There is something slightly indescribable about playing minecraft on a public server, but I will try nonetheless. Over the last few days I’ve been playing a new save on a modded minecraft server and going slightly out of my comfort zone by roleplaying as an adventurer and food connoisseur rather than immediately automating the shit out of every mechanical and industrial process known to block-kind. My voyages across this vast and moderately old server has been very enlightening in terms of world design. Specifically, there are everywhere the signs of passage, of players, of unknowable intent. These traces of the shaping hand of civilization stand out against the landscape like neon signs, and they are striking in their unknowableness. They could have been left a day ago or a month ago or a year ago (or in the context of an rpg setting, much much longer ago), and they could have been the accidental byproduct of travel or an intense and deliberate project. They could have been made for any reason, and there is none alive (or logged on) that I could ask to explain them. So please enjoy a collection of strange sights I have stumbled across in this minecraft server, presented in table form for your better use:
- A trail of magelights leading across the landscape in a haphazard string. There is no indication which direction they are coming from and which they are leading to.
- A perfectly healthy oak tree growing peacefully, fully submerged below thirty feet of water in an exactly circular lake.
- An abruptly exactly geometric cavern in a cave system, sheer straight walls exposing valuable but untouched ores and gems. A makeshift kitchen cheerfully roasts a stuffed chicken in the corner.
- A thin and curving line of floating ice bisects the ocean and terminates abruptly over nothing in particular. The ice refuses to melt even in the heat of summer.
- A steep staircase winds down the wall of a flooded chasm stretching hundreds of feet down into black water. A tunnel of inexplicable air surrounds the guiderope that is hammered by spikes into the rock.
- A small camp is tucked into a lee in the piled boulders, complete with a bed, a campfire, and a flat stone with scattered repair tools. A dozen whole cakes litter every spare surface in the little cavity.
- A thin spire of dirt climbs high into the sky, its tip beyond the reach of the naked eye. A rope ladder sways in the wind, seemingly dangling from the apex.
- A river tumbles out of its bed down a deep pit carved into the dirt. The floor of the pit is tiled in fine glazed ceramic tiles, now smeared with river mud. Fish swim in circles, unable to escape.
- Music plays maddeningly, bouncing along the walls of the canyon. When finally located, it is a single music player repeating one song disc, buried in a small opening behind six feet of solid rock.
- An abandoned encampment of brightly colored tents, moldering in the rain. Geysers of magma spurt haphazardly in between their orderly rows, hissing as droplets strike it.
- A thin borehole, too small to crawl through, lances through the earth at a shallow angle. It drills through stone and bedrock alike, and vanishes beyond sight into the darkness.
- A blacksmith’s anvil perched precariously on the edge of a cliff, a set of rusting tools left exposed to the elements.
- A spherical rent in the ground, in perpetual shadow of the hovering dirt held aloft a hundred feet above where it once rested. There appears to be a field of wheat growing atop the small island.
- An ancient protective golem, set to guard the area, relaxing in a bath of natural crude oil seep. It seems unmotivated to chase you rather than incapable.
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