My first month on Constantiam

Posted - 2024-11-10

Updated - Never

Introduction

For a pretty long time now I’ve been having the annual Minecraft itch. This, combined with the Youtube algorithm constantly showering me with copious amounts of MC Anarchy content, resulted in me finally deciding to try out anarchy. The only question was where ?

WelcOmE to ThE OldEsT anarCHY SerVer iN MiNeCra….

Now for everyone not living under a rock in the Minecraft world, the obvious choice would be 2b2t.org of course. The server’s ripe age of 13, the invaluable game world with the size of over 49TB, the rich history, what else could you possibly want ?

Well although it looks fine and dandy on paper, there are some pretty glaring issues with 2b2t that made me play on a different server in the end…

Let’s start with the most important factor - the community. I’ve had my fair share of internet edgyness, considering how much time I spent on 4chan and other niche forums throughout my teenage and childhood years. I don’t mind it, in some ways I even enjoy it, but there is a big difference between edgy humorous content in a far corner on the internet, and infantilised, loud, obnoxious behaviour for the sake of e-clout. This is exactly what 2b2t has become in my opinion. Of course it’s a natural shift considering how mainstream the server and internet in general has become over the years, but the issue still stands - you won’t find the same intimate experience in a small tight-knit community in this server. And even if you do, it will be the result of countless hours of shifting through mud and shit. Unfortunately that was exactly what I wanted when I decided to pickup anarchy and it made the server less appealing.

The second big issue is the player count and queues. The constant 500+ player count on a map this large almost always calls for a lower server performance. Combined with various giant farms, possible lag machines, people doing things they’re generally not supposed to do results in a pretty mediocre TPS. Now I can live with low TPS, don’t get me wrong (to some degree ofc…), but what I can’t live with is the queue times. In all my time playing Minecraft I’ve managed to join the server TWICE. Almost every time the queue was at least 300+ which resulted in you waiting for hours to join the server. Obviously paying for priority queue is an option, but im not spending 20 buckies a month just to play in a glorified ballpit with edgy children.

Follow your heart, not the YouTube recommendations

Although the majority of MC anarchy content, that the average player is exposed to in YouTube and other media platforms, consists mostly of 2b2t content, it’s far from being the only server for quality anarchy experience :

• 2b2t clones (e.g 5b5t) :
  • Now they are not clones per-se, but I call them as such and clump them together mostly because they all share the same reasons on why it’s not worth wasting your time in these servers. It all boils down mostly to a couple of factors - administration and player base. Almost all of these servers try to mimic the real deal in the worst way possible: unmanaged exploits and dupes that ruined the server’s economy, various illegals spawned by administration or their incompetence (sometimes even both :-D), extremely small and inconsistent player base, the list goes on…
• 9b9t :
  • Honestly, this server was my first initial pick, considering that I’ve already played on 9b9t before. Around 2019-2020 I wanted to try MC Anarchy, but ran into the same issues I mentioned earlier when picking 2b2t. The server age (since 2016) and the fact that the playerbase kinda overlapped with the 2b2t community made it very appealing. I did the whole shabang - escaped spawn, found gear, traveled to the millions in the overworld and set up my first base. Although I only stayed there a few weeks, the player count was very low, and the server had a few quirks (admin spawned illegals multiple times throughout the servers lifespan), it was still very enjoyable. That’s why I was kinda upset learning that the server is currently down for maintenance (afaik the server storage ran out and was in the middle of getting hardware upgrades).
• Constantiam :
  • Pretty much the same as 9b9t, the server started in 2016. It was the prime spot which 2b2t players flocked to due to 2b’s queue times. The admin being very active, no backdoors, only a few harmless illegals and a constant 50+ player count made the server appeal to me the most and ended up being my final choice.

First steps on Constantiam

I first joined Constantiam on October 16th, 2024. My primary plan was to escape spawn, figure out a decent method of transportation, and look for a stash or a base to get my initial gear. Although soon I figured out that it wont be that easy…

For one, there were a bunch of withers that constantly kept harassing me even outside spawn. I ran into them as far as 20-30K blocks out from spawn, which is pretty insane by itself. Obviously I had to travel at least half of this distance by foot in the overworld, because the Nether spawn is in even worse shape. The second problem is that I based my success on getting gear on this server solely on finding a stash/base. If you get lucky - good for you, but I didn’t and wasted around 5-10 hours in the overworld traveling through old loaded chunks. After a while it got too tedious and too boring to continue. Not wanting to quit the server so soon I decided to skip this step and travel further from spawn to make a base to gear up.

The biggest determining factor of the quality of your experience while traveling through the server map is obviously having the fastest method of transportation possible. Considering that the only decent chance to have your base relatively secure is by traveling millions of blocks away from spawn it was clear that just autowalking on the Nether highway was not going to be enough. Now the obvious choice would be an Elytra, but for a fresh player that’s pretty unreasonable - you need rockets and the Elytra itself, which without proper enchants like Mending is pretty useless, and that’s even with skipping the glaring issue of having to travel to the End to get it. From what I gathered in chat the End of Constantiam is not in the worst condition, but to find an Elytra you’d have to travel at least 30-50K out from the highways to find unlooted end cities. Bridging or using fly machines would take an ungodly amount of time as well as there’s always a possibility to die (which as a fresh player I couldn’t really afford). So I looked elsewhere - boats or ridable entities. Boatfly was patched so the only option left was horses. That, combined with entity speed allowed me to travel around 18-20 blocks/s depending on the server TPS. Using that alongside autowalk made traveling the Nether a breeze (ignoring the occasional highway grief that would chip away a few hearts).

Finally I decided to stop a little bit beyond 500K blocks from spawn since I didn’t want to distance myself too much from it. Spawn is the heart of Constantiam, the majority of player activity happens there and if I wanted to be a part of it, being able to easily access it was a necessity. My main conditions for a base location were obviously biomes like swamps (for various farms) as well as a village nearby which i can use to setup iron farms and necessary trades for enchantments and other useful items.

Do you want items ? Work for them.

The base was created on October 19th of 2024. I found an interesting looking streched out mountain that would make for a cool hidden base inside it. There was this naturally generated arc below it which could be used to access water or future farms underneath the base. Since I didn't have a lot to work with, the primary construction block ended up being various versions of stone bricks. It blended well with this cave-like environment and it didn't require a lot of effort. After I did some mining I managed collect quite a few stacks of deepslate, which ended up being used in the trading halls.

As you can see Ender pearl stasis chambers were built. This is an amazing way to travel around the server, especially going back to spawn. All you need is a friend or an alt that would close the trapdoor with a thrown ender pearl and you would teleport from any location on the map back to where the stasis chamber is. Combining this with resetting your bed spawn allows you to go to spawn and travel back to the base almost instantaniously !

While I was still deciding on my method to get gear on this server I stumbled upon CTP - Constantiam Trading Platform. This was the determining factor for my decision to use villager trades to get the majority of necessary items and enchantments. CTP is a platform for players to trade in-game items between themselves, you can post an offer or a request specifying what you’re offering and what you’re looking for. It didn’t take long for me to notice that most items that players want (Glowstone, dyes, bottled xp, emerald blocks, perls, etc.) can be farmed through villager trades. The plan was set in stone, and then in motion :

1. Find an initial trade for easy emeralds. I ended up on using farmers, since you can setup automatic Melon and Pumpkin farms for easy bulk items to trade.
2. Make a villager breeder to easily scale how much I can trade before prices increased.
3. With the collected emeralds setup necessary enchantment trades, such as Silk Touch, Mending, etc.
4. Setup trades for items that I can use in trading on CTP. Majority of them came from Clerics, as they sell items like Glowstone blocks, XP Bottles and Pearls.

Around the same time I scouted a few potential trades for Elytra and gear. The first one was manual labour - I had to help building a cathedral and in return I would get kits. The other two ended up being 4 shulkers of deepslate and 3 shulkers of glowstone blocks. The cathedral is still in progress, even if I don’t get anything out of it I will probably still continue to chip away at it. It’s a cool build and a good way to finally start contributing to the server. The deepslate with max enchant diamond pickaxe took only a few hours of AFK mining and resulted in me receiving a shit ton of shulker shells, a few stacks of fireworks and 4 elytras !

I am currently stil in the process of gathering all the glowstone from Nether mining and Cleric trades. The agreed trade is either for 2 shulkers of fireworks or a Netherite kit.

Future plans

Since the base is quite near spawn the main priority right now is finish gearing up and traveling further for a more permanent base with bigger builds. I’ve also started looking into Paper/Spigot patches as well as Bukkit for any potential exploits/dupes. Decompiling and deobfuscating the vanilla MC Server was easy enough, but the anti-cheat/fix plugins are the main thing which makes the anarchy servers tick so to speak, so you have to analyze all 3 alongside each other. As a software developer I really enjoy this process of analyzing or breaking software in my spare time so even if this ends up being a waste of time I’ll still gladly do it, maybe something amazing will come out of it, who knows.. ;-)