A little while ago some friends and I had the hankering to get back into Minecraft. But vanilla Minecraft has been done over so many times that there’s nothing new to do. Solution? Find a cool mod pack and install a grand total of 223 mods.
223 mods is a lot of mods. So much that it takes between 2 and 3 minutes for the game to load and crashes are common. Nevertheless, we grabbed a server that could handle so many different mods, we created a world, and got going.
At the spawn area there was a small blight called the ‘Taint’. Now none of us knew what this did and just assumed it was an area that would hurt us if we went in it. Cue 4 days of nonstop mining and crafting and a whole lot more. During my search for a new home I stumbled across another outbreak of Taint. Being curious, I researched a little and realised what I was looking at.
Taint is more than just a painful place to be in. It is a growing symptom of evil energy, it will constantly grow outwards, perverting its surroundings and turning the land into a terrifying hellhole. Not only was this blight right at the centre of the world, constantly growing outwards, but one of us had decided to build their house right at the spawn, barely a hundred meters away from this terror.
Realizing this, something strange happened. Previously, the server was on edge, and while we did help each other a bit there was a level of distrust and isolationism. This all went out the window as soon as we learnt what we had in our backyard. We all agreed we needed to work together on this. Huge amounts of resources were put towards containing this. Tasks were given out, researching the Taint, testing various methods of containment, and attempts to hold it off from the beautiful house nearby.
My task, being the one who read up on this first, was to research magical ways of containing the Taint. Whilst I was out collecting silverwood saplings and figuring out the intricacies of thaumcrafts complex web of research, the others found out that a large stone wall could contain the Taint. Now this wasn’t a small outbreak, it had started off fairly sized and since then had constantly grown and was already covering around 2 thousand square meters. We needed to build a wall high enough that no tainted vines could crawl up it, deep enough that no tunnels could let it escape, and wide enough that it couldn’t infect nearby areas with its presence.
This was when we really came into action. We set up quarry’s to supply us with the vast amounts of stone required, we had two party’s to dig the trench then build the wall in it. Those with good equipment lent some to others to allow everyone to help. We worked together to build a big hecking wall.
In short, while this may be a bunch of people working together to stop a danger in a video game, seeing everyone working together like this made me feel something. It may be a video game, but people worked together to achieve something. It was only a day of work, but it was a day where we worked as a team in unison.
I have always known that video games can bring people together, but this has been the first time I have seen something like this occur.
Sincerely,
Toby; A big hecking wall builder
