(courtesy of CivcraftDefenseFund)
I wasn’t happy with how things were turning out, but how could I change the course of the raging river of the HCF? Every day I dreaded logging in, but couldn’t stop myself anyway — one day I’d see the town’s center portal covered in a huge cube of cobblestone (produced by HCF agents dropping water and lava buckets repeatedly), and the next day the cobblestone would be gone, cleared by the ever-industrious citizens of Augusta.
Events continued in that general manner until one morning, I logged in out of sight of my home — I’d logged out the previous night after retrieving a large amount of items for a player who had accidentally fallen off their roof and died (thereby scattering an inventory load of wood across the lawn in front of their house). Whether that was good luck or bad, I don’t know, but when I walked towards my home (now a striking, well-designed tower), I saw nothing in its place but lava and cobblestone. Those bastards had targeted my home now, and I had lost everything (or so I thought).
Luckily, a few days before, I had placed a snitch (another serverside modification; a block which logs any actions which occur nearby) hidden inside a wall, and the lava had flowed in the wrong direction – it was safe. Still in shock, I climbed a tower of dirt to the snitch, and read the logs. To my horror, there were pages full of entries such as “Username: Placed – Lava Bucket”, and even then, I knew that I wouldn’t be rebuilding.
As I read the logs from the snitch, a player in a full set of enchanted diamond armor decided to stroll by, and quickly noticed me standing in the ruins of my own home. Without any warning, the diamond-armoured player quickly pearled me, and before I knew it, I was in the End for the very first time. Needless to say, I was pissed — and, as I later learned, I had been pearled by the very leader of the HCF himself, a nasty character known as Gordge, who just happened to be patrolling my part of town when I logged in.
Going to the End for the first time was an… interesting experience. At first bearings, it didn’t look good to me – a dark dimension filled with roaming criminals and innocents alike, milling about with nothing much to do. There were trees, though, brought in via the two End Portals on the overworld, and there appeared to be a fairly inexhaustible source of lava, going from the rampant lava griefing.
I walked around for a bit, then, to my surprise, a player (who I didn’t know) contacted me through the private messaging system. He offered a safe haven for me and anyone who might have been pearled with me, at a place called Fort Marienberg. I followed his instructions, and soon found myself on a very long bridge leading away from the floating mainland, and, after a short walk, I was confronted with the towering fortifications of Fort Marienberg, the home of the End’s resistance forces.
There, I met with the player who had contacted me: apparently I’d been vouched for by another resident of Mount Augusta, and I’d been deemed trustworthy enough to enter the base. He showed me around, and I noted that they had set up something that almost felt like… home. The Fort was fully self-sustaining, with a large farm and cobblestone generator, and some of its citizens were bedecked from head to toe in shining iron armor. We all, at the very least, had rudimentary weapons to protect ourselves from the plebeian masses huddled only a couple of thousand of blocks away on the mainland, accessible via a dark bridge.
(Courtesy of CivcraftDefenseFund)
Despite its obvious power advantage, the base was still vulnerable to griefing, and many times I’d log on to find our crops destroyed and random chunks taken out of the walls. We persevered, however, and one day we began to hear whispers of a huge raid being undertaken on one of the HCF vaults by a coalition of the most powerful factions on Civcraft — including the Ancaps, the most wealthy players on the server. I, personally, doubted them — there had been rumours of similar happenings before, and they had never come to fruition. Who was to say that they would succeed this time when every other attempt had failed?
