alone [minecraft]

September 7, 2022•855 words

I have a story.

A couple of years ago, back in the 1.12 days when that was the latest version of the game, I played Minecraft with a hacked client. I will not say which one, as I don't want to encourage using any hacked client, and honestly doesn't matter to the story.

What does matter for this story was one feature it had.

Apart from hacking the game to do impossible things, there was one feature that the client had, and one that I still don't understand why or what the purpose of it is. The hacked client was able to scan servers. Just random servers that are open on the internet.

I suppose the purpose, if I have to guess, is the find vulnerable servers exposed to the internet and jackasses like me who would probably use this shit for malevolent purposes would trash the fuck out of whatever poor server the client found. But that's just a guess. Anyway.

I ran the hacked client to scan, and it just showed me a boat load of other ones. But one stood out. You see, a lot of the servers that I found with the client, there was always a handful of people on it. Maybe ten, 50, 1000, or 10000 even. But one pattern you'll notice is that there was never only just ONE person on;

This one server though, had no one. Another peculiar thing was that this server had no name. It only showed it’s ping, and it’s IP. No custom icon, no name, no even metadata when you hover your cursor over the server entry on the server list.

This peaked my interest even more. So I joined.

I was greeted by being in the center of a village, a town that definitely other people made. It was a very nice village. Nice architecture. And a lot of cobblestone roads that went beyond my 11 block render distance. But then, I got a feeling that I'm sure many who are reading this now understand. A nostalgic sadness, a fear.

Or a feeling you get when you're in a place that's designed to house a lot of people, but instead, there's no one. I was interested now. I walked around for many, many blocks. Walked across farms, tall structures with lobbies, and many, many beacons. I walked across other towns, I think. Since the server had those fucking plugins that tells you to join one, and it told me what town I was in.

I remember feeling the loneliness that was described in this video. I was in a server that other people I've never met created with such love and passion for. A server i should not have found, yet here I was. I had had appeared in a brightly lit shopping mall with no people, a school with no students, a house with no family. The players were gone. Here be dragons i guess. This server had plugins, the standard ones every fucking server has. The "Join A Town!" shit, or the shop plugins that tells you to buy shit. Seeing my screen periodically fill with those notifications increased the loneliness for me. I was being advertised, and I'm the only buyer in a dead market.

As I explored the server, one person joined. They were a player, one I'd find out was the admin.

I greeted them, and they greeted me, and from then on, we just talked. I asked them what this server is, where everyone is, and who they are. One thing I found kinda funny now thinking about is that they never really questioned why I was there.

They told me that the server was one that belonged to their friends. They spent a lot of time on it, and other people joined in. A lot of OTHER people like me once upon a time. But now, as they said it, they're gone now. Life got in the way, and now, he was the only person that maintained it.

That last bit, although not at the time, leaves me a bit chocked up in sadness remembering. This server that i should’ve never found had memories in it. Something that other people made with time, and made laughs along the way. I asked them if their friends ever come back. They told me no, and it’s just them.

I quit the server shortly after.

I never went back there, and to be honest, I think about what that server was and how it's doing. I wish I saved the IP, but I didn't. Cuz my computer died with the game in it, fucking hell..

I guess, the reason I typed this story, is because to me, minecraft is a game where the reason it's lonely is because there's an INFINTE number of worlds, an INFINITE number of servers with their own culture, their own feel and systems. you'll never experience all of them. Any server or any world is as meaningFUL or meaningLESS as the one before or after.

And that keeps up at night when I think about life a little too much.