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kyledrake 5 hours ago [-]
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.
63 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
8note 40 minutes ago [-]
doesnt everyone on 2b2t use hacked clients anyways?
63 34 minutes ago [-]
I suspect the real threat wasn't the blacklisting so much as the possibility of lawsuits that could come after
nonethewiser 3 hours ago [-]
what? how does censoring "fuck" not make it anarchy?
csande17 2 hours ago [-]
"Anarchy" in Minecraft means no rules, and "you can't say bad words (or build things containing bad words)" is a rule.
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
That’s wild if true. The slippery slope starts somewhere, but I too am not convinced it starts there.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
vlian2088 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
DANmode 4 hours ago [-]
Hey now, they just want a very polite, predictable world for the children! /s
3 hours ago [-]
jorl17 7 hours ago [-]
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 :)
asdff 7 hours ago [-]
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.
tehbeard 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
enraged_camel 4 hours ago [-]
>> 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.
jorl17 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Telaneo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
doctorpangloss 1 hours ago [-]
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?
jorl17 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
fcatalan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Morromist 4 hours ago [-]
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 you want to relive your minecraft memories without actually playing minecraft again I recommend you check out the excellent game Vintage Story.
sourweasel 7 hours ago [-]
>"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.
zamadatix 5 hours ago [-]
The accuracy score of this one would probably be a lot higher than pulling that sentence out alone would lead one to believe.
poly2it 7 hours ago [-]
What is the issue? You can still download the world files, but it would be inconvenient to store them in Minecraft's unoptimal format.
xmprt 6 hours ago [-]
"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.
shhsshs 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Onavo 5 hours ago [-]
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)
pineapplepizza6 4 hours ago [-]
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.
karim79 3 hours ago [-]
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?
ashtonshears 2 hours ago [-]
No
ramgine 2 hours ago [-]
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?
zamadatix 1 hours ago [-]
If you want to play normally you can just log in to 2b2t. If you wanted to play these snapshots in your own way, you'd need to decompress them and recompress them into normal Minecraft chunks. You don't have to do the whole thing, which is good considering the 15 TB figure is for the more optimally compressed version without all of the details like mobs.
mlyle 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ivanjermakov 7 hours ago [-]
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
zamadatix 5 hours ago [-]
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.
1bpp 6 hours ago [-]
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
NobodyNada 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
DefineOutside 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mjevans 41 minutes ago [-]
What does bedrock consider 'modification'? E.G. cutting trees / plants? How about mining?
I imagine 'forgetting' softly touched chunks could be a notable benefit.
1bpp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 6 hours ago [-]
"players protested against these changes, this time by placing large amounts of hateful symbols and hate speech on signs all around the server"
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.
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...
[0]: https://www.2b2t.org/terms/
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.
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 hate, hate, HATE the Antichrist.
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 :)
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...
TEAM aVo DESERVES ICE CREAM!
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 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.
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.
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 haven't played a lot of Minecraft but I'm glad that most of the little I played was there.
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.
I feel like HN needs to have a small model that compares post title to the article content and assigns it an accuracy score.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36q4Ze0kFu8
https://github.com/DaMatrix/SaveSearcher
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.
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 imagine 'forgetting' softly touched chunks could be a notable benefit.
> hateful symbols, hate speech
What a despicable freedom...