Oldbat
Posted by brilokuloj on Jul 7, 2024
After a month or so of playing World3, I was ready to try out multiplayer with my girlfriend for the first time. This is the nameless Minecraft server I would later retroactively name “Oldbat”, most recognizable for the snowy taiga biome.
By the way, my “at-the-time girlfriend” is now my wife Paula, and she was pretty pissed that I referred to her as that in the last article, since I guess that made her sound like an ex-girlfriend. I originally had something sappier written out and trimmed it for brevity. I’m sorry, women.
If the women are willing to forgive me, keep on reading for a detailed cross-section of a Minecraft world from March 2011.
But first, some history
The first time I ever played multiplayer Minecraft, it was with a high school friend who asked me if I’d be willing to hunt for diamonds with him. He taught me how to set up Hamachi (a well-known VPN at the time), a devastatingly complicated ordeal for even me, and I signed onto quite possibly the laggiest home-hosted server ever known to mankind.
It was me, my girlfriend, my server-hosting friend, and a couple other people I had never spoken to before. We spawned in a taiga biome remarkably similar to the one I am about to show you, and the host lead me to a small hut he had built on top of a hill. Inside that hut was a ladder that went all the way down into an enormous cave at lava level. He handed us pickaxes and we got to work.
The whole thing was, well, boring. I didn’t get to make a house, and I never even got to play with him again, maybe because he recognized I didn’t have much fun. But that didn’t matter in the long run, because it had shown me the world of multiplayer Minecraft. I had been changed.
My house
You might be confused as to what the column of water is doing there. Well, that’s my boat elevator. Minecraft boats have always been hilariously broken, but in Beta 1.2, boats could actually rise up downward-falling water. This got fixed in Beta 1.6, but I had already moved on to another map by then.
I also had… this water slide I could go down really fast in my boat. Cool, right? Yeah.
Beta 1.2 was Hatsune Miku’s greatest gift to me, for one pivotal reason: CAKES. As you may have guessed from the contents of this blog, I like food; naturally, as soon as I had the option to place food in my little toy world, I immediately cheated myself a stack of cakes.
I then put them all outside our house. Just to look at them.
It was an unspoken agreement that we would not eat these cakes, because they were just for looking at. Indeed, to this day, the cakes remain untouched.
As a Minnesotan beginning to feel the pressures of climate change, Minecraft’s snowy biome was oddly comforting to me – so much so that at the top of my house, I built a glass dome that I would occasionally peer outside.
A couple paces away, within the very same mountain I lived in, we once cheated a bunch of TNT into the world just to see what it would look like to blow it up until it was hollow. Here’s what it looked like: pretty bad!
The doghouse
It felt like a massive deal when wolves were added to Minecraft. Prior, you had no pets to speak of, and all animals were farmed and slaughtered en masse.
The Yogscast video covering the wolves update was one of the first “MCYT” videos I had ever watched. I found the video itself mildly funny-or-annoying I-don’t-remember, but the thought of a pet Minecraft dog had its iron grip on my mind. My family had a dog in real life at this time, a fluffy grey sheltie, and the Minecraft wolf almost looked like him, if you were stupid. Which I was.
Not everyone was as excited about this update; in fact, the addition was what prompted the creation of Better Than Wolves, one of Minecraft’s very first serious overhaul mods. It proposed to be an alternate timeline for Minecraft’s development, one more focused on serious survival instead of silly immersion-breaking “cute” updates. I did not play it myself, but I watched its development with curiosity, and it unquestionably paved the way for me becoming emotionally invested in Minecraft modding in the future.
Anyway, I wish I remember anything about this dog. I don’t know where I found him, or why he was so far away from my house. This would still be a few years before name tags would be added, so I don’t even remember if I ever named him – if I had, I probably would have written it on a sign near the door, right?
A known Minecraft trope is that the last time you play on a save file is the last time you will ever interact with your wolf. Somehow, it continues to exist in limbo, sitting and wondering where you went. I hate this kind of mental self-harm and I refuse to believe in inanimate souls being “trapped” in these kinds of situations, but even if I ascribed to it, I’ve visited this guy plenty of times over the years. His real concern should be if he’ll ever get grass in his house!
My second home
I built this little house. It was my first attempt at actually building a house in the game. Then it got blown up by a Creeper and I got so mad that I gave up and went somewhere else.
The lodge
Can you recognize my stunning recreation of an iconic video game location?
Does this look familiar to you? Even a little bit?
That’s right! It looks absolutely nothing like the lodge from Psychonauts.
A little ways away was a hole in the wall that I was trying to build a mushroom farm in. I vividly remember that the time when I was working on this was the first time Paula explained her vampire character Andrei to me.
My third home
Eventually I got tired of living in the taiga, and I decided it was time to move out. I pattered off to an area that felt miles away, but was actually just the next biome over. It’s funny to me how massive Minecraft felt. This was before horses and powered rails and elytra – this was before running.
This base felt massive to me. Since this was a decade before beacons, we built our own out of stacking giant mushrooms on top of each other. Nearby was the cactus farm, which I liked to run through with my FOV maxed out.
To mark this place as our home, I built my girlfriend a stunning tribute to Pinkie Pie, because this was 2011.
What, you can’t see it?
Right next to Pinkie Pie was this “sand igloo” I was set on building. As you can see, I never finished it. This is because:
- Sand blocks, being affected by gravity, cannot be used as roofs
- Igloos are round on the top, not on the bottom
Near my wonderful art pieces, my house was a hole in the ground, as you do. I swear I remember having a doorbell at one point with the new noteblocks, but I couldn’t find that – maybe it got annoying and we took it down?
I do not remember what the deal was with this naked sheep encased in glass. Some dark, buried part of my brain thinks we might have referred to this as a human person we were keeping in a hole in our house. But I don’t know. Either way I hate it.
This was our home. The censored sign above the chest on the left even said “[DEADNAME] <3 [DEADNAME]”. Judging from the walls and floor, I think this might have actually been built out of a dungeon. I wonder what the spawner was?
This was our bedroom, not long after beds were first added. And underneath the trap doors…
… was a feederism sex dungeon. GREAT!
Categories: gaming
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