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.
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 because Microsoft approached 2b2t, and said if they don't implement these rules, they will be blacklisted.
Blacklisting is a penalty normally given to pay-to-win or gambling servers, where the client will refuse to connect to the server's domain name or IP address. In this case, Microslop used it to force a server to censor the word "fuck", because Microslop are political extremists.
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.
>> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Wow, how did you do the screenshot?
Was? It's still online no?
It's still online, but it's not anarchy anymore [0].
[0]: https://www.2b2t.org/terms/
This is because Microsoft approached 2b2t, and said if they don't implement these rules, they will be blacklisted.
Blacklisting is a penalty normally given to pay-to-win or gambling servers, where the client will refuse to connect to the server's domain name or IP address. In this case, Microslop used it to force a server to censor the word "fuck", because Microslop are political extremists.
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!
>> 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.
>"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.
The accuracy score of this one would probably be a lot higher than pulling that sentence out alone would lead one to believe.
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.
The censorship story is lame. Someone should set up a new uncensored server.
SalC1 made a great video about how this was accomplished: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDyze1YlOrI
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.
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
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.
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.
Nice history video of 2b2t server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3eTxoWSo7c
"players protested against these changes, this time by placing large amounts of hateful symbols and hate speech on signs all around the server"