About April of last year, I was having my first experiences with SMP. I went onto a server that apparently was just getting underway itself, Hydrocity Gaming. It seemed like I would be staying with that group indefinitely, but then real life happened and I was unable to play SMP.
With SMP again available due to moving on campus, I went to look at the place. Before I unexpectedly quit they had redesigned the spawn to have a nice hangout area and glass ceiling. It's changed since then, by a lot. I can tell they've reset the map at least once, and the immediate area outside of the spawn zone seems to be wrecked. As you move away from there it gets much nicer.
The place is now my new home server. The staff has almost completely changed but since I'm a relatively new face it's alright. I haven't come up with many plans for what I want to do there. Hopefully I can start up a new let's play series recording my events on the server. An impromptu series called Minecraft Uncut was recently spawned and has two episodes, available on my YouTube channel.
Because the server allows things like PvP, stealing, and griefing - it is an anarchy server - the prudent person will move far, far away from spawn. One person told me he had a place 75k from spawn! As I left I ran into ocean. And ocean. And ocean. So much ocean! A horrible design idea, if you ask me. There was just a splattering of islands here and there, many of the larger ones already with buildings of some sort on them. The occasional sky base, as well. Then it occurred to me, this could be my niche in the server! With that epiphany I styled myself Sea Emperor and proclaimed the endless oceans of the southeast and all its little islands would be my territory.
A few people have teamed up with me and become my "subjects." Still, I wasn't content to live on crappy little islands and devoted probably a few hours to boating around, looking for a big, uninhabited landmass. Do you know I encountered TWO mushroom biomes before finally getting a continent? I've set up a dinky little house in a plains located well over 10,000 blocks from spawn. That's where I intend to set up my imperial mansion.
Having developed a slight penchant for troublemaking in the past couple of years, I stopped by the place where people spawn when logging in or after dying. I had melon slices on hand and would randomly throw them at people who appeared. It was amusing to watch them look around for the source. I also took a swim in the water fountain, trying to see how far and high I could jump out of it.
Normally, I don't interact much with others besides chat. I should consider getting more involved with community things.
Concerning the Ultimate City: my level of free time has increased the past couple of days, but I've not been sure what else to do. I think there is a little bit more planning for me to take care of, but otherwise I think it's actually close to ready to move into the building phase. The owner of the server, probably due to its inactivity, turned off the map which would explain why nobody can log into it.
When I first opened the Ultimate City as a team project, I was just hoping for a group of people who could do the stuff that I couldn't - design buildings, make clever ideas, build multiple things at a time - but I've realized that some of the people I'm working with are pretty motivated and smart themselves. Some haven't even shown up to do anything, which is unfortunate, but there remain a couple who are interested in seeing this through. One person made a picture for the project a few days ago, and I think it's going to be the official image for it. I really dig the caption.
