The Enchanted Sacred Rubber Tree Sapling

Posted by brilokuloj on Jun 10, 2024

There is a Minecraft story as old as time, and it’s the Enchanted Sacred Rubber Tree Sapling. Supposedly, this is a tree with the power to melt technology and destroy worlds…

I have only heard these tales secondhand; in the early days of Minecraft, I was too intimidated by tales of mod incompatibility. Even running a Hamachi server with server-side plugins was too overwhelming for me at times. Nowadays, modding is much, much easier – but with these improvements, we lose the art that can come out of this beautiful jank, like server-killing trees.

That’s why I decided that the only thing I could do was see it for myself.

Let me get it out of the way: yes, this article was absolutely an excuse for me to play more Minecraft. Or rather, it was inevitable that I was going to play more Minecraft, so I figured I would make the most out of it.

This one I was pretty excited about, because it was a chance for me to finally try out a ‘classic’ modpack; the Rubber Sapling only features in MineFactory Reloaded, which never made it past 1.10. I exclusively play modded nowadays, but modern modded Minecraft is a totally different beast, and my experience with the oldies is so far limited to “I played a little bit of Blightfall”.

After browsing Reddit for modpacks I could find that featured the tree, I made my choice. Today I will be playing FTB Infinity Evolved, a well-established classic. This will turn out to be a terrible mistake, but I’ll get to that later.

My first impression of this modpack was that it immediately crashed and I had to reinstall it. Awesome!

Welcome to Tree Hell, a world that doesn’t know I’m going to ruin it with a really big tree.

My goal was as follows: build a base and play the game totally straight otherwise, but the moment that I found an Enchanted Sacred Rubber Tree Sapling, plant it and let it destroy my base and all my hard work. All the info I saw online, including the official FTB Wiki, claimed that the sapling could be found inside jungle dungeon loot. That was good enough for me; I could just play the game until I found a jungle.

By the way, when you’re making a world in modded Minecraft, you should always have cheats enabled, even if you don’t intend on cheating. Even to this day, I wouldn’t trust even the most stable and maintained modpack to not have a game-breaking bug. Also, sometimes the progression is just plain bullshit. I enabled cheats on this world and I didn’t regret it.

I made myself a little hut and got comfortable. Immediately my first hurdle was that I like to decorate my noob houses with stripped log accents… which didn’t exist until 1.13. In the end, I just made myself a classic box with some rounded edges.

My spawn was objectively quite shit. I was stranded on an island, with the only nearby land mass being mountainous. If I wanted to make a serious base, I was going to have to do some terraforming.

I eventually did take a trip to Jungle Mountain (probably not the right type of jungle for the tree to spawn in loot) to look for food…

… and got to see a really cool erupting volcano. No food, though.

Otherwise, oppressive early-Minecraft oceans as far as the eye could see. I had trimmed the wool off of one sheep to make a bed, and it had wandered into the ocean and floated away into the distance before it could ever eat another block of grass. It would remain in the ocean for the rest of my playthrough.

Speaking of oppressive oceans, at some point the water near Jungle Mountain grew this big dark splotch, labeled an “Eerie Biome” by the map. What the hell? It literally wasn’t there earlier, you can look. I looked into the sky, thinking that maybe there was something floating above it casting a shadow, but there was not.

I would have investigated the water to see if there were eerie creepies in it, but pre-1.13 swimming takes years off my life, so I didn’t. I just moved on.

And WHAT is up with the obsidian water penis?

I started working on your basic modded Minecraft base, which is to say, smelting pickaxe heads.

Here is where I might disappoint some people: I hate the gameplay loop of Tinker’s Construct, a mod that attempts to make the construction of armor and tools more in-depth and interesting.

I really want to like it, because the slime boots’ ability to bounce on every block is awesome, and by using the slimesling to shoot yourself into the air, you can shoot yourself across the map before you even have a horse. But the gameplay itself does nothing for me. I hate how many pieces you have to make and manage, I hate having to remember to have gold in my smeltery to make molds and iron to make the pieces. I hate never being able to remember what every ore does.

And maybe it gets better deeper into the game, but I can never stick long with a modpack that revolves around it, which means I have experienced the beginner’s loop of TiCo at least half a dozen times.

I needed to expand my smeltery if I wanted a chance to have enough tools to find a mineshaft. But because I had no room on my island, I was quickly running out of wood. Off I went on my boat.

By the way, early Minecraft boat physics are the WORST. THING. IN THE FUCKING WORLD. If you get off your boat, it just leaves. In the above picture, you can see two boats. I had to make a second boat because the other one had floated into the middle of the water. As soon as I got off of the second boat, NEXT TO SHORE, it also propelled itself into the middle of the water.

Off I went on my third boat.

I immediately got distracted. YES!! A FLOATING SLIME ISLAND!!

I spent the entire day into the night building myself a staircase up to the heavens.

Slime boots, here I come! I can get off of this stupid freaking island!

Notice the Creeper falling down on the left side of the image…

Another Creeper explodes, knocking me off of my staircase…

… and a Creeper at the bottom of the ocean blows me up.

I rode all the way back on my 4th boat to find that my inventory had been totally obliterated. I now had to start over. And get more iron. And make more TiCo tools.

Figuring that I would at least start on the right foot this time, I did bring a TiCo sword up to the slime island…

Only to find…

This modpack does not have the slime boots. Or the slimesling.

According to Google, the recommended transportation is the ‘glider’, which took – to my recollection as of this moment – at least 10 pieces of leather, which I did not have because I was on a fucking deserted island.

But I did have two cows.

It’s just that one of them had wandered into the middle of the ocean the moment I had started the game.

So I lured it over with wheat, and I bred the two cows.

The resulting baby was so small that it could not even keep its head above the water and it drowned.

At this point I was at my limit. There’s fun, there’s frustrating-fun, and then there is whatever the fuck is happening in Tree Hell. I had enough.

I spawned in some cows. I took a break. I played on my Minecraft server that I’m actually good at. I took some deep meditative breaths. I did indeed cry a little because this game was making me feel like an idiot.

Then I came back and realized that, while you can allegedly acquire the Sacred Rubber Tree Sapling from dungeon loot, it appears that you cannot get the Enchanted Sacred Rubber Tree Sapling in this modpack. Yes, there is a difference. I knew this, but somehow I had completely forgotten.

Wait, so what modpacks are the ESRTS available in? I realized that in every story I had read about someone “accidentally” spawning this in their world, it was through Creative Mode. The one modpack I could definitively find people saying they had got it through was a Skyblock-type pack, which I didn’t want to play; the entire reason I had picked this modpack was because I don’t like the gambling-reliant gameplay of Skyblocks.

I was really mad.

At this point I just gave it to myself in Creative.

There you have it: it’s a really big tree.

But from the base, it might not be clear how this is the server-killing tree. Most of us have made bigger cylinders in WorldEdit just fine.

So let’s see the leaves.

Render distance isn’t doing it justice here, but take a look at the mini-map in the top-right for an idea. This thing covers biomes.

Now imagine setting it on fire.

Cool stuff! A bit underwhelming after everything I went through to get there, and I was so stressed out at this point that I didn’t feel much like fulfilling my goal of making a giant laggy treehouse, but it was an honor to get a first-hand look at one of Minecraft’s legendary stories. Modded Minecraft has grown surprisingly important to me over the years, and like any special interest, absorbing as much bullshit trivia about it makes me a happy Billy.

And who knows, maybe the inventory mod is wrong and you can get the tree in jungle loot. I’m not gonna be the one to figure that out, though.

Categories: gaming

Tagged: modded minecraft minecraft

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