Considering I have gone inactive on ECC and no longer do anything when/if I log on I suppose it's time for me to share something I've been working on for about 6 months on and off whenever I feel like it. Please excuse any errors as this was a first draft and I had so much going through my head whenever I typed. Enjoy Also note: It's not finished. Before I start I'd like to invite anyone to give a "briefer" history or any input of nostalgic times with me in the comments of this post. I'd also like to invite mods to place this thread in the appropriate section. It was a very chilly morning in Portland, Oregon around December of 2011. I was in the Eighth grade and two of the quieter boys in my class and I were on flag duty. We were in charge of putting up the flag at front of the school in the morning, and taking it down at the end of the day. I knew them mutually well, but we weren't friends; although I knew they were close to each other. On that morning walk out to the flagpole I had overheard them talking of a Minecraft Server that they had found. I had only played minecraft in singleplayer and other very small survival servers, and was about a two month old player of Minecraft. As I overheard them talking about it they told each other that at the end of the day they were going to tell Jimmy about the server, who at the time, I hadn’t met. Their talk of this “awesome server” they had been playing on interested me throughout the day. When everyone met on the playground to be picked up by their parents I walked over to them. They were talking with a younger student who I guessed to be in the fourth grade. This student was Jimmy. So I quickly joined the conversation and asked them about the server, they gladly welcomed me. They told me their minecraft usernames and the server’s IP address which, at the time, I had to write on my wrist with a pen. This group of 3 players were @Tonyenike, @agentplatypus, and @jimmy91301. We all planned to meet on the server later that evening. I logged on the server, copying it’s IP from the smeared ink on my hand, and was instantly dazed and overwhelmed with information. At the time I didn’t realize servers could get as complex as EcoCityCraft was. All I had ever known was vanilla servers. Following the clues and information supplied by the many repeating server messages, signs at spawn, and moderators in Global Chat, I used my /kit starter and used the /msg command (as that was the command I was used to on other servers), and contacted my new friends from earlier that day. They showed me to their small settlement just outside the non-grief zone of Build16, which they said they’d already built up because they’d been playing for about 2 days before me. I remember the small settlement and secret entrance as if it were just yesterday. As you’re walking across the snow covered path, across iced over lakes and oceans you come across a cobble house that appears to have been griefed. Most people assume it’s just one of the many wild houses that have been griefed and are of no value. But to my friends and I it was something more. As you walk inside this desolate, cold, dark, torn up cobble building you don’t see anything out of the ordinary but a stone button on one of the cobble blocks. If someone were to have dug under that cobble block with the button under it, they would’ve found a base, our secret base. There was a small, rackety staircase for an entrance lined by cobble that went down about ten blocks into the main living quarters. The living quarters was an underground platform at around y:40 that was high above an intersection of three ravines. Inside, at the bottom of the stairway entrance, there was a main hallway carved out by Tonyenike that had a room for every person, a furnace wall, small tree and wheat farms, and at the end of that hallway was the main mineshaft. Although this hallway was probably eight blocks wide, fifty blocks long, and five blocks high, it was still quite small. Especially for the group of expanding members joining the server from the mainworld, although it was enough for four people, surely, and we wouldn’t be adding more people to our “clique” for a while. After living in that base in the wild, Tonyenike had enough for the Resident rank ($15,000 ECD, while agentplatypus and I were still builders with a few thousand ECD each. I’d say I had $3,000 ECD before I realized what a plot even was, and before I even thought of buying one. I scanned Trade chat to look for someone selling plots and I got talking with @jwpwns. Once I had learned that this land was actually protected, could be enforced by the Staff Team, had public farms, and I would live in an actual community with other players and learning players, I was sold. My first plot I bought was from @jwpwns in his town called LasVegas. I had bought a cheap 10x10 and built it up high, making about 6 stories that each housed a random builder I collected $50 a day from. Along with profiting off the small amount of rent I charged, I also took advantage of their tree farm and would use the wood to either build more rooms, or make it into charcoal and then sell it for $1 to stupid people (server still only bought for $.40). But what I thought was heaven was also my worst enemy and because I was a dumb builder I looked over at what I now realize was a farm in progress (but as a builder all I recognized was a bunch of glowstone) and I started breaking a few blocks of glowstone to see if I had access (wasn’t familiar with regions) and sure enough I did. I was removed from the town later that day for grief in LasVegas. I went back to living in the wild and tried regrouping with my friends at the first underground house but because we lived next to a build warp the land was regenerated after the warps switched around and that in turn deleted the house. Being that all three of us were homeless I went to school the next day and talked to them about getting way out, just walking for 20 straight minutes and then making a new home there. They liked the idea and we decided we’d all do that. So once we logged into the server the next day we took off from spawn, heading through the spawn town of Stoneport and into the wild. After what seemed to be a long trek we stopped in a snow biome and we decided that we had travelled far enough. We were set around -4000 blocks on the “X” axis and -4000 blocks on the “Z” axis; we were 8,000 blocks away from spawn. That was plenty distance for us and we felt like we were living on the frontier, and we loved it. I had made a better secret entrance this time and I used some weird perspective tricks to make a hill look normal but also hold a secret house in it. t Eventually I decided, once I had earned about five thousand Eco-Dollars, to venture out into the market and invest in some more protected land. At the time a town called Flintwood was being made. I had heard about the town in a Trade advertisement and decided might as well start somewhere. The plot being a 30x30 for eight thousand Eco-Dollars, I did not meet the required funds. Luckily he let me pay the remaining thirty-five hundred over a five day span. I was it’s first plot owner. This town at the time was owned by @dieselrabbit, a good friend who I didn’t know it at the time, but would eventually play a huge role in my starting life here on ECC. The next day, after setting up my house and officially moving into the town of Flintwood, I told my friends about it and asked them to join me. So within the week they migrated over to Flintwood and each bought their own plots. We decided to make money off of each other’s plots and to get the most out of the area we had. We all built pumpkin farms and farmed pumpkins, Tonyenike’s being the biggest, followed by my farm, and then agentplatypus’. Jimmy mostly shared plots with agentplatypus but he didn’t officially live there. He jumped around, using all farms, and having scattered chests throughout his friend’s houses. We lived a simple life, and were just farming pumpkins ($2 Each Pumpkins) and using the nearby spider spawner to sell XP (Mobs enabled in Main World) to make money for Resident. I joined a few days after Tonyenike and agentplatypus actually, and it turns out what I heard at school was just their personal remnants of their plans regarding what to do on the server when they got home. Because of this by the time I got the rank of Resident, Tonyenike was a Mayor and had founded a town called pinedorosa. I had moved in two places, and because of a small bug that andrew has now patched had two homes. One being /home bed in Pinedorosa, and the other being /home in Flintwood. I lived in two places, and although I had the freedom to build and do what I wanted in Tonyenike’s town, I loved the resources that Flintwood and dieselrabbit offered me; which at that time was the large public farms, shops, and co-mayorship. Dieselrabbit allowing me to work as his town’s co-mayor was a major turning point in my ECC career and I actually started making decent profits. Around that time I also donated for Teleport, Water, and ExtCommands Basic to improve my personal efficiency of making farms, and teleporting users to Flintwood, where I would sell plots for money. I don’t remember exactly how much I’d make, it was either %50 or %75 of all plots that I sold, but to me, money was money.
That's for me to know and for you to find out. But I consider my time on ECC well spent, and I consider myself to be a successful user.
I hereby nominate @SnDxCH4RG3R for the Wiki Team. Nice story, SnD. I (actually managed) to read it all.
