Minecraft: My Journey Through the Great War of Civcraft

To my happy surprise, I was completely wrong. The day after hearing about the vault raid, I logged on and, instead of being greeted with Fort Marienburg, I burned alive in lava. A good start, to be sure. When I respawned, I was inside the chest room of my destroyed house, which miraculously hadn’t been touched at all (being made of cobblestone instead of wood). My biggest challenge was getting out of the room, and, eventually, I was able to block off the lava and make my way out.

When I stepped out, it was to the largest sack of Mount Augusta yet. The farms had been wiped out, and there were huge mountains of cobblestone covering the center of the city, effectively prohibiting access to the Nether portal and the player-run shops dotted around it. It was almost heartbreaking to behold the devastation which covered the city, the countless man-hours which had been nullified in one fell swoop, and from that moment forth, I knew that I wouldn’t rest until I’d made a concrete contribution to the underground resistance.

(courtesy of LouisIndustries)

As I stumbled around, not quite knowing what to do, I was hailed by one of my neighbours, a member of the Communist Party of Mount Augusta (the CPMA). He urged me to follow him, to build a base far, far away… and I agreed, because there was nothing left for me in Mount Augusta except ashes and memories. After a few hours’ scouting and sailing, we discovered a small island a great distance from civilization, hidden deep in the map’s northeast quadrant. We dug downwards, made a small home base, and returned to Mount Augusta to transport his (and my) valuables to the island, which we dubbed New Pyongyang for the communist principles which we’d operate our civilization on. Soon after, we were joined by some other members of the CPMA, and our little family was created, out in the middle of nowhere.

Fast forward a week, and my comrades and I had developed the grandest of plans: instead of living in a hovel in the dirt, we would dig out a mighty cavern beneath the island, to serve as a glorious enclave for the resistance. The idea was ambitious, and the execution took longer than we expected, but after digging out nearly 300,000 blocks’ worth of space underground, and drafting a constitution, we adopted a juche policy (following in the footsteps of our city’s namesake) and attempted to seclude ourselves from the outside world, with its ongoing conflicts and messy requirements of human/HCF interaction. In New Pyongyang, we were utterly safe — we followed a strong policy of security through obscurity, and it worked extremely well, until it didn’t.

Here’s the point where I say “it wasn’t much, but it was home” — but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t much. New Pyongyang was a grand and almost entirely self-sufficient city. The saddest thing is that our exclusionist policies precluded our grand constructions from being seen by the masses, especially those who would appreciate the beautiful architecture that was exhibited in both its towering buildings and displays of public art (including a statue of Geckolubber, our Dear Leader).

Note that I’m using “was” instead of “is”. We worked diligently towards finishing construction for over a month, and even accrued quite a bit of wealth — hell, we could have even hired a hitman to take care of anyone who stumbled across us. Our paranoia had almost no limits at that stage, and I suppose it’s ironic, after all our hard work, the weeks of planning and running and hiding and deception, that our secret society was taken down from the inside by one of the very people who founded it. In fact, it was the same player with whom I originally undertook the scouting mission which resulted in the founding of New Pyongyang. We didn’t know that at the time, though — he attacked the city with an alt account, and managed to access our vault. With this in mind, we spent the next week or so running around like headless chickens, endlessly repeating the same theories to ourselves, wondering who the attacker was.

We uncovered the truth eventually, though, and by that time, New Pyongyang had been evacuated and then abandoned, with only a few signs left in front of Dear Leader’s palace to explain the history of our first home for any who might wander upon it.

After that, my time on the server was effectively over. I didn’t log on much to talk to my comrades, since I’d just flown to a time zone sixteen hours away, and I was discouraged by the fact that a couple of months’ work had gone down the drain due to the actions of a filthy traitor.

Civcraft pulls you back, though, and I was about to log in again when I read a post on the subreddit that, quite literally, made my jaw drop. Something awful had happened to the server — a HCF-affiliated user had volunteered server space for backups (something ttk2 needed) and had breached his trust by leaking the entire backup of the server, including the Civcraft map and source code of the custom in-house plugins. It was a catastrophe of the highest order, and every other HCF player (indeed, even the management of the Hardcore Factions network) immediately denounced his actions — but it was too late. The damage had been done, and over a year’s worth of work by hundreds of users had been undone in the space of minutes.

In spite of the huge damage that this breach wreaked on the server, some players are looking on the bright side — the breach has made a server map reset mandatory, which is something that many have called for in the past, and the map reset will necessitate the beginning of a whole new world of Civcraft: new players, new factions, new cities, new drama. The new map is scheduled to start on Sunday, May 19th, and I plan to be there to watch more stories unfold.

It’s going to be awesome.

(Courtesy of JakacBatko)