A Minecraft world that has been played for 3.5 years | Hacker News Reader

A Minecraft world that has been played for 3.5 years

minecraft.xandorus.com

259 pointsrocky1138103 comments

Pretty big world, but it doesn't even compare to 2b2t in scale.

For those who havent heard of it, 2b2t is an anarchy survival server that's been around for about the same period of time, 3-4 years, with no resets. Virtually the entire map from the spawn point to 5km from spawn is a desolate wasteland littered with ruins griefed bases, castles, and megastructures.

With the introduction of the hunger system everything got a lot more interesting, requiring new players to make a mad scramble from spawn and try to find some source of sustenance. It's not uncommon for new players searching for food to duck into a 2-3 year old base that's been long abandoned but has a few precious pieces of bread left in a chest.

Typically players will build their bases anywhere between 10-500km away from spawn, and when they do, they build some of the most impressive bases I've seen in the game. One favored hobby of many regulars is to go hunting for these gems that have usually been abandoned years past.

Google it and you can get a good idea of exactly how old the map is, but the pictures really don't do justice to the absolute carnage of spawn.

I was going to say: This world is pretty impressive, but I'd rather see what people do in a survival world. For some reason I thought it would be a utopia with marvelous redstone machines everywhere, automating everything, etc. But not surprisingly that's not the case. Thanks for sharing.

You should look at civcraft. It's basically the same thing, but with a bunch of "realism" mods (realistic natural resource distribution, the ability to protect structures, etc.) and there is (was? I haven't played in a few years) a ton of automated production machinery players have built.

The market in civcraft was really impressive. I remember when Bitcoin was less than a dollar, you could buy 60 diamonds for a Bitcoin from one user.

Civcraft is quite impressive regarding giving players actual needs such as transport and commerce.

I made this map here http://txapu.com where you can see rail connections. The map tiles are collected and submnitted by players, and the live player list comes from an in-game bot.

Check out the Reddit PvE server at p.nerd.nu. It's pretty incredible what they've built without any cheats, there is a full redstone railway system with automatic switching so you press your destination button and enjoy the ride.

The town dynamic is pretty hilarious to see as well. People recruit new visitors for their towns, offer a plot of land and a horse in exchange for contributing to their great works.

Do they still reset highly frequently? That kind of put me off playing on large public servers.

We reset every 3-6 months.

There's a similar PvP server at civcraft.vg or /r/civcraft. they don't have automated switching railroads, but considering it's an Anarchy server with cities that go "to war" with each other there is a massive railway support system and all sorts of glorious builds.

> there is a full redstone railway system with automatic switching so you press your destination button and enjoy the ride.

Oh man, I remember building one of those on my server back when Redstone was a lot less functional, so I guess it was even more impressive than building the same today with all the new goodies. It had 4 different stations in total, though only the one at our central base was capable of choosing different destinations (the station was pretty big, I recall having a warehouse of NOT-NOT gates to make the proper delay I needed).

Here's a video tour of 2b2t for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIlcLPJqvvA

Just watched that and came away a bit confused. I'm not a minecraft player, but I understand what it is and have seen videos of people playing. I guess my question is, in the case of this, did someone go around a build that whole world just to mess with players or is it the work of a lot of different people who want to make a difficult world?

I suppose I just don't get what they are going for.

The latter. The admin takes a completely hands-off approach to running the server (I'm not even sure if he plays on it). So the condition of the spawn is purely because many people over the years thought it would be funny to make it as inhospitable as possible.

I guess it's an acquired taste, but there's something fun about trying to survive in such a hostile world. How many game servers have 200+ page comics written about them? http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/

We should carve out a small section of land, right at the spawn. One chunk, say. Fill it with useful things like farms, farm animals, resources. Then, guard it 24/7 by using a rotating staff system. See how long we can keep it defended!

It would take a single smart person to undo hours of work. Even if you guard it really well, there's only so much you can do in minecraft.

Someone can approach you from 200m high building a 1m-wide bridge from outside your radar and just drop lava (or active TNT) on you. In minecraft, you need a pretty high defender:griefer ratio to keep things intact.

Oh, people have tried. It never lasts.

http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/comics/104/

EDIT: Looks like I've gotten sucked in again. Feel free to message me if you want to try.

I guess it grows naturally: the first players build a huge building near spawn, some griefer destroys it all, the next builders build a bit further from spawn, etc.

Also the resources you need for building are further and further away from the spawn. Everybody takes some and decides to build just a little further away.

That video also shows the prime failure in having an anarchy server: It's so easy to cheat. The guy has a radar and can spot any player before they could spot him.

Then there's loads of other plugins that people use to find ore, hidden buildings, track players, speedboost, fly even on servers that disallow it, etc... etc...

I wanted to like Minecraft. The hilariously insecure gameplay is what breaks it. It's not a game of survival, it's a game of trolls who can exploit the most.

Yeah, the "game" part of Minecraft is shallow enough as it is, and it only gets shallower when you cheat.

On the other hand, when almost everyone is using those cheats, it levels the playing field a bit.

Seeing things like this, and others in the thread, honestly depresses me. I've wasted months of my life building in Minecraft, huge structures that I can do nothing but look at, alone. Months where I lost social interaction and self maintenance. Nothing good ever comes of these worlds, and they are self destructive to their creators.

Minecraft, Reddit, Imgur, Facebook, all things you will eventually have to block from your life if you want to achieve anything real. Don't let it consume you. The only winning move is not to play.

Or maybe do things in moderation? A little HN is great, a little Facebook is great, unwinding during lunch on Reddit is great for a laugh... but if you let things consume your life it's like watching TV for days on end.

Hi, you make you a good point but it feels like most things are designed to keep you coming back, so it makes it hard.

Minecraft is tricky because it gives that long-term feeling of accomplishment (the same you get by creating a real-world artwork, or developing a software project), but it's not immediately obvious to some how untransferrable that time investment is to any real value or skills.

I know this sounds harsh, but you seem to lack self control which I can emphatize with. After all, I've spent nights where "one more thing" has kept me up till early in the morning.

I don't have the end all be all advice on the topic, but you might just need some people looking out for you. If you choose to play, play on a small server where you know people, and people know that you are struggling to pace yourself. If you're feeling guilty about playing, don't. Building huge structures you aren't proud of doesn't do you any good. If you're playing compulsively, but you're not enjoying it, it might help to shut it out entirely. Deinstall your client, give your account to a friend, block imgur, reddit and facebook, and forget they ever existed.

Sometimes that doesn't solve your problem though, it only creates a void in your life. Empty time is horrid, and we try to fill it up no matter what. Unless you make a conscious effort to fill that void with things you do enjoy, you'll just end up filling it with whatever is convenient. If you don't know what those things are, you might need to do some testing and sampling. Maybe it's contemporary dance or building miniature railways or helping people learn to code that you'll stumble across and start to really enjoy.

Also, if you, in the process of doing that, stumble across something you absolutely love, but tell yourself that it isn't productive or important, you've got problems with who you think you should be. You might be telling yourself you'll be happy if you're the guy in the 10,000$ suit sitting in his blacked out tesla, whilst you just stumbled over the fact you might be happier if you're the guy that's sitting in his basement watching tiny trains go on laps.

If you think that that will make your parents or friends or whoever you care about think of you less, what business do they have of deciding what makes you happy? They shouldn't have a stake in whether you're gay or straight, who you fall in love with, whether you want children or not, and certainly not in whether you get to lead a fulfilled life or not.

Anyways, I'm just drawing this from similar struggles I've been having, and maybe some of these points will help you crack out of whatever problem you're having. Honestly, I can't either say that I have implemented everything I'm preaching here, but it seems like a step in the right direction for me.

If nothing else I found this helpful so thanks for typing it

Another technique is to make empty time less horrid, which in turn reduces the need to immediately fill it, which in turn allows you to choose better activities instead of scrambling for what is the quickest and easiest distraction.

Empty time doesn't have to be a void in your life. If you can't sit alone and do nothing for an hour without a lot of anguish, that indicates some internal turmoil. Eliminating the feeling of emptiness during empty time is freeing, because in my experience it lowers the bar for your own contentment. While living, instead of worrying about meeting your needs for present gratification AND productivity of an action, you usually only have to think about the second, because you know you'll be fine, and even happy, regardless of the "fun" of the action you choose, as long as the action seems rewarding in the long run.

This is easier said than done, but I've found some success in being content in the present through reading up on both mindfulness practices and Stoicism. A lot of people have found success through mindfulness meditation specifically (so check that out), but I've found it more useful for me to mindfully and meditatively carry out mundane tasks, such as dishes, instead of sitting meditation.

I'm certainly plagued by some internal turmoil, and I feel free to admit that. I'm at an uncertain period in my life, and I do not know whether I will be sucessful at achieving any of my goals. My past record has been littered by public failures, and successes noone close to me wants to recognize.

I've failed at getting 3 businesses started, my academic track record is meager at best, and whilst I consider myself intelligent, I do not know whether I'll be able to perform as expected in college, which is what I'm looking at right now. I have trouble moderating myself, and even though I've spent the last couple of years working on my skillset, I'm not sure whether that will cut it for what I want to do in life.

I'm struggling with the amount of social expectations that I'm being handed. For one I have friends who expect me to do great things, and they are on track to do great things. I also expect myself to do great things. They're all in college now, I'm not. One kid I helped with bio homework back when I was in 9th grade and he was in 11th grade now studies Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. There's another former classmate at NYU who I'm helping with physics and programming problems, and he looks up to me as an example. Can't say that about myself.

But then, if you look at the way I've been performing, you'd expect me to fail in a spectacular manner. C student from the get go, then after changing schools oscialating wildly from getting straight As and straight Fs. Only student in the entire school that managed to get on academic probation with a GPA of 3.19. Then I got kicked out of that school as well. I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud of the school I managed to graduate from either.

Then college right now. I'm not sure which school I'll even get into. Ideally, I'll get into a respectable school abroad, perform well, finally get to use the skills I've been honing for years, make some money, transfer to one of the schools I was told I should be in, that I could be in if my life wasn't such a mess. That's a long shot though.

Then there's the less than rosy but equally possible probability that I'll ascend astronomically for the first semester and crash and burn within semester 2. Get kicked out second year, no job, no degree. My health in the gutter because I overworked myself and couldn't quite cope with the workload.

It's quite the conflicting, uncertain situation to be in, and I don't think I'll be any less anxious about it before I figure out how well each of the bridges I've got to cross hold up. They look shoddy, but you never know. I don't think meditation will help me with that.

Something that can really help with this is getting out of the mindset of identifying yourself by your achievements. You talked about stoicism and being in the present, but it sounds like you're very preoccupied and anxious over how others will percieve your potential success/failure.

One of the aspects of experiencing the present moment is cutting away that ego - realising that ego isn't actually part of conscioussness, it's just something you're choosing to cling onto and identify with.

That doesn't mean that you can't pursue goals and achievement - just that you're not tying them to your happiness. To quote Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle (which you may want to consider reading):

"Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? // It matters to you as long as you haven't realised your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way round, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to 'gain the world and lose your soul'. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to 'fail' sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realise that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose."

Hello, I logged in just for this comment.

I really must thank you for your comment, it has made me come to the realisation with what I have been doing with my lives.

I'm saying this out of sincerity, that your comment has had the most profound effect ive had in the last couple of years of reading comments.

It's been the final kick in the backside, so to speak. I just blocked reddit on my hosts file.

Also your comment is now my wallpaper. Really I must thank you again, for if I never saw this who knows how deep I'd fall.

imagine all the sand castles gone. the hugeness of our architectural history erased and will be erased by time - you are just human - imagine all the great waves someone catches but no one is on the beach to see and the other surfers are to busy - you would be alone then. it is true that the hours are gone but what do you make of your now? we are all alone with our accomplishments we are together when we hope. Thanks for your hope

Depends on what you like, I guess. Some people find playing video games worthless why others would rather do this than innovate/participate in OSS/etc. It's all about how you perceive it.

I'll have to disagree here. When I was on the West Coast, I kept in touch with a lot of my friends on the East Coast by building things together on my Minecraft server.

The goal is to turn your passion for something like that into something productive.

Reddit? A redditor thought image sharing could be better and built imgur.

Minecraft? Well, I'm still only a volunteer but I'm part of the www.shotbow.net team and we make some really awesome games essentially treating Minecraft like an engine - no mods needed!

Minecraft is a very capable multi-player game. Why not open up and share? I've spent a lot of time building in Minecraft alone, but also more time building with others.

No regrets. It's been fun, though like anything, all about balance.

Minecraft is like one of those desktop zen gardens to me. When I have some downtime (waiting for a patch to install) I can open it up and build my world. Yeah its not saving the world, but not everything can be.

Way awesome! It's really amazing what people can build in Minecraft even in a short period of time, let alone a long stretch.

Here's a map from a server I play on. This map represents only 6 months or work (we reset our map every 3-6 months) and was done 100% in survival mode: http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/61/64/-42/-2/0/0

Where on earth did you get so much iron?! That's what the spaceship is made of, right?

EDIT: Silver -> Iron

The spaceship is made of iron and is the only thing on the map that wasn't player-built. The spaceship was pre-made by the server staff to serve as the spawn point. However, iron is extremely abundant because we figured out how to exploit villager spawning mechanics to construct enormous machines that generate free iron by slaying and regenerating iron golems. A bunch of these machines can be seen all over the map; here's a notable example: http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/-1188/64/148/-2/0/0

Oh my mistake, I meant iron! Very cool technique, thanks for sharing.

If you're intrested in vanilla minecraft resource farming, i'd reccomend giving a couple of these videos a look, i've built a number of those back when i was still playing vanilla.

  Mumbo Jumbo 
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZYgfmLCrek&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] High Efficiency Sheep Farm
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zWbXLa4LKA&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Wither Powered Furnace Array
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-dzsMtVYk&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Mega Cactus Farm
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xzbx7vFqqE&list=UUhFur_NwVSbUozOcF_F2kMg] Supersmelter 
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gb4VUT_HLU] Automatic Tree Farm
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wx766O4tKQ] Simple Blaze Farm

  Xisumavoid 
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR6oATNOFSw] Wither Nether Farm 
  Redstone Jazz
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPwPpaPKFnc] Gold Farm
  Tango Tek 
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw] Iron Titan Compact Iron Farm]
  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvYKtL822E] Automated potion brewing.

Even if you don't play minecraft, some of those builds are either awe inspiring in complexity or size.

Is this for download somewhere?

Yup! All of our old maps can be downloaded here: http://mcp-dl.com/

what mods are running on this server?

When I look at the edges of the map, I see lots of unusual deposits -- big blocks of glowstone, and diamond much too high up for a straight vanilla server.

It is amazing that you chose to post this carto as it is the one I spent the most time on. Check out http://nerd.nu/maps/pve11/#/1610/64/-699/-1/0/0

If I remember correctly I built that floating island to hide my underwater base from the carto. I should load it up and wander around. Which rev is it?

Server worlds can get impressive pretty quickly. One of my wallpapers is this render from one of the old reddit server worlds: http://i5.minus.com/im5gOe.jpg

On the other hand, my single player world which is about 4 years old isn't nearly as impressive.

wow, I had no idea they got that impressive.

I migrated my single player world (dating back to Beta 1.8) to a server so some of my coworkers at the time could play too. It's not really huge, but I am strangely emotionally attached to it. My server was down for a few months (and I wasn't playing at the time), but I recently brought it back online. Minecraft seems like one of those games that I'll play forever, like Super Mario Bros.

http://minecraft.cgore.com

The ring roads are the most impressive part, IMO.

Between material-gathering, going to the work site, clearing the path ahead (largely avoided here by elevation, but still) and actually laying down the road one... block... at... a... time... roads are very slow to build in Minecraft. They take a large amount of investment before they start to pay off, unlike most buildings, and they can't really be fully appreciated except from map views like this site, so they're kind of low-reward for the people doing the work, too.

I only run a vanilla server, so I don't know how mods might affect that. Were these tool-assisted in some way? I just can't wrap my head around that time involved if not.

They were initially built by WE, then manually filled in over time. It's taken quite a while and you can still find some with holes.

Relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649733

I suspect that, at the very least, some of the building was done in creative mode (given the diamond block railways, and some other stuff I see.)

Stuff like this is pretty fascinating. I've only really played Minecraft singleplayer and intermittently. I almost always end up starting a new world with each update, too, since it bugs me not having the new blocks/structures/etc in already created chunks. I've never even made it as far as doing the enderdragon, usually getting caught up building some ill-advised structure or clearing some endless cave network. I wish the devs would slow down with the new features, the complexity is kind of out of control at this point.

That's the best part about minecraft:

"the complexity is kind of out of control at this point"

Because on the surface most people who don't already own the game probably didn't buy it because they thought the game looked stupid and "simple". Haha, what a pleasant surprise Minecraft is.

Here is a world I've been running for 2.5 years. Spawn has been moved several times, so the world spans tens of thousands of blocks. If you look carefully you can find large settlements from continent to continent, http://treestop.com:8123

Very impressive. How many days in total have been spent playing this world?

Also, some gems in there[1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/RFDD5lZ.png

I wonder which was first, the pyramid or the TIE. So as to find what went on the head of the builder "look, he made a pyramid... let's build a huge TIE Fighter!"

I think the pyramid was there first. It was made by a user known as ZeroYams. I believe I have a video on Youtube of the day he made it. I'll update this comment with the link.

EDIT: Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdQOGeHyfA&list=UUzs2AXsSaK...

To anybody reading the above two comments thinking "TIE Fighter? That sounds cool, I want to see that." The TIE Fighter is south east of the giant penis rocket.

That's my mistake. I always take a left after the giant penis rocket. Thanks!

Wow, the performance of this website is really good. How is this so fast?

They're just rendered PNG tiles in a Javascript slippy map library.

EDIT: Just checked, it's leaflet (http://leafletjs.com/)

Thanks! Can't take credit, though. My Minecraft server, using the Dynmap plugin you see, is hosted at Nuclear Fallout :)

Shameless referral link: https://www.nfoservers.com/order.php?referrer=hellblademobs

^_^

I have a really hard time believing you built those concentric pathways by hand and not through some level editor...

Very nice world otherwise.

They were built using Worldedit. The precision of WE is pretty bad, though, so they had holes from where WE rounded the numbers. I've been traveling along the roads over the past few years, filling them in by hand. It's quite meditative, to be honest :)

Another large server map that's from a 1+ year old map that's 12000 blocks wide. Players' towns are marked:

http://imdeity.com/map/

I know almost nothing about mine-craft. How many people played in that arena? I ask because it would be kind of sad if one person did all of that. However, it says something pretty cool about humanity if it was constructed by random people passing through, which is that people will naturally work together. In other words, no centralized set of rules are required in order for people to collaborate together to build a (virtual) city.

I'm not sure which arena you're speaking about, but a few of our arenas were very popular when we were running the Spleef plugin, which automated restarting of rounds after the last player stood, etc.

The best part about having so many players build over a period of several years is discovering little things they built that no one saw. Signs with personal notes. Graves for players who never came back or dogs that died. This kind of thing.

I think by 'arena' he meant the whole world.

Wanna play minecraft now. I have a save that is one i continually work on. Nothing super impressive, still dont have the enchanting table surrounded by book shelves. But it's been a fun project slowly growing.

The server has enormous lag because of this post. I managed to find a castle full of melons just a minute before I would have starved. I guess I'm lucky.

The map is toast. I got a notification from the server host that it was consuming hundreds of megabits per second so it was taken down :S

The server itself is back up and running though!

As someone who's never played minecraft, my first response is "I wonder if I can build Jurassic Park in this thing?"

It's not Minecraft, but i have seen some strange things in Trove club worlds.

Neat bit of trivia: Notch's wife, ez, was kind enough to visit once and leave a sign. "ez was here" :)

Well, come on, at least link to it!

VERY hard to see from the map, but you can.

http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123/?worldname=playground&map...

See the area in the centre with the red and yellow flowers? In behind the glowstone is the sign. You can catch the edge of it.

*ex-wife. They separated in 2012.

I've always suspected this was just an easy way for her to get out of the limelight, to be able to get away from the torrent of tweets, emails, threats, whatever else being in the public eye does. I have no inside information, of course. Just a thought.

There are some very impressive things created in Minecraft. This one of them: Westeros (Game of Thrones) built in Minecraft. Simply amazing, I bought the game just to check it out:

http://www.westeroscraft.com/

This could be an extreme version of "Where's Wally".

I never knew it wasn't called Where's Waldo originally. I agree, this would be an intense WW search. I wonder if he's already in there hiding?

A black page? The website doesn't seem to work in Firefox.

Works for me in Firefox. (33.0 on amd64 Linux)

Try http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123/?worldname=playground

I got in Firefox:

This address is restricted

This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other than Web browsing. Firefox has canceled the request for your protection.

It wouldn't even try to connect until I set network.security.ports.banned.override to "8123" in about:config. But now that I've set it, it seems that the website is unresponsive (overloaded?) anyway.

Another bit of trivia: I set the map to do a full render a day or so ago and it's still going. The map is at 1657200 tiles and counting.

The link is not working for me :(

I think my server host blocked port 8123 after this hit the front page :)

My question:

How many hours/day did you sit with Minecraft? (or whoever has made this)

Thousands. Most of my work, though, as admin, was building a great griefer-proof system, promoting people, working with newbs, editing configs, updating when new Bukkit + plugins came out, etc.

We've had thousands of players over the years. It's crazy because some of the people who were kids when they joined are now quite grown up. I'm proud to have run a server so long and (hopefully) been a positive memory in so many kids' lives.

Doesn't anyone on HN play feed the beast modded minecraft?

Yep - been playing FtB for several years now. In fact, it was an HN comment that tipped me off to FtB originally.

I do. Our server is kinda looking for new people actually. We're running modified monster with some additional tweaks to difficulty, such as Hunger Overhaul, Spice of Life, Zombie Awareness and Special Mobs.

I wonder wouldn't such map invite trolls and griefers that would just come to destroy everything in sight?

Most large servers have plugins that allow them to rollback specific sections of the map by an hour or a day to undo damage from griefers, and to log who made changes to blocks so that the griefers can be banned.

This is however a problem for 1.8 as the server API most of them were using, Bukkit, has disappeared in the wake of some drama that occurred because it was licensed as GPL invalidly (it distributes Mojangs All Rights Reserved code bundled with itself), and a former contributer unhappy with the fact that Mojang now owns the project DMCAed it.

Yeah, we run LogBlock and McBans, and have a pretty solid newbie filter that turns away all but the most dedicated of griefers.

I can't even imagine how much penises they had build in this time

What a waste of time.

I'd like to disagree with that because Minecraft ends up turning into a different experience once you're working at that scale.

Similar to EVE, which goes from spaceship simulator to corporate management simulator depending on how deep you get into it, Minecraft turns from house building simulator into project management simulation if you're building things of such size. There's a planning stage, there's a stage in which you aquire resources, people working on the project together need to be coordinated, the area needs to be prepared, and the actual building has to take place. Regarding large projects, this might also require preliminary buildings, such as stone generators, xp farms to improve tooling, complex smelting setups to create glass or lumber farms.

Modded minecraft will bring even more complexity to the table, from automated mining rigs, power production, ore processing, large scale agricultural work and making a disjoint set of technologies from different mods do exactly what you want them to do.

The project I'm working on on our server right now is building a world spanning road network (we have a 30km x 10km world) with safehouses every 500m and access points every 100m. After researching options and testing several designs, i arrived at a design that is both feasible and secure. One of the things I worked on before that is full automation of food production where I took this [http://imgur.com/Np6Ftaj] and converted it into a factory. Or building a computer controlled pebble bed reactor.

But since "that's pretty neat" isn't an argument, my experience managing personal projects outside of the game has also broadened considerably. It's taught me to vigorously test sub components, track figures and validate them, to detail the entire process before jumping into it, and a whole range of other useful planning skills.

I think for something that calls itself a game, that's a lot of use I'm getting out of it.

Safehouses every 500 meters seems like such a small scale...why did you choose that number and not something more distant? I'd think 800 meters would be a better distance.

I'm playing on a server with additional difficulty settings, which means you most likely want a bed closeby if any one player gets stuck somewhere at night (we have monsters form into mobs and being attracted to light sources). 1km seemed too distant, and 500m divides evenly. Also, preliminary testing has determined that running 1km on the road will deplete your hunger (I'm planning to put down 70k MFR road blocks, which make you run incredibly fast), and we don't want players accidentally running too far and dying due to starvation. Also, the cost of safehouses is almost negible, 3 beds and an ender chest for food and supplies.

Thats interesting, my first guess was something along the lines of a chunk is 16x16 so your "five hundred" is actually 512 at exactly 32 chunks and you're deploying chunk loaders along the road to keep the road loaded (and maybe also farm fields or trenches full of mobs or pipelines full of liquids or the worlds biggest applied energistics network or ...) Or something like each player can ask for a 128x128 "deed to the land" along the side of the road for megaprojects and there's exactly 4 along each side of every road segment.

Our server isn't quite as dense, and people usually settle several hundred meters apart from each other. We try to keep people settled close enough for interaction but far enough away from each other so that there are no neighbourhood conflicts. Considering we have 15km^2 of worldbordered space for less than 30 people, density isn't yet an issue.

We allready have a functioning nether road system for all 4 cardinal directions, the new road is mostly designed for overworld exploration and finding a place to settle for new players. Also, since we're running ATG with Biomes of Plenty, the landscape is truly stunning in certain areas, with rich sloping mountains and d̶e̶a̶d̶l̶y beautiful valleys. Due to the dangers on the ground at night (full powersuit won't safe you baby), there's rarely much exploration going on in this stunning landscape.

Also I'm absolutely running out of big things to build, having set up a 11x11 chunks base with 60 blocks high obsidian walls, and built the majority of the nether roadways. The project afterwards would most likely be a tokamak reactor or something if i could get the thing working in creative.

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