Oh wow, they actually provided the full torrent. I was always hoping they would so it could be studied.
For those unfamiliar, 2B2T was a Minecraft anarchy server that had almost no restrictions. It devolved into roving gangs of people trying to kill each other, use cheats to find secret bases, etc. The trick to hiding on this server was to go as far away as possible from the center, which led to an enormous map size.
I joined with a friend several years ago to see if we could survive, and it took days just to get out of the spawn, which was completely destroyed, surrounded by massive walls, and flooded with Withers (very difficult to kill enemies).
Fascinating study and perhaps the biggest metaverse experiment that's ever happened (but definitely the most lawless one).
Microsoft just wants to avoid press of kids getting groomed or seeing adult content on Minecraft servers. Stuff like this is bad for a brand that primarily targets kids as new players and could get them into hot water with regulators.
I personally believe that they probably should add parental controls to Minecraft so parents can control what if and what kind of servers kids can join. I also believe more control will put more scrutiny on Microsoft since I haven't a lot of negative press about child safety in Minecraft especially in comparison with Roblox for example.
Where else would it start if not "you're not allowed to say this word because I don't like it"? Personally, I don't see why that word being banned gets a free pass. Would this proverbial slope start with speech at all? I can't imagine why one would accept one word being banned, then stand up to decry another being banned. What word would that be? Why is it more worthy than any other word?
Historically, it doesn't seem like much of a fallacy to say speech controls become more stringent after being introduced. Indeed, historically, one could remove the word "speech" and still be correct. The control doesn't go away in most cases until power changes hands, and even then it's often meeting the new boss, same as the old boss.
I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.
It's a case of some people making it worse for everyone. If people behaved on the server, MS wouldn't have intervened, which then wouldn't have made 2b2t cave on a what feels like a core ideal. It may only have chipped a corner of that ideal, but it still stings.
That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation. MS wasn't going to let one of the biggest and most famous servers of its most popular game be filled with swastikas. Even less so when it's so popular with kids.
In a funnier world, 2b2t would have said 'no', but I have a feeling MS would escalate, and that whatever email or whatever the admins got probably implied as much, so maybe that world wouldn't be funnier after all.
> That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation.
Agree, and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to decide what is and isn’t tolerable - even within anarchy. Forget MS, the (imo) proper response should have been the community actively choosing to deface and destroy the nazi stuff, or outright ban it from the moment it became a thing.
> I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children.
Maybe. They’ll encounter if eventually and if they are coddled too much they can’t handle it. I also think folks forget, or perhaps they were coddled, that kids already know about a lot of this stuff and when parents aren’t around say all the bad works and make very, very crude jokes. That’s what kids do. That’s what we did.
Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).
Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.
This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”
All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.
The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).
There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.
You making the rest of the world foam padded because you don't want to control what your kid can access is gross. The rest of the world didn't have a kid. You did.
That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.
Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.
That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.
Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.
its sad ppl cant run their own servers without companies interfering. Was never an issue on games like CS. sure there was a lot of toxic ones but also rly nice ones. you cant moderate human nature. hiding it does no one any good either.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this. Microsoft should not be moderating privately-run servers.
Sure, on the realms or whatever they're called or whatever servers Microsoft do operate, fair game and good idea. But if I'm running a Minecraft server on my homelab it should be my decision what behaviour is acceptable within that server.
MS really hates minecraft's inherited self hosted server model. You can actually get a global ban for wrongthink commited on your own private server. (granted, someone needs to report you but still)
Also not really a censorship issue but I'm kinda bummed that the new version will default to having the server whitelist on. Going on an ip scanning site and joining random minecraft servers accindentally left on for years is an experience like no other. Some of the longer running ones are full of signs left by other explorers, or just griefed to shit. One of the few remaining wild wests on the internet.
I have such fond memories of venturing into 2b2t in 2016! I think it was one of the last times I truly felt like a kid in my life. As if I was a part of something larger than me. Multiple factions, and people betraying each other. Secrecy abound. The scarcity of resources leading to small groups forming joining for survival. Item duplication bugs being exploited all the time! Oh, and of course, the wonderful world of hacked clients. The idea of anarchy was gripping!
It was so thrilling! I'd wait hours in a queue and then explore. The difficulty of escaping spawn in the first day, and only surviving because of an apple that a kind stranger gifted me before they died has stuck with me for 10 years (10 years?!!). Contributing to a nether highway (I believe it was +xy?), creating small bases for millions and millions of blocks all with my signature style and leaving a sign. I wonder how many of them are still standing? And I wonder if the last place I logged out of has ever been found.
Imagination does wonders if it's nudged just right :)
The freedom of loosely moderated minecraft was amazing back in the day. I traded hats all the time between being a shameless griefer or actual contributor to community projects. I remember one server far away from spawn had a growing 1:1 imperial city from Oblivion build going on, that they specifically didn't want to use any build tools for (server admins project). Because of the vertical scale and height limit of the game at the time, they had to dig down to bedrock. You'd actually be "employed" by the master builders to simply clear out stone and dump it into chests. They'd provide you with seemingly endless diamond pickaxes and shovels, along with whatever share of the cobble or ore you'd want although you'd have to haul it out to your base wherever that was. I must have worked for them for months. I wonder if they ever finished the build. They had the central tower completed though.
I don't think it was finished before the map got rotated out due to all the changes to Minecraft world gen back then, decent progress was made on the big dig though.
It should be in the ver3/terra map download; best of luck getting the world data updated for modern MC.
Wow yes, quite a blast from the past. I followed their early videos as inspiration for my griefing. I used their client with the various griefing functions baked in. I would do stuff like torch grief or completely reterraform the footprint of someones build I destroyed as if it was never there. Wallhacking too of course but that's just the table stakes. A lot of those functions were quickly patched on servers running bukkit at least.
>> Oh, and of course, the wonderful world of hacked clients. The idea of anarchy was gripping!
My multiplayer experience in Minecraft consists of spending three days building myself a fancy treehouse, then logging in the next day and finding that someone had used an exploit to turn all of it to lava.
I'm sorry you had to experience someone else using exploits where they shouldn't. 2b2t is built specifically for chaos, which is why it was so fun to use hacked clients there. It is the norm, not the exception.
I have spent thousands of hours in Minecraft, often in survival worlds that spanned years, sometimes with friends, most of the time alone. The chaos of 2b2t was and is a very different thing, but that's why it was so fun. A specific place where there are no rules. The playing field is level: everyone can hack!
Sort of related, but the most emotional experience I ever had in VR was when I loaded up the world I had been working on for several years at that point (and which started with friends in it) in a VR mod. Being there, even at a terrible 20fps, brought tears to my eyes. I was literally walking in the houses I had built, traversing the paths I had laid, digging some more in the mines I had constructed. I was the conversation from three years prior, the memories of the relationship long gone, the hopefulness and glee of those roads built while watching Dr House for the 6th time.
Man, I wish I could turn back the clock to experience it all over again.
It's not too bad if you know it can happen and more or less expect it. Nobody goes on 2b2t not expecting chaos.
Thankfully, there are other servers on which people play nice. And there's always the option to host your own with friends, which is my preferred option.
Me and a friend had a minecraft server we'd built up over the years (hosted on my free azure msdn license credits). I lost the license along with my job and we migrated to a traditional host. Within a day or two someone had port scan'd us, logged on, and trashed the shit out of our spawn/base. Like, was fine, we reloaded from backup etc.
Now we know to set the whitelist up but I see in the server logs people regularly try to get on with appropriately "wEwIlldESTroYyOOurSvr" tags etc
Although, to loosely quote a friend of mine: "I care about my memories, and those of my close ones".
Naaah, that's not really true. I care about culture and about the progress of society as a whole, but I see nothing wrong with memories built within Minecraft. I think they're as good as any.
I spent a few weeks there back in the day. After the ordeal of surviving the spawn I remember it as a haunting and melancholic experience: you kept finding decayed places, huge projects long abandoned, vandalized monuments, vague traces of simpler dwellings, hidden orchards.
I haven't played a lot of Minecraft but I'm glad that most of the little I played was there.
I did too. It had a LOT more swastikas at that time, it was a natural hangout for bored edgelords taking time off 4chan. I travelled far out and built a small underground base and then got bored. It wasn't easy to survive and get out of spawn because there was no food or soil or trees.
"The largest available Minecraft world" implies we're talking about one world. Then "totaling 15TB" implies the world is 15TB large which would be incredibly impressive and potentially involve multiple shards of minecraft servers stitched together. But 15TB of world files means there's multiple copies of the same data. Still impressive but not the same as a single 15TB world.
The only redundant part of this snapshot is the second 512k^2 snapshot of the overworld. The End and Nether snapshots are still meaningful. Excluding the 512k^2 snapshot, the size would be around 12TB.
And the actual size of the 2b2t world is likely much larger than 15TB. The data for this project is stored in a highly compressed form, much more efficient than the game's standard file format.
Microsoft can probably scale Minecraft up to support infinitely large sized worlds if they want to. Minecraft lazy loads the world in chunks so you there's no real limitation (aside from machine digit sizes)
This has already occurred. This has been since Minecraft infdev (2009, now 17 years old). Later on, a limit of 30 million blocks (30000km) in each direction from the origin was added, due to floating-point precision issues and integer overflows in world generation, which get more severe past this point. Integer overflows in world generation caused the infamous "far lands" in versions prior to Beta 1.8.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means in that case:
> a 1,024,000² (1M²) area of the Overworld (Dec 25 2025 - Apr 13 2026),
> a 512,000² (512k²) area of the Overworld (Nov 11 2024 - Dec 12 2024),
> a 256,000² (256k²) area of the End (Jan 23 2026 - Feb 15 2026),
> a 100,000² (100k²) area of the Nether (Jun 9 2025 - Jun 14 2025)
How do they both provide a single snapshot of the world while also providing a date range.
Chunks were made with different versions, but I wonder if there's any viable approach to figure out the seed & generating version of minecraft and store just deltas.
It was made on 2b2t, the seed is well known: -4172144997902289642. FitMC makes a video where he shows what the original spawn looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksS00MCQPog
2b2t has used multiple seeds over its lifetime and has long since used custom (and not released) modifications to the terrain generator. I.e. this doesn't work all too well beyond spawn.
There are tools to find seed given some obstruct information like cacti height or bedrock patterns, and it's a problem for those trying to find a private spot on anarchy servers like 2B2T.
I think "storing deltas" based on seed is largely how Minecraft saves the level already, but you could probably strip out a bunch of useless metadata to get it smaller
> I think "storing deltas" based on seed is largely how Minecraft saves the level already
This is not the case, level data is stored in full. One reason for this is that level generation is pretty slow (compare the time it takes to create a new world vs. load an existing one); another reason is that it changes between versions.
Fun fact - bedrock only saves chunks modified by the player because consoles are much more restrictive with save file size than PC. If the world gets too big, your save is effectively lost.
Java does save chunks after generation, likely due to world gen updates not seamlessly transitioning with older versions of the game and PCs not caring about save size.
My bad, I had skimmed the wiki to confirm but I did misinterpret it as only storing NBT data for user-placed blocks, regenerating the rest. It makes sense why that wouldn't work.
I am a greybeard and I always find this stuff to be fascinating. Should I invest time in it for relaxation? I think I have the diablo-ish Minecraft thing on my Xbox series X. Is it worth the time?
If you want to play normally you can just log in to 2b2t. If you wanted to play these snapshots in your own way then you'd need to decompress them and recompress them into normal Minecraft save format. You don't have to do the whole thing, (which is good considering the 15 TB figure is for the more optimally compressed version). At any point you can do this from disk. Only the chunks the Minecraft server/client have currently loaded in view distance need to go into RAM.
Also not those things, much like real life. Renounce what is said in freedom (with good reasons) when you see it. Don't shove it under the rug and regret it grows around you when you close your ears. That is what makes freedom beautiful, not the enlightened few saying what's good to talk about and what's not.
That's the difficult part. I don't think there should be "complete" freedom, or "free speech absolutionism" - there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
Oh wow, they actually provided the full torrent. I was always hoping they would so it could be studied.
For those unfamiliar, 2B2T was a Minecraft anarchy server that had almost no restrictions. It devolved into roving gangs of people trying to kill each other, use cheats to find secret bases, etc. The trick to hiding on this server was to go as far away as possible from the center, which led to an enormous map size.
I joined with a friend several years ago to see if we could survive, and it took days just to get out of the spawn, which was completely destroyed, surrounded by massive walls, and flooded with Withers (very difficult to kill enemies).
Fascinating study and perhaps the biggest metaverse experiment that's ever happened (but definitely the most lawless one).
This is what spawn looked like from above https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vrKyqEBoNvRVbCtHoG6BGX-970...
Was? It's still online no?
It's still online, but it's not anarchy anymore [0].
[0]: https://www.2b2t.org/terms/
[flagged]
Hey now, they just want a very polite, predictable world for the children! /s
Microsoft just wants to avoid press of kids getting groomed or seeing adult content on Minecraft servers. Stuff like this is bad for a brand that primarily targets kids as new players and could get them into hot water with regulators.
I personally believe that they probably should add parental controls to Minecraft so parents can control what if and what kind of servers kids can join. I also believe more control will put more scrutiny on Microsoft since I haven't a lot of negative press about child safety in Minecraft especially in comparison with Roblox for example.
>if they don't implement these rules ... the client will refuse to connect to the server's domain name or IP address
I hate, hate, HATE the Antichrist.
what? how does censoring "fuck" not make it anarchy?
"Anarchy" in Minecraft means no rules, and "you can't say bad words (or build things containing bad words)" is a rule.
That’s wild if true. The slippery slope starts somewhere, but I too am not convinced it starts there.
Where else would it start if not "you're not allowed to say this word because I don't like it"? Personally, I don't see why that word being banned gets a free pass. Would this proverbial slope start with speech at all? I can't imagine why one would accept one word being banned, then stand up to decry another being banned. What word would that be? Why is it more worthy than any other word?
Historically, it doesn't seem like much of a fallacy to say speech controls become more stringent after being introduced. Indeed, historically, one could remove the word "speech" and still be correct. The control doesn't go away in most cases until power changes hands, and even then it's often meeting the new boss, same as the old boss.
censorship and anarchy are opposing ideals
doesnt everyone on 2b2t use hacked clients anyways?
I suspect the real threat wasn't the blacklisting so much as the possibility of lawsuits that could come after
I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.
It's a case of some people making it worse for everyone. If people behaved on the server, MS wouldn't have intervened, which then wouldn't have made 2b2t cave on a what feels like a core ideal. It may only have chipped a corner of that ideal, but it still stings.
That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation. MS wasn't going to let one of the biggest and most famous servers of its most popular game be filled with swastikas. Even less so when it's so popular with kids.
In a funnier world, 2b2t would have said 'no', but I have a feeling MS would escalate, and that whatever email or whatever the admins got probably implied as much, so maybe that world wouldn't be funnier after all.
> That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation.
Agree, and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to decide what is and isn’t tolerable - even within anarchy. Forget MS, the (imo) proper response should have been the community actively choosing to deface and destroy the nazi stuff, or outright ban it from the moment it became a thing.
This topic touches on a lot of the themes in [How to Radicalize a Normie](https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g).
> I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children.
Maybe. They’ll encounter if eventually and if they are coddled too much they can’t handle it. I also think folks forget, or perhaps they were coddled, that kids already know about a lot of this stuff and when parents aren’t around say all the bad works and make very, very crude jokes. That’s what kids do. That’s what we did.
Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).
Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.
This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”
All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.
The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).
There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.
You making the rest of the world foam padded because you don't want to control what your kid can access is gross. The rest of the world didn't have a kid. You did.
That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.
Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.
Having a Nazi in a bar doesn't make it Nazi bar. It creates a tendency to become a Nazi bar, which can be counteracted by other forces.
If that logic held water, having a communist in a bar would make it a communist bar, which is ludicrous.
That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.
Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.
> I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child
That is almost certainly not true, especially for the Java version, which this server runs.
its sad ppl cant run their own servers without companies interfering. Was never an issue on games like CS. sure there was a lot of toxic ones but also rly nice ones. you cant moderate human nature. hiding it does no one any good either.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this. Microsoft should not be moderating privately-run servers.
Sure, on the realms or whatever they're called or whatever servers Microsoft do operate, fair game and good idea. But if I'm running a Minecraft server on my homelab it should be my decision what behaviour is acceptable within that server.
MS really hates minecraft's inherited self hosted server model. You can actually get a global ban for wrongthink commited on your own private server. (granted, someone needs to report you but still)
Also not really a censorship issue but I'm kinda bummed that the new version will default to having the server whitelist on. Going on an ip scanning site and joining random minecraft servers accindentally left on for years is an experience like no other. Some of the longer running ones are full of signs left by other explorers, or just griefed to shit. One of the few remaining wild wests on the internet.
Wow, how did you do the screenshot?
looks a bit like chunky, maybe? https://chunky-dev.github.io/docs/
Also, this is minecraft ? Holy shit
I have such fond memories of venturing into 2b2t in 2016! I think it was one of the last times I truly felt like a kid in my life. As if I was a part of something larger than me. Multiple factions, and people betraying each other. Secrecy abound. The scarcity of resources leading to small groups forming joining for survival. Item duplication bugs being exploited all the time! Oh, and of course, the wonderful world of hacked clients. The idea of anarchy was gripping!
It was so thrilling! I'd wait hours in a queue and then explore. The difficulty of escaping spawn in the first day, and only surviving because of an apple that a kind stranger gifted me before they died has stuck with me for 10 years (10 years?!!). Contributing to a nether highway (I believe it was +xy?), creating small bases for millions and millions of blocks all with my signature style and leaving a sign. I wonder how many of them are still standing? And I wonder if the last place I logged out of has ever been found.
Imagination does wonders if it's nudged just right :)
The freedom of loosely moderated minecraft was amazing back in the day. I traded hats all the time between being a shameless griefer or actual contributor to community projects. I remember one server far away from spawn had a growing 1:1 imperial city from Oblivion build going on, that they specifically didn't want to use any build tools for (server admins project). Because of the vertical scale and height limit of the game at the time, they had to dig down to bedrock. You'd actually be "employed" by the master builders to simply clear out stone and dump it into chests. They'd provide you with seemingly endless diamond pickaxes and shovels, along with whatever share of the cobble or ore you'd want although you'd have to haul it out to your base wherever that was. I must have worked for them for months. I wonder if they ever finished the build. They had the central tower completed though.
Your name seems familiar...
I don't think it was finished before the map got rotated out due to all the changes to Minecraft world gen back then, decent progress was made on the big dig though.
It should be in the ver3/terra map download; best of luck getting the world data updated for modern MC.
http://forum.escapecraft.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=150&t=10...
> shameless griefer
TEAM aVo DESERVES ICE CREAM!
Wow yes, quite a blast from the past. I followed their early videos as inspiration for my griefing. I used their client with the various griefing functions baked in. I would do stuff like torch grief or completely reterraform the footprint of someones build I destroyed as if it was never there. Wallhacking too of course but that's just the table stakes. A lot of those functions were quickly patched on servers running bukkit at least.
>> Oh, and of course, the wonderful world of hacked clients. The idea of anarchy was gripping!
My multiplayer experience in Minecraft consists of spending three days building myself a fancy treehouse, then logging in the next day and finding that someone had used an exploit to turn all of it to lava.
I guess some people do like chaos, but not me.
I'm sorry you had to experience someone else using exploits where they shouldn't. 2b2t is built specifically for chaos, which is why it was so fun to use hacked clients there. It is the norm, not the exception.
I have spent thousands of hours in Minecraft, often in survival worlds that spanned years, sometimes with friends, most of the time alone. The chaos of 2b2t was and is a very different thing, but that's why it was so fun. A specific place where there are no rules. The playing field is level: everyone can hack!
Sort of related, but the most emotional experience I ever had in VR was when I loaded up the world I had been working on for several years at that point (and which started with friends in it) in a VR mod. Being there, even at a terrible 20fps, brought tears to my eyes. I was literally walking in the houses I had built, traversing the paths I had laid, digging some more in the mines I had constructed. I was the conversation from three years prior, the memories of the relationship long gone, the hopefulness and glee of those roads built while watching Dr House for the 6th time.
Man, I wish I could turn back the clock to experience it all over again.
It's not too bad if you know it can happen and more or less expect it. Nobody goes on 2b2t not expecting chaos.
Thankfully, there are other servers on which people play nice. And there's always the option to host your own with friends, which is my preferred option.
Me and a friend had a minecraft server we'd built up over the years (hosted on my free azure msdn license credits). I lost the license along with my job and we migrated to a traditional host. Within a day or two someone had port scan'd us, logged on, and trashed the shit out of our spawn/base. Like, was fine, we reloaded from backup etc.
Now we know to set the whitelist up but I see in the server logs people regularly try to get on with appropriately "wEwIlldESTroYyOOurSvr" tags etc
On the flip side does this stuff add up to a greater cultural impact than playground drama nostalgia? Can I write this without being downvoted?
I think it's either the same impact or better.
Although, to loosely quote a friend of mine: "I care about my memories, and those of my close ones".
Naaah, that's not really true. I care about culture and about the progress of society as a whole, but I see nothing wrong with memories built within Minecraft. I think they're as good as any.
I spent a few weeks there back in the day. After the ordeal of surviving the spawn I remember it as a haunting and melancholic experience: you kept finding decayed places, huge projects long abandoned, vandalized monuments, vague traces of simpler dwellings, hidden orchards.
I haven't played a lot of Minecraft but I'm glad that most of the little I played was there.
I did too. It had a LOT more swastikas at that time, it was a natural hangout for bored edgelords taking time off 4chan. I travelled far out and built a small underground base and then got bored. It wasn't easy to survive and get out of spawn because there was no food or soil or trees.
If anyone wants to look at it in your browser see this link: https://2b2t.place/@934,528,0.1179,0
If you want to relive your minecraft memories without actually playing minecraft again I recommend you check out the excellent game Vintage Story.
>"The data provided is NOT a single playable Minecraft world, but rather a highly compressed collection of several world downloads of 2b2t."
I feel like HN needs to have a small model that compares post title to the article content and assigns it an accuracy score.
What is the issue? You can still download the world files, but it would be inconvenient to store them in Minecraft's unoptimal format.
"The largest available Minecraft world" implies we're talking about one world. Then "totaling 15TB" implies the world is 15TB large which would be incredibly impressive and potentially involve multiple shards of minecraft servers stitched together. But 15TB of world files means there's multiple copies of the same data. Still impressive but not the same as a single 15TB world.
The only redundant part of this snapshot is the second 512k^2 snapshot of the overworld. The End and Nether snapshots are still meaningful. Excluding the 512k^2 snapshot, the size would be around 12TB.
And the actual size of the 2b2t world is likely much larger than 15TB. The data for this project is stored in a highly compressed form, much more efficient than the game's standard file format.
Microsoft can probably scale Minecraft up to support infinitely large sized worlds if they want to. Minecraft lazy loads the world in chunks so you there's no real limitation (aside from machine digit sizes)
This has already occurred. This has been since Minecraft infdev (2009, now 17 years old). Later on, a limit of 30 million blocks (30000km) in each direction from the origin was added, due to floating-point precision issues and integer overflows in world generation, which get more severe past this point. Integer overflows in world generation caused the infamous "far lands" in versions prior to Beta 1.8.
> “far lands” For those like me that didn’t know about this. Pics at bottom.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Far_Lands
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means in that case:
> a 1,024,000² (1M²) area of the Overworld (Dec 25 2025 - Apr 13 2026), > a 512,000² (512k²) area of the Overworld (Nov 11 2024 - Dec 12 2024), > a 256,000² (256k²) area of the End (Jan 23 2026 - Feb 15 2026), > a 100,000² (100k²) area of the Nether (Jun 9 2025 - Jun 14 2025)
How do they both provide a single snapshot of the world while also providing a date range.
The accuracy score of this one would probably be a lot higher than pulling that sentence out alone would lead one to believe.
Model? For a http request and a Levenshtein distance calculation?
Levenshtein distance and semantic distance can be wildly different. Deed -> dead, for instance.
SalC1 made a great video about how this was accomplished: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDyze1YlOrI
The censorship story is lame. Someone should set up a new uncensored server.
There are plenty of other Minecraft anarchy servers out there
Chunks were made with different versions, but I wonder if there's any viable approach to figure out the seed & generating version of minecraft and store just deltas.
It was made on 2b2t, the seed is well known: -4172144997902289642. FitMC makes a video where he shows what the original spawn looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksS00MCQPog
2b2t has used multiple seeds over its lifetime and has long since used custom (and not released) modifications to the terrain generator. I.e. this doesn't work all too well beyond spawn.
There are tools to find seed given some obstruct information like cacti height or bedrock patterns, and it's a problem for those trying to find a private spot on anarchy servers like 2B2T.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36q4Ze0kFu8
https://github.com/DaMatrix/SaveSearcher
I think "storing deltas" based on seed is largely how Minecraft saves the level already, but you could probably strip out a bunch of useless metadata to get it smaller
> I think "storing deltas" based on seed is largely how Minecraft saves the level already
This is not the case, level data is stored in full. One reason for this is that level generation is pretty slow (compare the time it takes to create a new world vs. load an existing one); another reason is that it changes between versions.
Fun fact - bedrock only saves chunks modified by the player because consoles are much more restrictive with save file size than PC. If the world gets too big, your save is effectively lost.
Java does save chunks after generation, likely due to world gen updates not seamlessly transitioning with older versions of the game and PCs not caring about save size.
What does bedrock consider 'modification'? E.G. cutting trees / plants? How about mining?
I imagine 'forgetting' softly touched chunks could be a notable benefit.
My bad, I had skimmed the wiki to confirm but I did misinterpret it as only storing NBT data for user-placed blocks, regenerating the rest. It makes sense why that wouldn't work.
I am a greybeard and I always find this stuff to be fascinating. Should I invest time in it for relaxation? I think I have the diablo-ish Minecraft thing on my Xbox series X. Is it worth the time?
No
Minecraft is fun. 2b2t is not.
Try it, why not. There's even a tutorial world on the consoles if you prefer it
By all means try out Minecraft, it can be fun.
Dungeons is a spinoff, a superficial Diablo clone that just uses the Minecraft theme and name.
"players protested against these changes, this time by placing large amounts of hateful symbols and hate speech on signs all around the server"
How would one go about running this server, or a part of it? I’m guessing not all the map has to be in ram at the same time right?
If you want to play normally you can just log in to 2b2t. If you wanted to play these snapshots in your own way then you'd need to decompress them and recompress them into normal Minecraft save format. You don't have to do the whole thing, (which is good considering the 15 TB figure is for the more optimally compressed version). At any point you can do this from disk. Only the chunks the Minecraft server/client have currently loaded in view distance need to go into RAM.
Nice history video of 2b2t server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3eTxoWSo7c
Three hours…
Also the most expensive Minecraft world :D
> Complete freedom
> hateful symbols, hate speech
What a despicable freedom...
Also not those things, much like real life. Renounce what is said in freedom (with good reasons) when you see it. Don't shove it under the rug and regret it grows around you when you close your ears. That is what makes freedom beautiful, not the enlightened few saying what's good to talk about and what's not.
That's the difficult part. I don't think there should be "complete" freedom, or "free speech absolutionism" - there should be no tolerance for intolerance.
Opposing voices / opinions by all means.
Intollerance is an absolute...you cannot include any part of it without the whole....wishful thinking of illogical utopianism is all that leads to