologetic smile. “Speaking of, I should probably get this guy back to our apartment. Sorry, you guys.”

“No, I wanna staaaaayyyy,” Leo whined, digging his chin into Jason’s arm.

“Maybe next time,” Jason said soothingly. “But right now, you need to get to bed.”

“Once a Praetor, always a Praetor,” Miranda joked, and Toby gave a little half-smothered snort. “See you when you get back, Jason! Thanks for the invite!”

“Thanks for coming,” Jason said genuinely. “See you later.”

Then Leo let Jason escort him out of Percy and Annabeth’s apartment, making a show of complaining and tripping over his feet the whole way out the door while Jason laughed at him. 

As soon as they were safe out on the street, Jason let out a huge groan of relief and sank down in a heap on a nearby bench. Leo snickered and sat down at his side. “Doin’ alright there, Supes?” 

Jason muttered something in Latin under his breath, then gave Leo a grateful smile. “Honestly? Way better now. Thanks.”

“I’ve always got your back, man,” Leo grinned, gently elbowing Jason in the side.

In response, Jason threw his arm over Leo’s shoulder and pulled him into a tight sideways hug and thumped their foreheads together. “Trust me, I’m well aware.” They stayed like that, staring at one another and grinning like losers before Jason’s face fell. “I’m gonna miss you.”

Leo swallowed around the sudden thickness in his throat and blinked a couple times, hard. “I– Yeah, man. This is gonna be the first time in ages that you’re gonna get a break from me, huh?”

“First time since the Argo II,” Jason confirmed quietly. 

Leo looked away from him, fiddling with his fingers. This would be the first time Jason was out of his sight longer than a couple days since he’d managed to drag Jason back to the land of the living. The thought made his heart race like a hunted rabbit, but he took a deep breath and just thumped his head on Jason’s shoulder instead of saying anything about it. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”

Leo’s voice was a little wobbly and bordered on wet, but Jason didn’t say anything. He just rested his cheek on Leo’s head, and they sat there in silence.

*-*-*

With Jason gone, Leo found himself feeling… off. There was no other word for it really. He just felt off-kilter like he was wearing a pair of shoes and one of them was a heavy-duty, steel-toed work boot while the other was one of those flimsy plastic flip-flops you could buy at the dollar store. He was somehow both overstimulated and understimulated at all times and every moment spent in their empty apartment made him want to itch out of his skin.

So, he kept himself busy. He spent even more time with Piper than he already did, much to Reyna’s mild chagrin. He got caught up on all of his homework, and pestered as many of his professors into giving him the next few assignments as he could. He took up running with Frank and he helped Hazel with sorting through her Praetor paperwork and practiced sparring with Percy and Annabeth. Hell, he even went out of his way to practice forging swords, and he hated forging swords. 

But most of all, he played Minecraft.

As he’d expected, Annabeth was surprised to find out about the subroutine he’d found and had absolutely no problem with lending him Daedalus’s Laptop again so he could run his scrubbing program, and in the three days since then the server had been running smoother than it ever had. Everyone was happy, and even Piper managed to take some time away from her precious Pokémon so she could appreciate his efforts. Not that she probably noticed, but whatever. She still beamed at Leo and told him he did a good job and that’s all his validation junky brain needed at the end of the day. 

It had also been three days since Leo was last flower bombed. His inventory was still a mess, but it was only a mess of the things that he put in it. All of his chests were just as tidy as he left them, and there wasn’t a single stray item in any of his farms. He still had flowers in pots dotted around his base, but no more had mysteriously appeared. He was incredibly proud of himself for finally solving his puzzle.

He was also very lonely.

He’d heard people talk about Minecraft being a lonely game, what with its wide, expansive worlds and lost cities and villages you could never truly join, but Leo had never really gotten that impression. The first time he’d played Minecraft was when Annabeth asked him to join the Argo III server, so his game had always been stuffed to the gills with his friends and, of course, flowers. He was never lonely. But now, as he sat in his bedroom, knowing the room on the other side of the wall was just as empty as his flower chest, he couldn’t help but feel so very alone. He wished he could go back in time and tell himself not to make such a big deal out of nothing, to just accept kindness without trying to mask it with frustration or some stupid joke. He wished he didn’t feel the need to fix everything in his life, even the things that were maybe better off broken.

He wished he still had his flowers.

*-*-*

Six days had passed and Leo was once again staring down at a chest he knew for a fact that he didn’t place because it had been given a cheeky little label that read For Leo ;) and was sitting right in the middle of his front door. He’d never admit it to anyone, but his heart leapt into the back of his throat as he opened the chest. He blinked down at the contents and pressed his fist to his mouth in order to help smother his grin before he took a deep breath, furrowed his face up into something more akin to irritation and turned around in his chair. “Jason!”

Jason’s head whipped up from where he was reading a book on Leo’s bed. Since his return from Ohio the day before, he and Leo hadn’t been out of each other’s line of sight, and Leo quite liked it that way. They’d have to get over themselves come tomorrow when they’d be forced back to classes, but for right now they were free to be the codependent little freaks everyone accused them of being. “What’s up, man?”

“It’s the stupid flower thing again,” Leo huffed. 

“I thought you said you fixed that.”

“Apparently not. Come look.”

Jason dutifully got up off the bed so he could drape himself over Leo’s shoulders, his weirdly sharp chin digging into the top of Leo’s head. Leo once again opened the chest for Jason’s perusal, and after a moment, Jason let out a bright snort of surprised laughter. Leo did his best to scowl up at him. “What the fuck, dude? You’re not supposed to be laughing at me!”

 “You have to admit, they did get you,” Jason pointed out in a half-hearted defense, and okay, yeah, Jason maybe had a point. The chest was stuffed completely full with every type of flower known to the wide Minecraft world from the common azure bluette to those weird-looking ones only the Sniffer could find,  every color variant of tulip, and even one of the chorus flowers from all the way in the End. There was even a pink textured block that Leo was pretty sure was actually just cherry tree leaves stashed in there for good measure. Not that he could double check that because all 25 flowers in the chest were individually renamed

DID   YOU   REALLY   THINK     IT   WOULD   BE  THAT     EASY?

I’M   JUST  GETTING   STARTED   LEO.   DID     YOU    MISS      ME?

                       <3           I     MISSED    YOU       <3

“You are the most wildly unhelpful person on the planet, and Buford exists,” Leo accused. “You’re more unhelpful than a talking side table I accidentally programmed to be sassy. Do you know how hard that is?”

“I’m sorry,” Jason said, though he didn’t sound all that sorry at all. “At least they were polite enough to keep it in a chest this time.”

“That’s fair,” Leo grumbled, side-eyeing the pixels. He couldn’t help but think about how much effort must have gone into that particular plant. Aside from the pain of collecting all the flowers, including a damn Wither Rose, it would have taken a lot of effort to get the levels necessary to rename them all. Considering the fact that an experience farm was one of the only farms Leo hadn’t been bothered to make, that meant all 26 levels necessary would have needed to be collected the good old fashioned way. He had to admit that the dedication was somewhat admirable.

“You said it doesn’t actually bother you, right?” Jason clarified. 

“Well, it’s bothering me now,” Leo complained. “I thought I’d solved it.”

“Not this time,” Jason chuckled. “Looks like you’re just going to have to wait a bit longer and find out who it is.”

Leo scowled at his screen, but he couldn’t deny the warmth that was curling in his chest. Maybe he didn’t mind that much.

*-*-*

“So, care to tell me why I had to find out you have a Minecraft secret admirer from Frank of all people?”

Leo flicked his eyes up just in time to see Piper flop down in the chair across from him. She stole his ice cream, and he only mentally cursed her lineage a little bit. “Honestly, I have no clue how or why Frank would have told you that,” Leo said simply. “I’ve never told him about it.”

“He heard it from Hazel, who heard it from Nico, who heard it from Annabeth,” Piper explained. “And that’s, like, completely beside the point. I’m interested in the fact that you didn’t tell me.”

He shrugged and stole his ice cream back. “Honestly, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. It’s not like you even play Minecraft unless I make you.”

“Uh-huh,” Piper drawled. “And the fact that ‘it’s not a big deal’ is what led to you kidnapping Annabeth’s laptop so you could run experiments on it until four in the morning?”

“Literally whatever!”

Leo snorted and rested his chin on his hand. “Honestly, it’s not a big deal. I didn’t even notice for ages because I thought I was just picking up random flowers and forgetting about it.”

“Number one, it was only two in the morning, and she gave it to me,” he corrected.

She flapped her hands through the air dismissively as if to say Bah! Don’t pester me with your silly things like facts and details! I’m busy being deranged! Then she leaned forward across the table, eyes bright and eager. “So, you figured it out, right?”

“No,” Leo confessed. “I thought I did for a while there because I found a weird subroutine in Annabeth’s mods pack, but I think it was just a leftover bit of code from testing or something. I got rid of it, but the other day I found a chest full of flowers that had been renamed to leave me a message. So, like, definitely not a glitch or a code thing or whatever. I’m thinking maybe Hazel because I got torch flowers and stuff and I’m pretty sure she’s the only one with a Sniffer.” Piper just gaped at him like she did sometimes when she was questioning everything she knew about survival of the fittest and how Leo managed to fit into that. He arched an eyebrow at her. “What?”

“Are you stupid?” she asked bluntly. Leo spluttered in shocked outrage and she waved her hands again. “Okay, ignore that. Obviously you’re not stupid. We both know that much. But are you thick? Can you pick up a hint, or does it have to be gift wrapped with your name on it?”

Leo scowled at her. “If you’re gonna be a bitch then–”

“Okay, that was mean,” she admitted. “I’m just, I dunno, gobsmacked you haven’t figured it out.”

“I haven’t exactly been given a lot of hints, Pipes.”

“You don’t need hints for this,” she insisted. “Leo, come on. Someone is going around leaving you flowers and writing you playful little messages. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure it out.”

“Then who is it?”

She rolled her eyes and scoffed, “Oh, I dunno, maybe it’s the guy who’s madly in love with you to the point that he comes off as an obsessed little weirdo to anyone who’s not you?”

Leo wracked his brain for anyone who fit that description. “Uh, Percy? Because of the dog whistle thing?” Piper gave him a look that made him finally understand why Minecraft used the word wither. “Okay, so not Percy.”

“No, dummy. Not Percy.”

Leo thought so hard he was worried he’d give himself a migraine. Still. “I got nothing. Can’t you just tell me, seeing as you know so much?”

Piper’s look changed to one of pity, though he got the feeling it wasn’t for him, and she shook her head. “Sorry, but if you haven’t figured it out, it’s really not my place to say.”

Then she got up and left, leaving Leo behind with his half-melted icecream and his half-solved riddle.

*-*-*

It wasn’t often that Leo got the urge to go out exploring in Minecraft. Most of the time, he was more than content with his not-so-little farms, and any urge to face down the beasts of the land was quenched by a quick trip to the mines to fight some skeletons and zombies (no spiders, thanks to one of Annabeth’s mods) and gather resources he didn’t 

really need. When he was feeling really adventurous, he’d head down to the Nether and see what foes awaited him down in the depths, but never beyond that. He’d fought the Ender Dragon with Jason on their own little two-man server once, just to see what it was like, but never again. He didn’t particularly get the hype if he was honest. Now, if he could tame the Ender Dragon, that might be something worth doing, but that wasn’t a mod he’d come across and he wasn’t particularly interested in making it himself.

But every now and then, he got the urge to go out and play Minecraft. To really see what was out there in that big expansive world. Today, in particular, he wanted to conquer a Woodland Mansion and get his hands on a Totem of Undying or two. Doing that would, admittedly, be a lot easier if he could fly, which he couldn’t, as he’d never bothered to get his own Elytra from the End. Jason had offered to fetch him a pair, but he’d declined. It wasn’t like he really needed them often enough to warrant having his own, and he knew for a fact that Jason regularly left a (fully enchanted) pair just sitting around in his base. So, naturally, Leo did what any good best friend would do, and he broke into Jason’s house.

He didn’t really feel all that bad about his breaking and entering, or burglary rather, seeing as he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jason would have happily handed over the Elytra on his own back if he’d been online for Leo to ask, and Leo was planning on leaving him a few stacks of rockets for the involuntary lending. Really and truly, he was probably doing Jason a favor by stealing his Elytra for the day. Yeah, that’s the angle Leo would spin.

So, he packed up his very best armor (full iron with a diamond helmet, don’t judge him, he hated mining) and made his way across the savannah to Jason’s homely little base. 

It was exactly the same as Leo remembered it being, other than the addition of a new corral, which Leo thought was a little odd. Normally, Jason just used bread as a food source, seeing as Leo had a wheat farm, but Leo supposed there was nothing wrong with Jason having a pet. Maybe he had a little flock of wolves outside his base to make it more homey or something.

Then, just as Leo was about to head inside, he heard the low, bellowing half-moo-half-groan of an animal that was definitely not a wolf, followed by some furious sniffing noises. He turned back to the corral and came face to giant furry face with none other than a Sniffer. It flared its little digital nostrils at Leo like it was trying to scent him before lumbering off a few steps and plopping down on the ground. It ducked its head and started rooting around in the dirt for a moment before a little item popped up between its feet. 

Leo just stared for a moment in complete bafflement. He remembered Hazel complaining about all the effort she’d gone through to get her Sniffer, he couldn’t imagine why Jason had done the same. Even if he had stumbled upon an egg in his adventures, surely he would have just given it to Hazel, seeing as she was still trying to hunt down a mate for the one in her zoo. It just didn’t make any sense so he did what he oft times did with things he couldn’t fix or understand: He ignored it.

Instead of trying to solve the Sniffer puzzle, he made his way down into Jason’s basement to solve the much more pressing puzzle of finding anything in Jason’s chest monster. It took ages for anyone, including Jason, to find anything in the mess Jason shamefully called a storage “system.” Most of the chests were only half-full of random items, with several of those spots being dedicated to unmarked Shulker Boxes full of, you guessed it, more random junk. Leo was lucky enough to stumble upon an Enderchest at one point, and he crossed his fingers before opening it, only to find six raw chickens, some gunpowder, and an iron sword with half its durability gone before realizing that he wasn’t seeing Jason’s items, but his own. Enderchests were fun like that.

Then he came across something interesting, or, at the very least, out of the ordinary. It was a chest with a single Shulker Box among the various other garbage Jason had stashed with it, which would have been fine if not for the fact that it was bright red. All of the other dozens of Shulker Boxes Leo had sifted through were the exact same shade of End purple of undyed Shulkers. The fact that this one was red admittedly had Leo curious. With somewhat bated breath, he opened it to see what was inside.

Flowers.

Not just one or two, but at least twenty of every flower in the game, all arranged in neat, tidy little orders based on rarity. He felt his heart beat in the back of his throat. 

Maybe it’s the guy who’s madly in love with you.

Leo quickly stashed the Shulker Box in his inventory and bolted out of Jason’s house.

*-*-*

Leo wasn’t really sure where he was going or what he was meant to do now. So, Jason was probably the one giving him flowers. Probably had been the whole time, but at the very least since the chest with the note. According to Piper, that meant Jason was in love with him, but he couldn’t think like that. He’d wrestled with that idea, and managed to shove the part of his brain that made heart eyes and sighed dreamily at Jason like a lovestruck schoolgirl into a box and stashed that box somewhere he was sure it would never bother him again. 

But this. Leo liked facts. It was difficult to ignore facts. He could do it, but it wasn’t easy.

He made his way back to his base to stash his stolen goods in his (properly organized) storage system, but what he saw stopped him in his tracks. Jason was in his base, carefully arranging a set of birch trap doors around a dirt block he’d placed in the middle of Leo’s floor, and once he was happy with that, he took a step back and placed a big old peony right there in front of Leo’s very eyes. 

Then he finally turned, and apparently he saw Leo because he crouched and did a slow little walk back and forth that very much made Leo think of a dog with its tail between its legs. Leo crouched a couple times back at him before he threw the Shulker Box on the ground. Jason slowly crept forward to pick it up, and paused for a moment to check its contents.

And then he logged out. 

Leo stared, dumbfounded, at the place Jason had just disappeared from and darted out of his room just in time to see Jason making a mad dash through the living room towards the front door. “Jason Grace, don’t you dare!”

Jason immediately froze before slowly turning to face Leo, who was once again viscerally reminded of a dog who knew it was in trouble. “Uh, hey, Leo.”

“You’re the one giving me flowers!” Leo accused, feeling he should probably just cut straight to the chase. In just a few steps, he was across the room and standing practically chest to chest with Jason. 

Jason’s face flushed maroon. “Um, yes.”

The schoolgirl part of Leo’s brain was furiously kicking and trying to escape its box. “Like, the whole time?”

“Yes?” Jason squeaked. He awkwardly cleared his throat. “I, uh, didn’t really plan for you to actually notice. I figured if I just stashed them in your chests, you wouldn’t really think it was that weird.”

“I didn’t until you started messing with my farm chests.,” Leo agreed. He shook his head. “I just– Why? I don’t get it.”

“I just…” Jason was staring down at his toes and Leo kind of wanted to scream about how adorably embarrassed this gigantor hero-boy was over some colorful pixels. “I though they were pretty. I figured you’d like them.”

Maybe the game thinks you need things as pretty as you.

Leo’s breath hitched in the back of his throat and he blinked owlishly at Jason. “Wait, really?” Jason turned somehow even darker and nodded his head. The schoolgirl in Leo’s brain was officially unleashed, and he felt a giddy smile pulling at his cheeks. “Hey, Jace, can I do something I would have thought was super dumb yesterday?”

Jason cocked his head and squinted down at him. “Uh, yeah, sure. I guess.”

Without waiting for a second thought to cross his mind and dash any of the lovestruck courage Leo was feeling, he reached up to grab Jason by his cheeks and kissed him square on the lips. Jason made a loud startled sound and Leo couldn’t help but giggle in delight, which made kissing more difficult than it needed to be but he didn’t care. He was kissing Jason. He’d wanted to kiss Jason since he was a scared, lonely fifteen-year-old in a sewer and Jason was smiling at him like he actually mattered. He’d put up with all the awkward nose bumping in the world to stay right here. 

But then, oh, Jason actually kissed him back. Really, for as much as Leo loved kissing Jason, he liked being kissed by Jason just as much. Jason’s hands kinda fluttered through the air for a moment before landing on Leo’s biceps and squeezing him tight. For once though, being held didn’t feel like someone trying to keep him in place, it felt like someone who never wanted to let him go. He just kissed Jason back even harder.

When they had to take a moment to breathe, Jason blinked at Leo like he was seeing something that made all the wonders of the world – ancient, natural, and modern – look like roadside attractions, and Leo’s heart did a besotted little tapdance in his chest. “I’ve had a crush on you since you brought me back from the Underworld.”

“Get on my level, bozo,” Leo grinned, and he knew his nose was scrunching up because Jason rubbed his against it. “I’ve got you beat by, like, a year and change.”

Jason’s eyes got all wide and sparkly and he scooped Leo up in a hug that actually lifted him off his feet. Leo laughed, loud and bright while Jason peppered his face in delighted kisses. “Will you date me then?” he asked eagerly. “Or, can I date you? I don’t know if there’s a way you’d prefer. Or a difference at all, I guess.”

“I suppose I can let you date me, if it really means that much to you,” Leo teased. Jason just kissed him to keep him from saying anything else. Leo got the feeling this would be Jason’s new go-to for shutting him up when he got annoying.

He made a silent vow to be extra annoying.

[tiredfoxtf]

No, Minecraft haven't gotten "worse" over the years. No, new updates haven't "killed" Minecraft. No, Minecraft itself didn't become "boring".

If it was a case, everyone would be still playing on idk a 1.12.2. But no one does that. With every update it gets more painful to play on old versions. I could never reverse to playing without gorgeous mangrove wood, new beautiful terrain and ever useful elytra. And I am not alone. There's a reason people play on newer versions of the game, why modders continue to update their mods newer versions. There's a reason why people are excited for Trial Chambers and new wolves variants. Minecraft only gotten more fun.

I'm sorry to be the one who breaks it to you, but if you think Minecraft is boring now it's one of the two: 1) You're playing Minecraft wrong or 2) Minecraft is not a game for you.

1.You're playing Minecraft wrong. Which is, admittedly, a pretty hard thing to do in my opinion. Minecraft is a game about getting resources and using them to create your own world. It's a sandbox of which you are the sole player (or not, if you are in multiplayer), where you challenge yourself on what next amazing thing you can create. You can be a builder, making castles and spaceships, you can be a redstoner be it a practical redstone or logic redstone, you can be a modder making your own little elements, adding them to the game in a way you would like (a bit of a more advanced hobby than the others). You can join public servers to play entirely vanilla mini-games. Become a parkour master or pvper on the different public servers. Call your friends and make a private multiplayer world, where you race each other in resources or work together to create something, prank each other, build elaborate traps, escape rooms anything and everything.

The goal of the game is NOT to kill the Ender Dragon. The goal of the game is NOT to get maxed out netherite gear. The goal of the game is NOT to get every achievement even, but achievement hunting CAN be a fun game to play with your friends. Or speedrun all of the achievements/to kill end dragon, trying to optimize your skills.

Otherwise killing the ender dragon, getting a full gear and equipment are just part of the experience. Just like fishing, mining, getting wood. Minecraft is Not an rpg, where you go on quests to finish a main plotline, where you level up and monsters get harder, no. All hard content is Optional. That's the point. Not to say irrelevant when we talk minigames servers. Minecraft is a sandbox, survival is just one of the gamemodes.

2.Minecraft is not a game for you.

And that's OK! Although Minecraft is a beautiful game, it may not be for you. The games that are for everyone, are for no one. Not all games born equal in the eyes of a player. You probably like other games! Like Terraria or Starbound, maybe you enjoy Zelda games, maybe you are a Genshin player. They are very different games, if you bored playing Minecraft, it's time close it and to play something you enjoy.

[chiisana-lion]

wait duck im in tears over this minecraft horse server lore from your typing speed post. i need to know more about horse minecraft server if youre willing to share

IM ALWAYS HAPPY TO SHARE ABOUT MY MINECRAFT HORSE SERVER PAST. well except for super specific things like the server name but it really was a huge part of my middle school life that time ksjdhfjsjfh plus it was one of my first reaaally rather deep internet experiences i guess? also just a precaution this got pretty long LMAO

but anyhow back when i was like 9? 10? id get a lottt of minecraft books like those official guidebooks and a handful of unofficial ones too. i love minecraft. ive loved it so much since i was little and i was way deep into dreaming of playing multiplayer on servers like hypixel and stuff too (i used to watch a Lot of bedwars stuff/also played it a good amount too eventually) and by some coincidences i got my hands on a minecraft account from an old classmate (who has since taken it back and changed the password but i have my own acc now bc of it so its swagever) so i could finally fulfil my dream of multiplayer minecraft 👍

in any case getting to the horse server, one particular guidebook i got was all abt multiplayer stuff, and it had some sections that highlighted cool servers and all and this one was one of them! im not sure why That one specifically drew me in so much (my longtime affinity of horses since childhood aside) that eventually i went for it and joined and good lord i loved it So Much. i spent a good two or three years there as a regular and made some neat friends! unfortunately many have moved on me included but i still talk to my best friend from there once a year on our shared birthday bc not only did we join the server and go through the tutorial (of which i will bring up again later) at the same time and picked our first horses together we also turned out to be the exact same age and had a lot of similar interests like with art so we hit it off super well and even seven or eight now? years later shes still my dear friend <3

the server had its own special plugin designed specifically to revolve around horses, which has since improved and evolved but im not sure what its like now since i have less time to hang there so ill just talk abt it as i remember it. basic things like giving horses stats you could train up (endurance, speed, jump height etc) or special traits depending on if its a stallion mare or a gelding (stallions have more endurance, geldings are the fastest and mares with the most jump height i think) and they hosted a lot of horse based contests like youd find in real life like dressage (ngl im not sure how minecraft dressage worked there even now. i never won one), steeplechase (yours truly had a great winning streak here), cross-country or hurdle jumping and a buuunch of other stuff. there were horse auctions and breeders and all of that too. certain horse coats were rarer and more desirable than the rest too, i know a pure black or white horse would sometimes go for a Lot skdjhfjs. horse breeds like thoroughbreds or andalusians etc were more of a cosmetic trait that didnt rly affect anything though. the staff and members were always super sweet even if some players you could definitely feel the Horse Girl™️ emanating off of them it was a rly nice place all around, that id eventually decided on and got accepted as a volunteer in a minor staff position of which is a guide that ill get into next

guides were what i mentioned in those tags before, basically those who run new players through the tutorial introducing them to how the server and plugin works, explain the rules, things like that! eventually at the end of the tutorial the newbie will reach a stable or penned area with a bunch of horses they can choose from, and go through the process of claiming their first one to start with for the rest of their server journey. mine was a dark brown sooty i named olivier aksjfhshhd i miss him dearly. it was a fun job! though pretty challenging because in the span of <10 minutes youre faced with a new player whos usually just speeding through and ignoring all the signs and explanations or even you so youve gotta make it somewhat engaging or interesting for them, so even if we usually have a vague script to go off of id adlib my entire way through it and have to speed type to make sure they dont get bored 😭 harder than id thought but it was fun to an extent, especially when the other player really is interested and cooperative :') but yeah my. kind of higher than average wpm was the result of a whole year and a half of this LMAO

considering the fact i was still very young at the time, the older members were aware of this and honestly i was super duper lucky all of them were wonderful responsible people who made sure i had a good experience and treated me well :'D i loved this server so so much but unfortunately when id moved back to my home country and into a much stricter, harder hell of a school that would soon be the cause of all my insane depression and social ineptitude and anxieties (that resulted in me dropping out in the 10th grade and transferring/restarting in an art school lol) i had to step down from the position and stopped playing as much bc of how much i struggled irl 😔 the servers still up though and has grown a good amount from what ive seen, though even if i dont know many people there anymore since a lot of my old friends had similar situations getting too caught up w irl things i do hope i can hang there again :'>

[danielt1985]

Learning To Love Minecraft Again (A Thread)

Written by Daniel T. Gaming

I've been recently falling in love with Minecraft again. After so long of not playing it. I decided to pick it back up & play it again, and It has been one of my favorite things to play in SO long. However, I did a few things to spruce up my newly found interest.

1. A Fresh Client I had decided to switch over from the tradition Minecraft launcher to the ATLauncher, a mod-eccentric client. And while it may look a tad confusing, it's actually very handy. I am now able to save as many different versions of Minecraft I wanted without my save files or mods controlling one another, unlike the official Minecraft launcher. on top of that, the official launcher also installs a bunch of useless Xbox junk because, well, Microsoft.

2. Bringing Back The Old With the ATLauncher's ability to save as many versions of Minecraft with their own dedicated files & saves, I am now safely able to play older versions of Minecraft as my heart desires.

Right now, I'm playing 2 different versions, Beta 1.7.3 (A version regarded by a LOT of people as one of the best versions of Minecraft to play today), and Release 1.5.2 (The first ever version of the game I EVER played back in 2012). I will still pick up & play Release 1.20 cuz I do like a lot of the new decor pieces & things, but if I ever just want to play a standard game of Minecraft, I have these 2 versions to keep me occupied.

There's also the old legacy versions from Consoles that people are coming back to, but I haven't gotten to those yet, but planned on them soon.

3. Making My Own Goals

My mind has always saw that "Beating the Ender Dragon" was the ultimate goal of Minecraft, and that once it's done, it's done. And while a part of me still feels that way, I'm slowly moving away from that, because that mindset has literally KILLED so many of my past Minecraft maps, and I deeply regret it.

So I started to make my own goals & my own rules. My current survival map never had a bulk smelting machine, so I added one. I never got to refine my mine & make it more like an actual mineshaft, so I got to go & do that.

I don't just want to make Minecraft a point A -> B kinda game. I want to make it a game about creating as much stuff as you can. There are people in this world who have been able to build worlds that have taken them over a DECADE to finish... so why not give yourself that same level of encouragement?

4. Playing With Friends I recently managed to get a personal Minecraft server going on an old PC. And playing with my friends has been an AMAZING experience. It's actually pretty cheap to run a server nowadays, and Bedrock editions now have general multiplayer support, so playing with friends is now becoming even EASIER than ever before.

5. Modding Makes The Difference Although I haven't got to do this one yet, I *am* planning on it, as it's been talked about by a LOT of people. There are actually a handful of mods out there that are not just for entertainment, but for bringing fresh vanilla-eccentric changes to Minecraft to keep its charm that it had in its early stages. Two that I have heard of are ReIndev & Better Than Adventure. Both of which actually run off of Beta 1.7.3 too, so that's neat!

I think personally, what these two mods are doing are GREAT, and I cannot wait to play them.

6. Making It Personal

Personally, I've been handling the game on a more personal level, and not too personal to where it's overbearing, but I mean as in I like to just do traditional fan things that I've done long ago. Watch Minecraft videos, pull out the old Minecraft merch I had from when I was young, listen to the soundtrack, etc.

I haven't felt this attached to Minecraft in SO long, but I am glad it's coming back. I might make this whole thing into a video, but until then, I wanted to make this thread to tell you all how I managed to finally get back in touch with Minecraft.

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

Hello! No pressure to answer if you don't feel like it!

While I started following you for other stuff your Minecraft posts have made me curious about mcyt.

I don't know where to begin though, I don't really know any of the YouTube channels or series (it's a different series each server right?)

What would you recommend for a newbie to mcyt?

If it helps I know some of the basics about Minecraft (nothing more complex than redstone) and the people you post about seem to be really nice and have a fun group dynamic?

Hope you have a nice day!

OK ANON I'm so sorry I've had this in my inbox for like 2 weeks bc I wanted to do it justice but I've started drinking and am putting off going strip mining for sand on my minecraft server so instead you get my QUICK AND DIRTY INTRO. And by quick and dirty I mean I'm going to ramble for a WHILE so I'm putting this under a cut. I'm sorry if this is a lot. I'm so sorry.

Okay so like... there are single-player series that some people will do, then there are SMPs (Survival MultiPlayer servers). Some of these are only or majority just streamed and you have to watch VODs or unofficial clip collections to get the content, and others are only or majority only edited videos, and others are a more even mix. I'm going to describe a few of the ones I like, and those should be good jumping off points into other content, if you find a creator you like.

The Life Series is, per my wife, the best thing to start with because it's short, contained, and has a clear start and end. It's a sort of a collection of short seasons, spearheaded by content creator Grian, where basically there's an SMP server and a gimmick where he and like 12-15 of his friends play minecraft in a VERY small map and try to be the last one alive, with a new gimmick and set of rules every season. The first season, 3rd Life, basically was just "you get three lives, and after that if you die you're out, plus if you're on your last life, you go from just trying to play the game to having the intent and permission to HUNT AND KILL the other players", and it got more complex and interesting and homoerotic from there. (side note: mcyt gets intensely and INTENTIONALLY homoerotic sometimes. This seems to be a universal constant bc I've noticed it in basically every series I've watched regardless of who's involved. You either love it, learn to love it or... idk leave?) I highly suggest Grian's own POV of 3rd Life (season 1) as a starting point, followed by BDoubleO100 (aka Bdubs) in Last Life (season 2), and Jimmy SolidarityGaming in Double Life (season 3), and then branching out to anyone who you think seems interesting or who you get attached to. (This is a universal suggestion for all series, btw.)

Dream SMP is one of the big ones, it was an SMP server started by minecrafter DreamWasTaken that went from "chill server to play with my friends" to "quasi-improvised RP storylines and lore" kind of overnight. It is hellish to get into, see the ask i literally just answered before this one to see a highlight of why and some recs if you're interested in it. High key DO NOT RECOMMEND for a newbie tbh, just due to how confusing/difficult it is to get into, but ymmv. I have no advice beyond "Watch SAD-ist animations and Technoblade Videos" for getting into dream smp.

Hermitcraft is basically the longest-running SMP on youtube afaik - last year was their 10 year anniversary. It's mostly not heavy on lore or RP, it's just some particularly skilled minecrafters in the area of building and/or redstone who come together to build awesome things. They reset to a new world seed every year or so (tho season 9, the current world, looks to probably be more of a 2-year world like season 6, considering we're already a year into it and no one is REMOTELY done with their plans.) The Hermits include some of the older widely-known minecrafters who are still actively on youtube, the redstoners legit MADE redstone as you know it, hello Ethoslab with the Etho Clock and april fool's Etho Slab) with a lot of married adults with kids, and they're a lot of fun and relatively easy to get into in my opinion. Some of the Hermits stream, but the majority content I consume is their edited videos. Mostly Hermitcraft videos are about building gorgeous structures and/or redstone, and a bit of messing around with your friends. It's fun for shenanigans and seeing people build truly amazing things If you're interested, I stand firmly by my suggestion that the best jumping on point is Grian's Season 8 series. Season 8 was extra short compared to most seasons, and Grian is a fun, funny, and accessible creator. Plus this was the first season they had proximity voice chat, and it was REVOLUTIONARY for the ease of collaboration on the server, and led to a lot of amazing moments.

Empires SMP is much heavier on the roleplaying than Hermitcraft, but is full of gorgeous builds and fun lore concepts. All the creators are the leaders of their own kingdom/empire/etc and they build to that theme. I have no idea what to even suggest you start with in Empires as I've not watched nearly enough, but they're all pretty good.

There are a bunch of other SMPs (short-term heavy RP server Rats SMP was adorable, and involved the players RPing as lil rats, and doing quests and avoiding humans and stuff in a big manor house. Outsiders SMP i hear good things about but I've never watched, also a heavy RP server.) and then creators often have singleplayer worlds that they do video series of. Philza (also spelled Ph1LzA) streams multiple times a week for hours at a time from his long-running hardcore world (aka a world where if you die, that's it that's the game, no respawning), and builds absolutely amazing gorgeous builds. BUT he can be a little hard to get into due to the length of his VODs.

And frankly if I didn't plug Technoblade's content in this post I would be doing a disservice to mah boy. Techno was a creator who did a lot of silly videos of him playing PvP or messing around with his friends or participating in tournaments and stuff, and was smart and funny and deadpan and legit one of the best minecraft PvPers, and he died last summer of sarcoma and he is deeply deeply missed. BUT his videos are a serious comfort watch for me. His channel has a playlist of, quote, "actually good content", and while I enjoy a number that aren't on that playlist, it's actually a very good starting point.

...Actually no, start with the potato war, with Techno. The potato war is Techno at his MOST TECHNO and if you don't enjoy them he's probably not the creator for you.

And THAT'S ALL I GOT, nonny. Hope this helped and wasn't just DEEPLY OVERWHELMING. I hope you have a good night and uh. GOOD FUCKING LUCK.

[risingsunresistance]

Top 5 of ur favourite like, minecraft worldbuilding headcanons?

i've been thinking of how to answer this ask for like. way too long. so instead of a top 5 im gonna give you a "first five that come to mind in no particular order." bear in mind for most of these, the MAIN headcanon i base everything on is "imagine ALL worlds and servers are interconnected, so basic minecraft lore and server-specific multiplayer lore are assumed to intersect in some way"

-chat can manifest in different ways for different people AND depending on the server. some servers (aka pocket dimensions that operate on their own rules based on the admin [sorta like a god of the world] who runs the place) will have anything from carrier pigeons or animals that appear before the person to full-on comms devices and electronics. the default is like a holo screen that appears in front of you when summoned. summoning methods vary from player to player and can be done hands-free. talking in chat can be literally talking, typing, or whatever the user can come up with (within the limits of their world), so the main limiting factor is the player's own imagination

-READ THIS POST READ IT READ IT READ IT if i had to pick a number 1 it would be this. reading this changed the entire trajectory of my life, i've never been normal about hypixel since this post KJFHDSG

-the farlands are an area that is out of control of any player, admin, or higher being or any sort. the void is another untouchable zone that cannot be altered. players who are damaged by either the farlands or the void may carry those effects through various dimensions and lifetimes, but they can fade away. it's unlikely tho, and they could show themselves again even after they disappear. it's up to server owners to keep their players as safe as possible. obviously players get thrown into the void a lot, but taking Real Damage from the void is different. server damage and real damage operate in different ways IF the admins choose to set up their dimensions as if they were a game, which many do. sometimes there are mishaps tho :]

-a personal favorite headcanon of mine that ignores some real physics and also some parts of the game itself: the nether just exists below bedrock! so the nether ceiling is the overworld bedrock. if you listen for long enough you might be able to hear the other dimension through the layer of bedrock. the nether is essentially the core of this weird infinite earth... so what's the void? where exactly is it? good question! maybe it's never supposed to be there at all. maybe this world is barely connected to itself, falling apart at the seams and contradicting itself, trying to fix itself only to leave chunk errors in the way where there used to be other problems. you were never supposed to be able to see the void, it SHOULD only be in the end, because the end is void, but sometimes the overworld is void and sometimes you go above the bedrock in the nether and that's void too but you aren't being hurt either like you would in the other dimensions-

-this is the only singleplayer-specific headcanon here: most structures have legends or stories about why they were built and who built them. talk to any villagers (or maybe even pillagers and witches, piglins if you can understand them, etc) and they'll tell you what they believe about desert temples, ocean monuments, whatever is nearby. but no mobs of any kind are aware of the stronghold. they know that endermen exist and most of them know about pearls and how to use them, but they dont know anything about endermen themselves. ONLY players and the endermen know about the end, and even then some endermen have only ever lived in the nether or the overworld. not every enderman is actually FROM the end. it can make you feel very alone if you never interact with other players by crossing dimensions into servers or linking up to another lonely player and inviting them to your own world

[dirt-piper]

On the origins of Not So Seecret Saturday, and its future

When I first found Minecraft I was roughly 10 years old.

I can’t precisely identify how I found it - through some kid at school, or a friend of my sister, or randomly on the internet - but I remember falling in love with it.

I loved the aesthetic, I loved the dopey Minecraft music parodies, I loved the let’s plays, I loved the classic multiplayer servers, I loved the dumb jokes the community made, but most of all - I loved the game itself. It was weird, beautiful, simple, terrifying, serene, and hilarious, all at the same time.

I spent hours not only playing the game itself, but also watching videos about it, reading forum and blog posts, and poring over the Minecraft wiki - my favorite articles of which were the ones regarding the removed, unused, and planned features - aspects of the game that I could know about but never experience for myself.

Over time the game I fell in love with started to fade away - the aesthetic changed as biomes were added (though not that much, and it still looked nice), the gameplay began to suffer (a fast travel hell dimension with nothing to do in it, beds that let you sidestep the entire challenge of the game), but it was still largely the game I loved.

After Beta 1.8, the game I loved ceased to exist.

Okay, that’s a bit too dramatic. I still played the hell out of the game during the early release era - but I notably stopped playing survival singleplayer altogether after Beta 1.8. Multiplayer in any game is fun, and the newly added creative mode gave me hours of mindless entertainment blowing things up with TNT and making useless redstone contraptions. But to a large extent I stopped playing the game itself - survival singleplayer - and every time I did I found myself having a very hard time enjoying it.

Now, kid me didn’t really know why I suddenly lost all interest in this game I loved - I could kinda grok that stuff like the new hunger system and terrain system were less than stellar (likely helped by the fact that everyone seemed to hate these two things at the time - the massive open letter to Mojang begging them to add beaches back to the terrain generator springs to mind), but the nitty gritty specifics of what exactly made the game less fun for me were not yet apparent.

Luckily for kid me, I managed to find something to help me alleviate the problem - Exalm’s OldDays mod. This mod allowed you to tweak Minecraft’s features to your own preferences, literally undoing changes from various updates on-the-fly to permit you to hand-tune your personal “perfect” version of Minecraft. I used it to tear out all the changes I didn’t like - gone were the biomes, hunger system, nether, sprinting, new terrain generator, stackable food, potions, enchanting system, etc. Now, suddenly, I could play (and enjoy) singleplayer survival again - and this was the ‘default’ way I played Minecraft up until the mod stopped getting updated in 2013, around release 1.6.4.

By this time a brand new Minecraft launcher had released which allowed you to (officially) go back and play previous versions of Minecraft - with OldDays gone, I picked the version of the game closest to my hand-crafted ideal and dove right in. Thus, the primary version of Minecraft that I played became Alpha 1.1.2_01.

Flash-forward 5 years to July 18th 2018, and I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve just graduated high school, and I’m on vacation with my family in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. It’s a rainy day, so I’m playing Minecraft on my laptop. By this point I had a singleplayer world with damn near everything a player could want in 2010 - an automatic cactus farm, a mob grinder, a minecart system, vast underground mines, an automatic boat dispenser, a hulking storage room - you name it. But deep within I felt a twinge, a feeling that something was missing. I don’t remember what originally set me off, whether it was being by the ocean, or the nascient release of the update aquatic, or a memory of Minecraft classic, but somehow I started getting a bit upset that sponges were unobtainable in the version of the game I was playing.

Very conveniently, I had taken a class on Java my junior year of high school.

I dug up an ancient version of the Mod Coder Pack for a1.1.2_01, decompiled Minecraft and started poking around the codebase. After a bit of digging, a realization slowly began to dawn on me - why stop at sponges? Why not fix more things? Like fix axes not breaking workbenches? Or redstone ore taking an eternity to mine? Or boats exploding when you sneeze on them? Or, better yet, fulfill my childhood fantasies by implementing all the removed/unused/unimplemented features I used to spend hours reading about on the minecraft wiki. Realizing I could use some guidance, I asked my friend Vulpovile (creator of Minecraft Classic Creative Revived) if he might like to help me out with my new project.

side note: I planned on adding the ambient loops a full two years before getting around to implementing them... and my method was essentially the same as what I schemed up on the first day. Most NSSS features bounce around my head for a year or two before I finally implement them.

We managed to get sponges done within a day, and banged out the rest of the little QoL fixes I wanted not too long after. Soon we began going haywire - adding singleplayer commands, trying to fix the outrageously janky alpha multiplayer, optimizing the game, making food stack, making trees drop apples, underwater dungeons, whatever we wanted to do, we did it. We had already numbered our new ‘fork’ of Minecraft as ‘Alpha v1.1.3’, but didn’t actually have a name for it - the original working title was “Minecraft Redone” - a very literal description of our goals, but not that catchy. After 4 days I finally coined the name.

By the 28th, our first release was out: Not So Seecret Saturday’s Minecraft Alpha v1.1.3. We ended up released one update every other week straight on into october - in 1.1.4 we tried to beat the server code further into submission, in 1.1.5 I reimplemented the score system from survival test and added floating worlds, in 1.1.6 I tried (and failed) to improve mob AI and made sponges redstone-sensitive, and in 1.1.7 we polished our work a bit and added two more world types. Then September hit and Vulpovile and I were sucked right back into college. During winter break we managed to release some more patches to 1.1.7, as well as 1.1.8 to add McRegion and running... before the first gap.

‘The gap’, as I’m dubbing it now, is a fairly common occurrence in NSSS development - it’s happened roughly 3.5 times now, and each time it’s the same thing:

Development on NSSS is interrupted by something IRL (at first this was always college, but now it’s health conditions and other boring responsibilities of being an adult. And a bit of depression.)

I don’t get right back to working on NSSS.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the then-current state of NSSS. A LOT of time.

The more I think, the more I determine needs to be done to NSSS before I’d be satisfied enough to do a new release.

Every time I open eclipse I either get so overwhelmed by the massive backlog of work that has to be done that I either only manage one tiny portion or I give up and do something else.

Steps 2-5 are repeated ad nauseum, until...

A sudden, miraculous wave of motivation occurs. I get everything I’ve been planning over the past [weeks/months/year(s)] done in the span of 2 weeks, release the update, and finally return to making semi-regular NSSS updates.

This routine is so predictable to me now that I can nearly time my watch to it. But that first gap after 1.1.8 was special - as I sat and thought about NSSS, and what I really wanted to do with it, my goal slowly shifted. At first I had just wanted to ‘fix’ Minecraft alpha by cramming a bunch of shiny toys and knick-knacks into it to satisfy my inner child, but now I wanted something... more. I didn’t just want to make a better alpha than alpha, I wanted to make a better Minecraft than Minecraft.

Let me preface this by divulging that I’m a massive fan of Team Fortress 2.

The development history of TF2 is utterly fascinating, and if you’re at all interested in game development I urge you greatly to play through the entire TF2 developer’s commentary, but the relevant parallel is this:

The original Team Fortress was a mod of quake made by a trio of Australian teenagers who went hog-wild with QuakeC, the super powerful Quake scripting language, to invent the class-based shooter in 1996. At first they were just adding things to have fun, but over time started paying more and more attention to the actual design and balance of the game they had created. Eventually, the entire team was hired by VALVe in ‘98, and after porting Team Fortress to GoldSrc as ‘Team Fortress Classic’, they got right to work on Team Fortress 2.

Team Fortress 2 didn’t release for another 9 years.

During that time, TF2 went through a multitude of totally different designs and ideas, at some points being nearly unrecognizable gameplay-wise to the original Team Fortress, until ultimately VALVe decided to stop trying to invent something wholly new and unknown and instead to improve on what they knew - and so they essentially rebuilt Team Fortress for the third time, now in the Source engine, and with a cartoon-ier art style. And then they started playtesting.

VALVe had learnt from making half-life that playtesting often and early is utterly invaluable as a tool to aide game design. After all - how do you know how something is gonna play until you’ve played it? And how will it play for people who are totally unexposed to it? A developer already knows all the game’s mechanics and how they work - how would a lay-person discover them all for themselves? Which mechanics would a normal player use in ways the developers never intended? There’s no way to find this stuff out until you hand your game off to a stranger and wait to see how they break it.

And so VALVe, through constant playtesting, tweaking, and fiddling, honed TF2′s design and gameplay to a point where, while not totally perfect, was absolutely better than the original Team Fortress. And aside from the new artstyle, the omission of grenades and bhopping, and the medic becoming... well, an actual medic, very little had changed of the core gameplay beyond little tweaks and nudges.

That’s what I wanted NSSS to become.

I wanted to make Minecraft into a better game than it already was through little tweaks and nudges - an adjustment here, a rebalance there, and a few new features where a gap exists to justify them.

During the first gap I did manage to release some moderate patches to 1.1.8, fixes for things like the busted FastRender port and proper textures for all the dye colors, as well as the first release of the NSSS launcher. But all of these were just tide-overs for what I really wanted.

In summer of 2020 the first gap-and-a-half concluded with the release of 1.1.9, which added Creative mode, Sponge Armor, and Ambient loops. All of these features were things I had spent years brainstorming, tweaking, and revising before I was finally happy with them - and when they finally released to the public... they were good. By now NSSS had started to accumulate some following, and the positive feedback to 1.1.9 was notable - it turns out that people like things that are carefully thought-out and designed! Two weeks later I released 1.1.10 to patch over some more things and finalize gold touch, and then I set my aim on the largest hulking problem NSSS has faced since day 1:

Multiplayer.

The original ‘legacy’ NSSS server was accidentally based off of a version of hMod for Alpha 1.1.2_01, but our problems with it would have occurred regardless; the Alpha server SUCKED. Within a day of poking around the code Vulpovile and I came to the conclusion that Notch had taken the Classic server and stapled infinite worlds onto it to create a horrible abomination.

Mobs would randomly turn invisible, Redstone would only work at certain Y levels, Doors would open halfway, you would randomly die of fall damage for no reason, you couldn’t eat food unless you were looking directly at the floor, if you checked a furnace while it was smelting something it’d break the timer and waste fuel, you could dupe items in chests by clicking on them fast enough, tools could be repaired by dropping them on the ground and picking them back up - it was a nightmare.

Vulpovile and I both, quite rightly, came to the conclusion around 1.1.8 that the legacy server was unworkable. We started trying to write our own , new server from scratch, but that went nowhere - too much of an uphill battle. Once 1.1.9 came along, I decided to do it ‘the easy way’ and just take a later version’s server and downgrade it to alpha - the winner was beta 1.7.3. I had hoped to finish by 1.1.10, but found myself in a deeper hole than I expected, so 1.1.10 was shipped with no multiplayer and I made 1.1.11 into the “fix multiplayer” release.

1.1.11 took over a year to finish.

God what a nightmare. It did not take me very much time to get simple interoperability between the NSSS client and the Beta server, but certain bugs quickly emerged as gordion knots: if someone sneaked they would crash all connected clients, opening a chest crashed the game, crafting recipes were one slot to the left, your armor would shift one slot down at random times, and vehicles were possessed by demons. The sheer amount of bugs I had to work through to get this update out was mind-boggling, to a point where I actually opened 1.1.11 up to a limited group of playtesters for several months before full release just for the sake of trying to eliminate every bug possible. Ultimately, the pre-planned release date of September 18th, 2021 (exactly eleven years after Alpha 1.1.1, the first seecret saturday) snuck up on me, and I panickedly released what I hoped was a relatively bug-free 1.1.11: it wasn’t! While multiplayer was far, far better than it had been in 1.1.9 and prior, singleplayer had become riddled with bugs, namely pertaining to inventories and creepers. I quashed most of them in later patches, but the armor shifting bug still isn’t totally fixed in multiplayer - if you die and relog without completely closing and reopening the game, your armor still shifts one slot down. I have no clue why the hell this happens.

Something that started happening during 1.1.11 that would foreshadow the next 2 years of NSSS’s development was a trend wherein I would gradually feel more and more trapped by the feature set of the update I was working on, and would increasingly wish I was working on the next update instead - this sucked for motivation and made 1.1.11 take even longer. That next update was going to be one that would add Seasons and Dynamic Weather to NSSS - an update which has been in progress for almost two years.

1.1.12 is still coming along, don’t worry, but I can guarantee you that once it’s out, I am never doing another massive, year-long-wait update for NSSS every again. Updates will return to being smaller and more frequent - the way it should be! Expect further ranting in a later post.

-DirtPiper

[cheese-water]

no no you don’t understand. I can’t comprehend why anyone would prefer old caves to 1.18 caves. I guess for some “large” multiplayer servers I get why you’d used the old caves but for everything else? I just can’t believe that.

There’s so much to do now! I’ve always enjoyed ravines and was beyond excited whenever the illustrious double ravine appeared. But now? If I don’t have to make a pinpoint accurate jump into a stream of water right next to a pool of lava just to enter, I’m better off walking another 50 blocks to find one. And don’t even get me started on the generation. I don’t know how they did it but Mojang made getting lost fun. I’m not talking about going through the same looking tunnel over and over just to find your furnace, no no no. I’m talking about heading down one direction but constantly getting sidetracked by caverns full of materials that seem to go on indefinitely. But somehow, when you do reach the “end” of a path, you pop back out to the generously torched area you were in before. Everything is connected and now you don’t even have to backtrack and I love it so much.

But the biggest thing to me in my opinion is 1.18 caves allow so many different ways to play. For example, my dad is very good at Minecraft. He’s played for over ten years with a variety of data packs and mods and whatever you can think of. He completely agrees with me, that the vanilla caves recived a massive upgrade and changed for the better. He finds them relaxing since he doesn’t have to worry about not finding whatever he needs, because the caves are so damn big, while he listens to audiobooks.

I however, am very bad at the game. Not just Minecraft, most WASD games since I’m not used to the controls or mouse sensitivity or reaction timing or whatever have you. But, I still enjoy Minecraft and hanging out with my dad so every once in a while, I’ll play on a server, go caving, and die. Over the past week though, I’ve played every night (go play vault hunters right now), slowly getting better, still dying, but getting better. Late last night, I’d just watched a valorant tourney (moist moguls ftw), and it was still on my mind as I was gearing up to get some more iron. And I thought to myself “I did need more practice fighting enemies…”

It was no longer a “simple mining trip.” It was a break in. I was peaking corners left and right, shooting skeletons down as if they were security guards in my way. Leapt over caverns and crevices with the confidence of someone who preformed four block jumps since they were a toddler. My heart was racing. My three stacks of torches ran out quickly but I pressed on still. Just because I was out of my depth, tired to the bone, didn’t make the monster hit any less harder or lay down and die themselves. And that meant there was more money to be made.

Two hours later, and I had over seven stacks of iron and the most fun experience I’d had playing a game solo in my entire life.

[andronauts]

literally solved why i dont have fun playing mc with my bf but i habe fun playing with [another friend]. i love my bf the most but when he’s playing minecraft he literally wants to do everything himself and then never wants to do anything together… which is FINE i like doing things in mc on my own too. sometimes i wanna build a tower or a ship myself .

but if im playing on a multiplayer server i want to play with PEOPLE😭 why would i want to go mining on my own or exploring on my own or build a farm on my own when its so much more fun to do with someone else ?

probably why i had so much fun plauing with Rat friend bc he’d always ask to go mining together or or ask if i wanna build a farm or help me if i wanna go mining or buoild a farm or smthng. like yeh there’s stuff we did on our own but every now n then we’d always do stuff together. i think i have more motivation to actually play mc if i know im playing WITH people and not just playing at the same time as someone? 😔 its so much more fulfilling to make progress with other ppl

i guess my bf can do whatever he wants but when i play minecraft with him it feels so unfun bc he’s already done everytjing or he’s doing something so far ahead of me and then only kinda gives me stuffsometimes instead of doing stuff with me and its just kinda unfun to play like i dont even wanna do anything. 🥲

[lucemferto]

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT TECHNOBLADE (or A Narrative Analysis of the Dream SMP Doomsday Event) - Script

Heyo! Per request I am posting the script to my video of the same name here on tumblr. I must warn you that just reading the script will probably not give you the full experience, so I would encourage you to watch the video (linked above).

There might also still be a lot of grammatical errors in the text, because I don’t proofread.

Okay, so! I don’t want this to turn into a reaction channel OR a Dream SMP channel for that matter! I am planning on doing a big dumb, way too long analysis video on the Dream SMP which will – at my current pace – come out in five years. I am already way too late on this one.

Spoiler Alert for the Doomsday Event that took place on the 6th of January in the Dream SMP. Surely the worst thing to take place on the 6th of January 2021 … I’m sorry, what’s this about the Capitol?

In case you don’t watch the SMP and need context: The Dream SMP is a Minecraft Multiplayer Server, that, throughout the last year, has transformed from a normal Let’s Play to an ongoing new-media series streamed by multiple high-profile streamers such as Dream, TommyInnit or Technoblade. It comes complete with script – by which I mean loose bullet points – and story events. It has attracted a large fanbase specifically invested in the story and less so in the actual gameplay content. Like I said before, I will probably do a big video on the Dream SMP at some point in the future.

The storyline is long and complicated and trying to explain it all would take up the majority of the video and there are other channels who have already done a much better job than I could ever hope to do, so give them a watch. I’ll try to summarize all that is pertinent to what I will talk about in this video.

Okay, let’s speedrun this summary. Cue the music!

Major Players here are TommyInnit, a founder of the independent nation of L’Manburg, Technoblade, an anarchist who was deep in conflict with L’Manburg, Tubbo, Tommy’s best friend and current president of L’Manburg, and Dream, the ruler of the Kingdom of the Dream SMP (even though he is not the king, but we’re not going to get into that right now). Tommy had in the past been exiled by Tubbo for endangering L’Manburg’s shaky peace with the Dream SMP. Tommy had then teamed up with Technoblade, who was hellbent on destroying L’Manberg after some prior altercations – more on that later.

Tommy and Tubbo came into conflict during a festival set-up to celebrate the friendship between L’Manburg and the Dream SMP. After punching out their feelings, Tommy came to the realization that his friendship with Tubbo was more important than his vendetta against Dream and those who exiled him. Techno took that change of heart badly and teamed up with Dream to destroy L’Manburg … and that’s exactly what happened.

Techno and Dream, with little to no opposition, obliterated L’Manburg with no hope for recovery leaving its inhabitants stranded hopeless and alone.

… And that’s what you missed on Dream SMP!

Okay. So, usually I just put whatever thought slime drips out of my mouth hole into your subscription box. But then I asked myself: “Am I not taking this a largely improvised nonsense story from a bunch of 16–24-year-olds a little too seriously?”. And then I remembered. I’m a pretentious bitch. I made an 18-minute video explaining why the popular commentary YouTuber memeulous is secretly the time travelling Anti-Christ, REASON HAS NO SWAY OVER ME!

So, like the English Major drop-out that I am, I will present you with two theses, which I will then combine into one … supratheses! That word doesn’t exist, I just coined it, it’s mine! I am very smart!

[I know words, I have the best words!]

 Thesis #1: The Fandom focuses too much on Character Analysis in Favour of Narrative Analysis

The Dream SMP is truly something special. It is uniquely singular in how it tells a story of this scope through its chosen medium. While there is an overarching script that lays out the plot points of the future, each of the 30+ streamers on the SMP are their own cameraman, director, writer and actor. You cannot watch “the Dream SMP” – if you attempted that, you would be 80 by the time you caught up to the Doomsday Event. You have to choose whom to watch. You have to choose your focal point character.

Because by the way the story is told and consumed – aka in such a compartmentalized fashion; you watch one streamer and get one character’s perspective – it has sort-of unintentionally conditioned fans to look at the SMP and its characters less as one coherent story with messages and themes and more as sports teams they can root for. You’re Team Techno or Team Tubbo or Team Tommy or Team JackManifoldTV (formerly known as Thunder1408) and every other side is in the wrong! It’s like Twilight for a decade old children’s game about virtual Lego!

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but the amount of discourse perpetuated by and revolving around so-called “apologists” – a terrible term that unfortunately has caught on – is really not something that I think is good for how we interact with the story of the Dream SMP.

The Dream SMP is discussed a lot on character-based level, which is, like I said before, hugely advantaged by the way the story is consumed by its audience. With traditional, visual media such as film for example, the audience can be made more aware of what messages the narrative might try to communicate on a narrative level without the need for an explicit narrator to tell you the moral.

As an example, in a movie you could have a smash-cut from the Butcher Army’s discussions about neutralizing the danger Technoblade poses to Techno being nice around villagers or taking care of animals. This would communicate on an extradiegetic level, that the Butcher Army is in the wrong with their assumptions. Alternatively, you could contrast Techno’s declarations that power corrupts and that Tubbo’s administration is cruel with Tubbo choosing not to punish Ranboo for his association with Techno – thus the narrative would communicate that Techno’s view of Tubbo and by extension the government is one-sided and not true to reality.

Stuff like that helps the viewer understanding a story holistically and manages to communicate stuff like themes and morals without having to solely rely on in-character logic and argumentation, which, as Ghostbur put it so eloquently, is comprised of a bunch of unreliable narrators.

Character analysis is great if we want dive deep, if we really want to give a character flavour and understand their motivations. It helps make the universe feel like it is alive, like it’s real. But – and this might be a shocker for you – it’s not real. It’s written. It is construction – and as such, in its construction, it has messages and themes and morals, intentionally or unintentionally.

By being so focused on specific characters and their individual journeys, viewpoints and motivation we really run the risk of not looking at the bigger picture and fail to see what the overarching narrative is actually communicating. And we may also fail to understand how characters might or might not fit into the overarching narrative.

Speaking of which …

 Thesis #2: Technoblade experiences very little Meaningfultm Thematic Conflict

Okay, let’s talk about Technoblade. I’m sure I’m not going to get any hate for this one.

I want to preface by saying that I don’t watch Technoblade’s streams; I catch up though clip channels and summaries. I’m mainly watching Tommy, Tubbo and Quackity – which is honestly already more than I can handle – but I want to be clear that while I’ll try to be as even-handed as possible – like I explained previously – the way I consumed the storylines will undoubtedly leave me with some bias.

Also, needless to say, I’m talking about the character Technoblade, not the actual content creator, unless I specifically say so. That should be obvious.

Now, I’m not doing a Technoblade character analysis, because that would be hypocritical of me – seeing how I just bitched about the overwhelming amounts of character analyses in the fandom – but I’ll try my best to summarize what is necessary.

Technoblade’s interesting in that he is a very static character – at least inwardly – he doesn’t change much. He is very steadfast in his beliefs and ideals and has very little introspection. He doesn’t question himself; he doesn’t waver, he is never in a bind about whether what he’s doing is right or wrong. He is very much a parallel to early TommyInnit – who, of course, famously said “I’m always in the right”.

And I want to emphasize that I mean this in no way as a critique of Techno’s character. A static character provides a nice contrast to more dynamic characters and can balance them out. It can also be utilised by the writing as a character flaw – which is what I hope content creator Techno is going for.

Like Techno doesn’t have a lot of empathy in the sense that he is particularly skilled at or interested in trying to see the viewpoints of others. There is never an attempt to reconcile, for example, the goal of the Pogtopians to reclaim L’Manberg and install another administration with his desire for an anarchist society. This is also compounded with his overreliance on violence as the only tactic for conflict resolution – Techno has a whole thesis statement about violence being the only universal language. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote.

And lastly, what really drives this all over the edge, is his all-or-nothing approach when dealing with the enemy – he is not so much eye for an eye as he is – to use another biblical example – you make fun of me for being bald and I’ll sic two bears on you that maul and kill you and 41 other children.

There’s also the open and completely unacknowledged hypocrisy of a self-described anarchist working together with a man that installs and dethrones Kings with his every whim – someone who – and I cannot stress this enough – hits about every box when it comes to the definition of tyrant.

So, what I’m saying is that Technoblade is the Dream SMP equivalent of Dick Chenney. C’mon you know it’s true! He will bomb that freedom into your country whether you want him to or not. That’s some cogent political commentary in the year 2021.

Okay, so now that I’ve outlined his character, what kind of conflicts does Technoblade face. Well, it’s mostly physical or external. He fights a lot whether it’s against Quackity or Sapnap or bodying Karl Jacobs five times in a row. And – with the exception of maybe Sapnap – none of it is challenging. Technoblade is the best PvP-Player on the server – there really isn’t much tension to be had from a purely physical fight.

So, how are these fights supplemented emotionally. Well, internally there is not a lot going on. As I said before, Technoblade isn’t really an introspective character. Even during his shouting match with Tommy there’s not a sense that Technoblade is wavering or unsure of himself in the way that Tommy is. He exposits that one of the reasons, he acts like he does is that he feels dehumanized; that people only use him like a weapon and then discard or even try to neutralize him once he’s no longer useful.

But that is not something that Technoblade has to grapple with – it’s not conflict for him, it’s more conflict for Tommy. Technoblade is self-assured in that he’s a person and not a weapon – it’s almost like there was a character arc there, where Technoblade self-actualizes and breaks away from the people that want to use him. But we didn’t see any of it. Technoblade unleashes the withers; then he goes into retirement because he wants to be, I suppose, and then he returns to violence as a reaction to the Butcher Army. There is a story of vengeance here, but not any conflict about being used. There is never a point where we see Technoblade come to this realization or comes to assert himself.

In season 1 there’s never a push from Pogtopia where the narrative frames them as exploiting Technoblade. He fights with them of his own volition, he gives them weapons and armour of his own volition. Nobody pressured Techno into procuring their inventory for the fight. And in Season 2, he’s the one to approach Tommy about their potential partnership – he is in the position of power here, explicitly not Tommy.

Like, I’m sorry, if this ruffles some feathers, but I really don’t see this arc where Technoblade is being used. There’s a story of misunderstanding and maybe co-dependency – but not of dehumanization. This entire line of thought seems to solely reference that moment, where Tommy says to Sapnap “I have the blade” during one of their wars – which, to base an entire emotional arc around that without any further set-up, is, and I’m sorry to say that, incredibly flimsy.

Okay, so we covered physical and emotional conflict? But what about conflict on the narrative level? Well, that leads me to my suprathesis …

 Suprathesis: The Narrative is Unclear on how it treats Technoblade … and that’s Not Good.

Here’s a Hot Take: The narrative of Season 1 treats Technoblade way less sympathetically than that of season 2.

Let me explain. The narrative of Season 1 revolves mostly around Wilbur and Tommy. The emotional fulcrum of the overall narrative is Wilbur’s rise and fall from Grace – and Tommy succeeding him as symbol of L’Manberg’s “special”-ness. Now I will talk about all that more in detail, when I talk about Season 1 of the Dream SMP. So, you’ll just have to go with me on this one for now.

Technoblade, by contrast, doesn’t really have much going on thematically in Season 1. He mostly exists as a sort-of utilitarian character – he is an accessory to make story beats happen. Like him executing Tubbo doesn’t open up any sort of thematic conflict involving him – on a character level it sets up antipathy between him and Tommy and it grants us some insight into how he operates with his violence speech – but on a larger-scale narrative level it really just shows how far Wilbur and Tommy have drifted apart in how they react to the event.

His biggest contribution is during the Season 1 finale, but even there he plays second fiddle to Wilbur. Not just because Wilbur does way more destruction with his explosion than Techno does with his Withers, but also because Wilbur had an emotional and thematic climax to his arc and by extension the entire storyline. Like Techno’s is a cool moment and very epic visual but in terms of thematic relevance, his Theseus-speech is really more set-up for Season 2.

And Season 1 is very unambiguous about L’Manberg being good and Tommy’s ideals ultimately being morally justified – I mean, they have a whole speech about it in the end and it was built-up throughout the entire Season – Techno is cast in a … less than sympathetic light. He is, if not a villain, then definitely an antagonist.

But with Season 2 the narrative is either uninterested in or not very clear on exploring Technoblade’s flaws.

Like ask yourselves: is Technoblade’s character ever consciously challenged by the narrative? Are his actions ultimately shown to not be in the right? Are his beliefs about government and power ever called into question? Are the negative consequences that his actions cause ever shown to be larger than the “good” he does?

I think what exemplifies this the most is how the Butcher Army event played out on December 16th. Now, during that event, the Butcher Army, which was comprised of Tubbo, Quackity, Fundy and Ranboo, managed to apprehend Technoblade, who at that point was living the quiet retirement life, and tried to have him publicly executed – without trial.

Now, smarter people than me have pointed out that the Butcher Army had a bevy of in-character reasons that can justify or explain their actions. And that’s definitely interesting, but as I said before, I want to get away from that and look into how the Butcher Army is treated on a narrative level. Because this is one of the few instances where the otherwise grey-loving Season 2 has some very clear narrative intent when it comes to morality.

The Butcher Army is very deliberately framed as almost cartoonishly corrupt and violent. They very forcefully investigate Philza, mock him and then put him under house arrest – and there’s just no remorse in the script even from normally sympathetic characters like Tubbo.

Compare and contrast with the Tommy-exile scene, which is also an act of moral ambiguity and is treated as such. And things get even worse once the Army arrives at Technoblade’s abode and attack him after he softly tells them that he has left that live behind him. They then proceed to take his horse hostage, mock him and execute him without fair trial – and I haven’t seen it but from live commentary I gathered that Techno really played up the whole softie-schtick before the Butcher Army arrived. I mean, before the big Technoblade vs Quackity fight, Quackity had whole villain monologue for Christ’s sake.

And even afterwards, the Butcher Army really plays up the corrupt angle with Tubbo proposing a festival as a guise to publicly execute someone. And again, I know that on an intradiegetic there’s nuances and it’s not really comparable to the Red Festival, but in combination with what the audience has seen up until that point and with how much it feeds into the already established themes of history repeating itself and becoming like your predecessors, it really does not paint a pretty picture of the Tubbo administration.

You can feel the heavy hand of the script on your shoulder, which is a feat seeing how – as discussed before – that’s not something that can be easily accomplished in this medium.

And that is what I mean when I say that Technoblade is not really challenged by the script and is in this case even emboldened by it. Because after this whole ordeal the thought of Technoblade taking revenge by destroying L’Manberg doesn’t seem like such an extreme response to the viewer – even though in my opinion, it is.

As of right now it is too early to say how the narrative will judge Technoblade’s actions in the future. Will they be framed as extreme but ultimately justified or perpetuating a cycle of ever-escalating vengeance? Will we ever see a government that’s not just at best misguided and at worst completely awful?

Ultimately, I believe and hope that Technoblade will be challenged by the narrative, mostly because a character that cannot, believably, be physically challenged, who doesn’t have any meaningful internal conflict about what he’s doing; and who does come out on the other side having everything he always believed in be proven completely in the right by the narrative, would be incredibly boring. Not just to watch but also to play as.

As it stands now, if the destruction Techno, Phil and Dream inflicted upon L’Manburg is framed as ultimately in the right, I would find it personally a distasteful message to send. I would ultimately say that the “correct” way to counter corruption in government is to completely obliterate the entire country. Like we’re not talking simply disbanding the government – that’s not what Doomsday was – we’re talking complete and utter annihilation. And that would be cynical and depressing. Like, call me a big softie, but even bothsidesing this argument would be bad.

Like, I’m not calling for Technoblade to be transformed into or treated a monster like Dream. But I personally feel like the narrative needs to acknowledge that the Doomsday was something that was taken way too far and that it ultimately brought more harm than good. And Technoblade needs to held accountable by someone who is not a cartoonishly corrupt government-official or who is in conflict with him anyway, like Tommy.

I thought Philza or Ranboo could do that but seeing how their storylines are progressing I don’t believe that will be the case. But who knows, maybe Captain Puffy will come through for us. We stan a Queen.

 Conclusion

So, yeah, I made this entire video just to air out my grievances with how one-sided the mode of analysis is in the fandom, because no person actually involved with the production of Dream SMP will ever see this.

But after everything I am cautiously optimistic, that content creator Technoblade knows what he’s doing. He has talked in the past about how his character is a bad guy and he loves his Greek myths. After all what’s more Greek myth than hybris being rewarded with punishment? [Technoblade never dies] That bodes well for him.

Also, this isn’t the video I promised at the end of the last one!

[peachyydesires]

The YTTD Cast Playing Minecraft

genre: crack / platonic relationships

warnings: n/a 

bloopers: 🌳 [tba]

a/n: my good friend, alyson, and i wrote this as a collab together! she has an ao3 account that she recently started for both danganronpa and your turn to die! if you like either fandom, i 110% suggest to go check out her work/subscribe to her! she’s an amazing person so go show her some love if you can!! i recruited her a bit last minute and we spent all day yesterday writing, but this was definitely one of the most enjoyable things to write so far! 

Keiji Shinogi (Aka The 1st Boomer):

❏ This man has BARELY any idea how to play Minecraft at first. Hell, he even had to get Gin to help him install it on his computer. He has to learn how to even use the basic controls, and he’s constantly asking the others what certain keys do (does he do this just to be annoying? The world may never know).

❏ Once he gets the hang of the game, things go a little bit smoother, but not completely. While he may have quickly learned all of the buttons, there’s still a lot more to Minecraft such as PVP, building, mining, the bosses, crafting, etc, and that takes him an eternity to learn (don’t even get me STARTED on the Nether and the End). Without his other friends, he’d probably be stuck in the middle of the night with zero protection or tools on him to fight the mobs that spawn.

❏ He’s mostly just there for the laughs; while he’ll try to stay out of the way from his friends, he’ll show up at the most erratic times. He’ll either immediately teleport himself to someone in the middle of fighting a group of mobs or invade someone’s house and steal their stuff just for fun. 

❏ While he’s not as much of a prankster as Shin, he’ll still do some of the most random actions ever, even if it’s not to annoy others. He’ll place down a random door in the middle of a room and just leave it there, or make several holes in the ground while trying to punch some grass to clear it out. When the group is on a voice call, 90% of the call is just the others yelling at Keiji to stop planting trees on their farms. 

❏ He’s not one to explore, but wherever his friends are, he is. He’ll tag along with them nearly anywhere, whether they’re doing a dangerous excursion to the End or traveling across the sea, he’ll always be tagging along. He honestly doesn’t know the point of the game, but again, he’s just there for the laughs. 

Joe Tazuna (Aka The Brave One):

❏ Joe has played Minecraft before, but he doesn’t care about building a pretty mansion or planting flowers. This man will live in a tiny dirt hut and beat the game. The one thing that Joe always plans on doing whenever he starts a new world is to get a dog and name them “Sven” after he watched one of his favorite YouTuber’s playthroughs one night instead of studying. He would do anything to save his dog, even if it means sacrificing his friends’ lives.

❏ When he plays on multiplayer servers, he always insists on getting the supplies and food for everyone. It’s pretty much all he does. He isn’t afraid of caves or mobs, and he won’t hesitate to run towards a creeper to stab it repeatedly. He is, however, terrified of skeletons and endermen since they always kill him. Once, he dropped down into a cave after spotting iron on the surface, only to be ambushed by a horde of skeletons. No one came to help him. 

❏ He tends to forget about his hunger level until he actually starts taking damage. The same thing goes with drowning. It doesn’t help that he’s constantly sprinting wherever he goes. Because of this, he’s constantly falling into caves, ravines, and even little holes filled with water, yet no one ever helps him get out. They usually leave him behind, or they think that he’s simply lost. 

❏ His girlfriend, Ryoko, hasn’t yet tried Minecraft, despite him begging for her to play with him 24/7. Although constructing a fancy house isn’t his cup of tea, he’ll do anything to play with Ryoko. He even once asked Sara to help him practice with his Minecraft dates. He needed help with his wording of asking Ryoko if he could put his bed next to hers, so Sara volunteered to assist him.

❏ Joe’s always falling into lava as well, and he gets very frustrated when it happens. Whenever he falls, he starts screaming into his mic while on voice calls (he doesn’t curse because he’s cool like that), yet still, no one comes to help him. Sara only says “teleport to me!” but it’s always too late. Keiji once offered to help him, but Joe declined, saying he didn’t trust or like him since he’s creepy towards Sara. 

Q-Taro Burgerberg (Aka A Minecraft Veteran):

❏ Besides Joe and Gin, Q-Taro surprisingly knows the most about Minecraft. He used to play it a lot when he was younger before he started getting into baseball, so he knows the basics such as crafting and mining. Despite not picking up a controller in years, he still knows all of the mechanics the game has to offer as not much has changed when it comes to the controls.

❏ What HAS changed, however, is literally everything else in the game. All of the major updates over the years have nearly changed the game completely, including the Nether, the End, the villages, even the ocean became useful. He doesn’t realize this at first until he goes into the Nether and sees that it’s completely changed (He’ll stand there for a moment, wondering why the caves haven't been updated but the Nether of all things has). 

❏ He’ll have to completely relearn the game, having Gin teach him all of the new mechanics such as elytras, banners, shields, etc, and all of the new structures including ruined portals, pillager towers, shipwrecks, etc. He’s always confused on call, constantly asking what a certain block is or yelling into his mic, “Uhh, I found something!!” 

❏ One thing about Q-Taro is that he loves to mine. It’s the one useful thing that hasn’t changed all too much, so he can still help out and gather ores for everyone else. Although, he has to have the best armor out of the rest of the group or he might just commit theft. When he learns about Netherite, however, he refuses to wear it; he doesn’t want to admit that diamond isn’t the best in the game anymore, although no matter how many enchantments he puts on it, his armor will never be as good as netherite.

❏ In all honesty, he forgets the majority of the information that Gin tells him. Even after all of the warnings that Gin gives him to ‘not punch everything he sees’, he still punches everything he sees. He’ll run up to something new and whisper vaguely into the mic, “I’m gonna punch it.” And before Gin can scream for him not to, he’ll give the new block or mob a nice good smack. Beehives, llamas, polar bears, and pandas are prime causes of Q-Taro’s many deaths in the game. Regarding the new mobs, he encounters hostile ones a lot. He’ll often forget to sleep (despite everyone else yelling at him to go to bed) when he’s down in the caves, and he’ll emerge from his hole at night only to see 5 different phantoms flying in the air trying to murder him. 

Alice Yabusame (Aka The Sailor):

❏ Alice is a rather frustrated player. Nothing ever goes his way when he plays, and he’s constantly cursing on voice calls. His sister, Reko, sometimes kicks him from the calls to keep Kanna and Gin as innocent as possible (although they don’t really care, and Gin sometimes picks up on Alice’s bad behavior himself when he gets mad). 

❏ Similar to Joe, he’s an explorer. He loves exploring the ocean (especially the water temples), but his cheerful vibe suddenly switches into a pure, satanic rage once he starts drowning. He gets too cocky sometimes, though. Once while he was looking for an End City in the End, he lost control of his Elytra and flew into the void, cursing and screaming in fury the entire way down. The same exact thing happens whenever he falls into lava and loses all of his belongings; if anyone were to make fun of him when he died, he would craft a sword and kill them without any hesitation out of pure spite. 

❏ He would try building a house next to Reko to get a bit closer with her, but once, he went out mining, and when he came back, his house was on fire. He then discovered that Shin was the one who set his house ablaze, so whenever Alice sees the troller, he grabs a stone sword and attempts to kill him (since he’s poor), but Shin is almost always in creative mode, which angers him more and only causes him to scream swear words into his microphone. He begs Sara, the one who created the server, to ban him, but Sara’s excuse is always, “he’s just having fun, which is the whole point of this server.”

❏ Since his house is always being destroyed, he usually makes small bases inside of caves or mountains to avoid Shin, but somehow, the troller always finds them and burns them down or blows them up, so he’s constantly on the run from him. He also does stuff alone since he doesn’t have any friends on the server (besides Nao who sometimes gives him food and supplies). 

❏ Due to having to relocate nearly every time he joins the server, he rarely keeps chests on him. He has nowhere to store the treasures that he often finds in shipwrecks, sea temples, etc so whenever he runs out of inventory space he gives his materials away as gifts to his other friends, especially to Reko. Despite always giving out free resources and ores, nearly everyone in the server finds him odd, especially when he’s quiet for one moment only to be throwing a tantrum the next on the voice calls.  

Shin Tsukimi (Aka The Troller): 

❏ It’s no big surprise that Shin is just as chaotic as he is in-game, if not more, than IRL. Despite being over 20, he often lurks around on the Minecraft forums, always learning new hacks and ways to troll the others in the shared server. For some reason, everyone has server operator on the server, so Shin’s able to switch between Creative and Survival as he pleases, although he rarely goes into Survival.

❏ His only goal in the server is to create mayhem and confusion rather than to actually be productive; he’s always quiet on voice calls (except when he giggles loudly while he’s blowing something up or creeping behind someone), listening in on the other conversations so he knows who he can terrorize next. 

❏ Since he’s in Creative, the minute he joined the game he automatically spawned himself netherite armor and tools while everyone else was running off to go trample the forests for wood. He builds a secret hut, making sure no one else could find it (in the side of a mountain, underwater in the sand using a conduit, really anywhere he can hide). He has chests full of TnT, flint and steel, potions, mob spawn eggs, and redstone in case someone forces him into survival. 

❏ He’s played a prank on nearly everyone in the server; his favorite target is Alice, as he rages the hardest and tries to murder him despite him always being in Creative. He constantly will throw down an invisibility potion and follow Alice into a cave whenever he goes on a mining trip, waiting until he’s right in front of a conveniently placed lava pool before pushing him in. He’s always heard giggling in the background during voice calls while Alice screams out strings of curses and vows of revenge, which are never followed through. 

❏ Sometimes if he’s really in the mood for some chaos he’ll switch into Survival and taunt Alice on the voice call, daring him to come and catch him and murder him now that he has a health bar. This immediately catches Alice’s attention and he literally drops everything he’s about to do just to partake in the wild goose chase that Shin ends up leading him on. He gets close a couple times, but Shin always stands still for a moment before teleporting away to someone like Kanna (“Thanks Kanna!” “SHIN GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE YOU COWARD-”) 

Gin Ibushi (Aka The Kid Leader): 

❏ As the youngest in the group, Gin obviously is the Minecraft pro compared to everyone else. It’s one of the many games that he constantly plays when he’s not playing with his toys, and it’s a good escape outlet for him. He’s been through nearly every Minecraft update, always mastering the new skills such as flying, potion-making, and new PvP tactics as soon as the game updates. 

❏ He was the original one that suggested that the rest of the group start a Minecraft server with him, although Sara was the one that managed to start it up. As soon as he spawns in, Gin’s already off doing who-knows-what to try and speedrun the game, but nearly every 10 minutes he has to stop what he’s doing and help the others out of their confusion. He doesn’t care too much about having a fancy house or not, so he usually just builds a sufficient starter house (which is actually like, 3 stories) in between his adventures.

❏ Somehow, after the first day or so, he already has the strongest armor and tools in the game: netherite. While Shin cheated and used Creative, Gin managed to find the rarest ore in the game (probably after pulling an all-nighter or two admittedly). He’s very insistent on fighting the Ender Dragon early, but everyone else is either off doing their own thing or still on iron armor and afraid of even going into the Nether despite Gin insisting he’ll ‘carry’ everyone. 

❏ Gin is always the one to lead excursions off into the other dimensions. He’s very eager to finish the game (despite having done so dozens of times), and he’s always pressuring/convincing the others to go out and explore. He knows everything about the varying structures and bosses, from the Pillgar Towers to the Ocean Monuments and the Wither to the Ravager(s). 

❏ Surprisingly, he does die quite a lot. Despite having played for years on end, he still makes careless mistakes even when he isn’t being trolled by Shin; he’s fallen into lava pits countless times and died to the occasional skeleton even with his netherite armor (sometimes he forgets to put it on as he leaves it on an armor stand at home so it doesn’t break). One time he was looking for a Woodland Mansion using an Elytra, following a map while flying over several different biomes at once without a second glance as he was focused on the chords displayed on the screen. When he finally realized he was about to fly right into a mountain, it was too late as he smacked right into the wall and fell to his death even after trying to put down a water bucket to save himself. 

Kai Satou (Aka The Quiet Fighter):

❏ Kai hates to admit it, but he’s actually quite a fan of video games, especially Minecraft, considering he played it a bit as a kid. The moment he spawns into the map, he gets wood for a crafting table and supplies for himself, Sara, and sometimes Q-Taro. He’s usually pretty quiet on voice calls since he doesn’t really want to bother anyone, and he logs on sometimes on his own to build a fancy wood house or to get some extra supplies. Once, he logged on and saw that his house was on fire with Shin standing by it, saying taunting things in chat just to piss the loner off. Kai didn’t really care, though, since his houses don’t take him very long to build. Shin is annoyed by this, but still, he just goes after Alice instead. 

❏ Similar to Joe, he’s always out hunting for food or seeds. Every time he plays, Kai starts a farm by a river, pond, or even near the ocean. Whenever someone walks on their/his own crops, Kai silently rages inside his head, but he never tells them anything.

❏ He usually goes on mining trips by himself, and he isn’t afraid of mobs or hostile surroundings. Unless Gin is off helping the others, Kai is always the first one to build a Nether portal or travel to the End.

❏ Whenever he plays, he always gets a cat or two from either the jungle or a nearby village. He likes to give them fish, and he takes his precious pets on his less-dangerous adventures. Once when he logged onto Minecraft, he saw that one of his cats was gone. He looked around until he found Shin beating his helpless bundle of joy with a stick until it died. Kai didn’t say anything to him, but he was furious on the inside. He later blew up Shin’s house with TNT after finding his hidden shack, and being an expert with laptops/computers himself, he also got Shin temporarily banned from the server, making Alice exceptionally happy. 

❏ Sometimes, Kai invites Q-Taro to go on mining or exploring trips with him, and the athlete gladly accepts. Kai tells him about all the new updates that occurred over the years, even though Q-Taro never really pays attention. He’s pretty quiet whenever he talks on voice calls, so Q-Taro is always shouting for him to speak up.

Kazumi Mishima (Aka The 2nd Boomer): 

❏ Mishima had never even heard of Minecraft until Nao brought it up to him one day in class. When Sara made the server for all of them to play in, he jumps into the server wearing nothing but a Steve skin, but Nao quickly helps him change it by making him a skin of his own image. Surprisingly, he got used to the controls of the game rather quickly.

❏ He wouldn’t really know what to do, and he would find Nao doing everything for him, including building his houses and getting him food and ore. He would make a lot of silly mistakes, such as mining gold with a stone pickaxe, eating raw meat, digging straight down, and ignoring fall damage. Mishima isn’t really bothered whenever a hostile mob suddenly appears either and tries to attack him. 

❏ If Mishima ever stumbled upon a village, he would clap his hands in joy. He loves villagers and trading, and would even kidnap some of them via boats to experiment and test what they could do at home. Some of the others are a bit creeped out by his fascination, but Nao and Gin find it to be quite entertaining. 

❏ Despite being a polite, smart teacher in person, his online persona is the exact opposite. He’s always barging into people’s homes and examining their shelters, sometimes stealing a bit of their stuff while quietly giggling on the voice call. However, he once accidentally killed one of Kanna’s parrots, and he was extremely apologetic about his mistake. He even went out in the jungle just to get her a new one despite her constantly reassuring him that it was fine.

❏ Mishima’s favorite mob would definitely be a cow. He doesn’t really understand why, but he loves their patterns and design. He refuses to kill or eat them, but he’s always on board with the idea of capturing them and bringing them home. If he ever encounters a mineshaft, he’s scurrying around the place, trying to find a name tag for his precious cows.  

Kanna Kizuchi (Aka The One Who’s Scared of Everything):

❏ Even though she’s rather young, Kanna has strayed away from video games for a long time. Sure, she’s heard of Minecraft, but does that mean she’s ever played it? No. But she had watched several Minecraft playthroughs on YouTube before, so she was somewhat prepared when she spawned in with everyone else. She knew the basic controls and learned pretty quickly the other mechanics and new features the game had to offer. 

❏ She thought Minecraft was a rather tranquil game, and she loved all of the details and peaceful mobs that spawned around her. She loves the flowers and trees the most, constantly picking flowers and exploring the grassland excitedly on the first day. She seems to be pretty good on her own until night comes along. After spending all day flower-picking, she doesn’t realize until she starts getting attacked by the hostile mobs that its night. She’s heard frantically screaming and panicking on the voice call before her death notice appears on screen to everyone else. 

❏ After that night, Kanna is terrified of the night sequence(s). As soon as the sun starts to set over the horizon, she’s scurrying inside her house or spam-clicking her bed before she’s even allowed to sleep. Despite people like Gin always reassuring her that she has armor and a sword to defend herself with, she still refuses to go out at night no matter what. She’s also always pressuring everyone to go to bed to make sure she doesn’t have to sit through the night in her house and so that phantoms don’t spawn either (even though she’s never encountered them, she’s determined to keep it that way). She’ll be quiet one moment on the call before suddenly scolding everyone to get inside and go to bed so the server can time skip to day. 

❏ Kanna doesn’t exactly realize that not every mob is either peaceful or hostile. While she isn’t like Q-Taro who’s always punching the neutral mobs, she’s still unaware of certain hostile variants such as the Killer Bunny. One day while Kanna was out picking flowers for the outside of her house, Shin got the grand idea to spawn a bunch of rabbits inside of her house along with a Killer Bunny or two that he hid in her storage room. When she came home, she was rather confused and could be heard quietly murmuring on the call, “Where did all these bunnies come from..?”. Her usual soft and melancholic whispers quickly turned to shrill shrieks as she entered her storage room to put away the flowers and the Killer Bunnies, which looked like regular rabbits to her, began attacking her. Shin obviously began bursting out laughing when his invisibility potion ran out and he was standing in the corner of Kanna’s house watching her run away from the mob(s). Although, after she began sobbing quietly on the call everyone went silent, including Shin for once (although some of her sobs were overexaggerated just so she could guilt Shin for traumatizing her) as he silently noted to never troll her again. 

❏ It’s not very surprising that Kanna has at least a dozen pets. She has an entire pack of dogs (which she only managed to tame after stealing Gin’s collection of bones), several different colored cats, three parrots, two foxes, and even a panda bear she managed to kidnap using Mishima’s classic boat method. She has several rooms in her house that she built purely to keep her pets in, especially the untamable mobs like her foxes. She’s actually rather creative with her rooms, always adding in small details such as scratching posts for her cats and mini trees for her parrots. Her stable for her horses is also humongous and often mistaken for a second house when people run-up to her plot. She also somehow is an expert at coming up with names on the spot and she has a nametag on her 24/7 (admittedly, Shin always secretly restocks her name tag collection that she has in her chest since they’re rather rare and Kanna is too scared to go into dungeons herself).  

Nao Egokoro (Aka The Helper): 

❏ Nao has obviously played Minecraft before, and she was ecstatic when Sara announced that she would be making a server for all of them. She loves making Minecraft skins, and she made skins identical to how they really look for everyone on the server.

❏ She would totally use those Minecraft house building tutorials on YouTube and would help make houses for her friends if they were struggling. Nao would also get supplies for people (especially Alice since she pities him) out of the kindness of her heart. She really enjoys picking flowers with Kanna and getting cute pets/animals for everyone as well.

❏ However, Nao refuses to harm any animal/mob she finds. She sometimes goes on mining trips with her friends as well. Since she doesn’t want to lay a blood-thirsty finger on any of the animals, she begs Alice to go mining with her for materials since she knows he’s a good fighter, and he could fend off mobs for her as she mines. Alice obviously agrees since Nao has helped him out with Shin’s antics, and he would constantly jump up behind her to stab skeletons, zombies, creepers, and even endermen. They both left the cave even happier than before, and Alice didn’t curse once when he was mining with her.

❏ Nao invited Reko to live with her, and her friend happily agreed (Reko would do anything to move away from Alice). They would go on cute trips together, and Nao would build a stable for the horses that they found.

❏ She’s pretty nervous to play the game by herself, and she always waits until someone else is on the server with her (even Shin) before she does something a bit daring. Nao is always frightful when she has to travel to the Nether, and she has to beg people to go with her out of fear.

Sara Chidouin (Aka The “Mom” Friend):

❏ Although Gin was the one who suggested that they should make a server, Sara was the one who created it. She’s been playing Minecraft for a long time (especially with Joe) and was happy when Gin suggested the idea. 

❏ Sara is technically considered the “mom” friend on the server, yet she won’t give a crap about her friends’ issues. If they fell into a hole or were being attacked by mobs, she wouldn’t help them. She would let them die with zero regrets regarding her actions, as she doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal since players can respawn. 

❏ She likes to use Minecraft building tutorials, similar to Nao. She’s started to memorize building patterns, and she’s even gotten more comfortable with building in general. However, she doesn’t admit that she uses them, and she likes to flex her “skills” to the others (Shin always calls her out on this with a snicker or two, but he’s immediately silenced when Sara threatens to ban him from the server for terrorizing everyone else). 

❏ Even though this has already been said, she still doesn’t give a crap about the others’ issues. Alice would always come to her and beg for Shin to be banned from the server, yet Sara would shrug it off and say that he’s having fun. Deep down, she would enjoy watching Shin torment and tease Alice, even if she was annoyed when he bothered her.

❏ Sara spends most of her time on the server with Joe, Keiji, and Nao, trying her best to avoid Kai, Alice, and Shin. She isn’t scared of doing things alone, such as mining or going to the Nether, but there is one thing that she is terrified of: zombies. She hates how much damage they can do, especially when they’re crowded together in a large horde. She has to beg her friends to kill them for her since she always fails. Joe always kills them for her and taunts her, saying that she owes him back. Keiji would accidentally hit Sara, so the two of them would just run away from the zombie. Nao, of course, wouldn’t want to hurt the zombie, so the two of them would also try their best to escape the annoying mob.

Reko Yabusame (Aka The Raider):

❏ Reko is somewhere in the middle of everyone; she used to play every now and then with Alice when they were kids, but the game has updated so much that she forgot half of the mechanics at first. As soon as she spawns in, the nostalgia hits her like a truck and everything comes rushing back to her. So while the others are stumbling around, voicing their confusion into their mics, Reko’s off along with Gin to go punch some trees down. 

❏ Similar to her brother Alice, she gets easily pissed off at the game. While her rage isn’t on the same levels as him, it’s still quite strong. She’ll mutter curse words under her breath, barely audible so the kids in the call don’t hear her. The farthest she’s gone is thrown her controller across her room after falling into a lava pool in the Nether while bridging, and surprisingly it didn’t break. When it comes to her brother and his rage, she’ll often mutter, “Brb.” before leaving her room and storming into Alice’s, and often a loud slap is heard from Alice’s side with no further explanation to the others. 

❏ When it comes to her brother, Reko is one of the few people who can tolerate him. She helps him at the start of the game despite her reluctant groans into the mic but ditches him as soon as Shin starts harassing him. It’s not uncommon for her to have to rescue Alice when he’s running back from mining and is being chased by a horde of mobs. She’ll leave her house with only an iron chest plate on and still somehow manage to murder all of the hostiles while Alice runs inside with half a heart. Besides Gin, she’s probably Alice’s mentor the majority of the time, always teaching him new features that he forgot like potion-making and archery. Whenever he dies (which is very often, unfortunately) she can be heard mumbling during Alice’s screams, “I told you…” 

❏ Reko’s favorite part of the game is the Pillager raids. For some reason, she finds it an interesting challenge for her due to the different levels that raids can spawn in. She has several different strategies, some of which she made up at the last second. Some notable moments include dropping a block of TNT on a Ravager from her tower, spawning in a large group of Iron Golems at the start of the raid, and somehow shooting a Vex with a bow. She somehow hasn’t managed to die even once during the raids, and even Gin can’t believe her skill and sheer luck when it comes to fighting. She often tags along with him when he goes on adventures, especially when it involves the Pillagers (she finds them interesting, what can I say?). It’s no big surprise when she conquers a Wooden Mansion with ease one day while on a trip with Gin. 

❏ After moving in with Nao, she got to teach her pink-haired friend a lot more about the game (especially since she was away from Alice now). She often encourages Nao to step out of her comfort zone and explore, as there’s a lot more to the game than just her house. She accompanies Nao on every mining trip (except for the few times that she chooses to go with Alice when Reko isn’t on) and even takes her out to the other dimensions. She’s always watching after Nao, always standing close to her with a netherite sword in hand to murder any mob that dare come near her. Reko even ends up teaching Nao how to defeat a raid (although she was the one carrying the entire time) and it’s not too surprising when Nao joins the excursion to the End to defeat the Ender Dragon. 

[mossball-nyoo]

Hypixel (Blog/Personal Review)

⚠ Note that the following information is based on personal opinion and experience, and may not be accurate for all players. I respect your opinions, please respect mine.  ⚠

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[ Hypixel is probably by far, one of the most popular Minecraft Java Servers in existence. Nearly every Minecraft player has probably played there at least once, however, with so many things packed into one server, there may be some debate on what makes and keeps Hypixel in the highest rankings. ]

After some research on some player opinions from other sources, some say because of the Friendly Community, others say because the content it holds is unique and in general more fun than most servers, some others say because of the huge, outstanding builds featured around the server itself. These ideas leave room for debate, which I will go over in the following. 

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I . Community 

Now, as most of us are aware, no server or community is perfect or ‘the best’, not even Hypixel’s. If you’re coming into Hypixel for the first time, do not expect a warm welcome. With the vast amount of players on the server, upon joining, most players will fail to acknowledge you even exist unless you have gained recognition through continuous hours of playtime or just happen to be a famous content creator.

Now, as I mentioned previously, no community is perfect, and you will find toxicity and negativity in many places on the internet. However, negative experiences are even more common the larger the server becomes, and where its popularity originated.

In case you are not aware, Hypixel’s content offers a wide range of multiplayer minigames, PVP, and etc. This type of content of course, tends to make players very competitive, and on such a large server, the race and pressure is on to fight your way to the leaderboards. Some ‘friendly competition’ isn’t a bad thing of course, but many of the competition and community in Hypixel fails to fall into the category of friendly. 

4/10 Not the best place for making friends 🙁

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II. Content

Hypixel may just be the number one place to play mini games such as Skywars/Bedwars, and may have a larger variety of minigames compared to other servers. However, several other servers in this time also have the same or very similar content, so in some aspects it may not be as 'unique' as it once was.

In servers with a smaller player base, where toxicity is less common, minigames and pvp may actually be more fun. I’ve even supported this idea through personal experience, as playing minigames on a few smaller servers did prove to be more enjoyable. 

Many things on Hypixel are very simple, and can get boring which probably explains somewhat why it may be necessary to have 50+ different minigames on the server. I’m not saying having variety is a bad thing, as it does fit the interests of several types of players. However, if you are not much into high pressure, it might not be the best place for you.

6/10 Large variety, but can get boring quickly. 🤔

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III. Builds

Honestly, I cant really say much about the builds on Hypixel because I admit, they are very cool and complex, and far beyond anything I myself could build within Minecraft. 

9/10 Agreed, Hypixel has exquisite builds 👍

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My final opinion/summary

I understand why many people like Hypixel, it does have several reasons for its popularity, however, I think the majority of this popularity comes from other sources such as YouTube and Content Creators. It’s not a new thing for things to gain attention after getting input from certain people, however, that leads to over-popularity of something that in truth, isn’t something to write home about. This is my opinion. If you are reading this and think differently, I respect that, I’m not at all saying Hypixel is a bad server, I simply believe it may be popular for the wrong reasons, and for me, there are better places to spend my time.

Final Rating: 5/10 - Neutral Feelings 😐

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[tenkobutgayer]

calling out @threecheersfordeadpoets

Cancelling “jade” on twitter dot com:

-goes by jade on tumblr and elsewhere. Why is that?? hmm?? you tryna create a fake identity for yourself. Download a house maybe??? And ofc the name is Jade, homestuckie. That’s right. She’s a certified homed stuck kinnie. kinda cringe dont u think. what happened to your imaginary cousin elisabeth?? that we made up so you’d get builder rank on the minecraft server that shall not be named.

-is holding my old monster high dolls hostage. they are in her attic. she does not give them adequate living space or appreciation of any kind. that is neglect and i will not stand it. hand them over it is clear that you are not capable of taking care of them seriously

-likes emo music in the year of our lord 2021 and almost got me into an emo phase with her in the 4-5th grade. Need i say more?? a hate crime scene music is obviously better.

-does not listen to lemon demon regularly. rlly?? neil cicerega is right there with his gorgeous melodies and she listens to weezer. smh my head. go to the corner and don’t leave until you’ve memorized every note of cabinet man

-misspelled my last name in the 6th grade. That’s right [name redacted], I wont forget. You forgot the p. kinda cringe considering the fact that you’ve known my last name since the first grade. smh-ing my head so hard rn

-likes that one show with the homophobic gay rugby men. I’ve never watched it but they’re br*tish. that should be reason enough to call it problematic media that she is in fact taking part in and enjoying. you said youd watch the owl house two months ago. i sent you the link. no progress whatsoever. meanie.

-80% of her danganronpa kins survive like come on that shouldn’t be allowed

-thinks shuichi is hot while simultaneously having him as her highest kin. first of all hes the worst protag and stinky also thats conceited af so :/ cancelled emo boy

-plays the guitar. whys that?? u wanna play bass like that guy in mine toxic relationship??? everyone knows that ppl who play guitar are cringe. mae says it during the campfire party in NITW.

-enjoys the dream smp. the amount of hate i have for that singular piece of media and it’s fandom could match the power of the sun in intensity. god the amount i wish the mcyt fandom would stop existing. just perish. then i’d truly be happy. id get to enjoy minecraft content without it being taken over by some block men wannabees. then i’d get the lemon demon sounds back on tiktok. then the actually enjoyable minecraft survival multiplayer servers would get acknowledged like they truly deserve *cough* hermitcraft (that “jade” has said she’d watch but has not) *cough*

-likes things that suck. if i listed them all this post would be like, larousse dictionary sized.

-didn’t have an extra fountain pen to lend me in grade 1 for the dictee. 

-has made me the unknowing third wheel on MULTIPLE occasions. why does the cycle keep repeating itself why do you always do this to me.

-ghosts minecraft servers if the rest of us are more advanced than her.

and last but not least:

-pissed on my wife. thats right you pissed on my wife so I’m gonna one up you and piss on the moon. you have 24 hours before my piss droplets hit the earth.

[dolphin-enthusiast]

Headcannons for the Joestars playing Minecraft together/alone.

My kind of request

Jonathan:

- The purest most relaxed gamer. All he does is literally tame animals, build houses and harvest crops. He loves his pets dearly and gets very upset if any of them get killed.

- He avoids combat and only acts in self defense. Expect him to feel VERY guilty if he accidentally kills an animal. Actually, he feels bad even for killing cows and pigs since he needs food. Me mans also is pretty good at building houses and has lots of patience.

- Although he prefers to play on singleplayer since he finds it to be more relaxing, when he does go on multiplayer he tries being as cooperative as possible while playing mini games on servers. He always is extremely friendly and never rages but bitching assholes and trollers do sometimes get on his nerves.

Joseph:

- Literally the opposite of Jonathan. Here’s when the chaos truly begins. He literally has no fucking idea how to play at first and goes around literally breaking and destroying everything. He goes by the logic iT’S fReE ReAl eStAtE.

- Digs a hole then puts a torch in it for HOme DeCoR. Fucking mines iron with a wooden pickaxe then gets pissed when nothing comes outta it. A literal fucking mess basically. If anything he’s good at fighting because he literally spams the goddamn left mouse button until it breaks.

- On multiplayer, well...it’s even worse. He goes around trolling everyone and pouring lava all over their houses then getting mad when he gets reported. Or banned. Sometimes has the rage moments where he swears like those kids in trolling videos.

Jotaro:

- Fucking c a s u a l. If you thought that Joseph succed at this game then just wait until you see the mighty ocean man. Has literally no fucking idea how to craft anything and tries breaking STONE blocks with his bare hand.

- Gets killed 94986849 times and punches the desk each time he dies. Can’t fight a goddamn mob to save his life and also has no idea how to build a decent house. Then again he’s better than Joseph at this point since he AT LEAST makes a box out of dirt and doesn’t just fucking dig a hole in the ground to call it home.

- He doesn’t like playing with others since they annoy him. Yet on the rare occasions that he does do it expect him to literally get annoyed at anything, from the way in which the maps on the server are to how stupid the players act. Literally goes ham at pvp and rage quits when he does get killed by others.

Josuke:

- You could call him a true gamer boi for he’s a pro at this shit. Knows his way around crafting and most likely has ranks on many servers as well as a server of his own.

- Is also pretty damn good at building and loves playing on creative. However, his temper is short so any little thing often manages to tick him off. Like me mans is the kind to get so mad that a mob killed him that he comes back on creative to probably tnt it’s ass or something (based on a true story bc I may or may not also do this.)

- Would rather play on multiplayer than singleplayer since even if he finds it relaxing it does tend to get a little boring/lonely. And so he and his gang go around exploring servers and mercilessly trolling people then laughing their asses off when they get kicked or banned. Koichi always tries to stop Josuke and Oku from causing so much chaos but dem bois don’t give a fuck.

Giorno:

- Similar to Jonathan as in he would rather play on singleplayer since he finds it to be more peaceful and quiet. He’s actually a pro at crafting and builds SUPERB houses like no joke me mans’ design game is STRONG.

- That’s why he mainly stays on creative since he mainly plays for the creative aspect. However he does also play on survival and surprise surprise he managed to survive literal WEEKS while playing hardcore. He’s a damn unit.

- Is extremely calm even when he plays on multiplayer and gets killed/trolled. But don’t test him for his Dio genes tend to show up when he’s LEGIT pissed, letting out a WRYYY as he rushes in for a kill. But the boi usually avoids combat and only fights if someone first attacks him. When he does fight he n e v e r loses.

[etraytin]

Quarantine, Days 174-175

September 1-2

My computer is even more kaput than usual, which is why I didn't post last night and also why I am using my son's laptop to post with tonight. He has not only this very nice laptop we got him for Christmas, but the school has also issued him a Chromebook for virtual learning, making him about 1000% more technologically up to date than I am. He has magnanimously declared that he wants me to get a new laptop very soon so we can play Minecraft together and have a house, since he has been living in various abandoned houses since he joined his multiplayer server. I said it sounded suspiciously like he wanted me to play Minecraft with him so he could live in my house, same as real life. He thought that was pretty funny. 

I was bummed I couldn't post last night because something very nice happened to me yesterday. I was down to literally my last two tablespoons of kitten formula, when the mail carrier arrived and dropped off a new can of formula, sent by somebody from Tumblr who read my post the other night and sent me one from my fostering wishlist. It was literally just in the nick of time, and it made my day. Made Audiva's day too, since she is still deeply stubbornly refusing to try wet food on a plate, and made the other kittens day too because they will eat wet food but still love to get a hit from the bottle. I got another can of formula today as well, and it was amazing! It is so nice to not have to stress out about whether the kitten is going to learn to eat before I run out of food it will eat already. So thank you so, so, so much to the kind people who sent those to me! 

Not a lot else happened yesterday, I spent a large portion of the day doing laundry, trying to catch up on the massive pile that accumulated in the hallway. Our laundry area is just a little closet in the side of the living room, so it sometimes happens that if we get too many clean clothes and do not fold them, the pile tips over and falls on the floor. Or the kiddo digs through the pile in such a way that it winds up all over the floor. In any case, it's on the floor, stuff gets stepped on, it's hard to know what is clean or dirty. The problem is exacerbated during kitten times, when I am too tired to deal with things, or when one of us is away and the other one is carrying the household. It was pretty bad this time, so I just called a do-over, washed everything, and folded it as soon as it came out of the dryer. I also went through and put a bunch of stuff in the donations bag so we have a slightly more manageable number of clothes as well. 

The kiddo had a day of ups and downs, he won back and lost his electronics privileges in a matter of hours because he cannot stay off the multiplayer server, so that's not super great. To keep him busy, I gave him my last big moving box, which I finally unpacked a mere two years after our move (it had some clothes in it I'd completely forgot I owned! Many of which are now being donated!) He spent a fair amount of the day in the box, cutting out windows and listening to his new clock radio. It's a bummer when he loses his electronics because he hates it, but it's nice to see him stretching his brain and finding alternative things to do as well. I got creative with boxes too; I finally pulled out my Dremel and assembled the nebulizer box I've been collecting pieces for. Now it is fully ready for next time I need to give a sick kitten or cat inhalant medicine! We had several of these at my rescue back in Florida, and they are great.

I made us sushi for supper and we watched several episodes of The Good Place together before bed. For a quiet day, I guess we actually got a lot done. 

Today was a little busier, I did more laundry, fed the kittens more, tried to organize a little more. MIL is doing better and my husband hopes to come home this weekend, so I have a deadline for all my self-imposed goals now! We also spent the evening trapping cats because a friend of mine has a sick kitten and couldn't go out tonight. So the kiddo and I got fast food for dinner and ate it while traveling down to our first trapping site, which was in an affluent neighborhood full of big samey houses with fenced backyards. When I'm driving the truck I feel more self-conscious about going into neighborhoods like this than into bad neighborhoods, where nobody wrinkles up their nose at a noisy old truck. But the truck survived another night, good job, truck! We caught one cat at that site, then went to the fish market to try and fill our quota. There are lots of cats at the fish market, but we only managed to catch one more that was not tagged. We left at the right time, though,because it started to rain really hard just ten minutes or so after we got home. 

Tomorrow the kiddo gets his electronics back, with the caveat that all electronics must be used in the living room or master bedroom, not in his own room or the kitten room until further notice. We'll see how that works out. I'm also going to have a very unpleasant afternoon at the dentist getting a crown put on, so wish me luck there. Two hour appointment is never something you want to hear from the dentist's receptionist. I will probably be in a very unpleasant mood by tomorrow night, so I will try to enjoy tonight's good mood while it lasts.