My Skyblock Origin Story

Discussion in 'Introductions & Farewells' started by RedstoneTrails, Jan 2, 2020.

  1. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    I've never formally posted an introduction here, so I thought I'd recount the story of my experience with classic.

    Chapter 1: Discovering Skyblock
    To begin, Skyblock is the only server I consider myself to have ever actually "played". I've played on countless mini-game servers over the years with friends, but I'd never get on those servers alone. To this day, I've never found another server that I actually enjoy just being on and playing whenever. When I first joined this server long ago, though, I was immediately sucked in.

    I enjoyed the single player Skyblock map, but never lasted too long on it. I'd challenge myself to see how quickly I could go through the entire checklist of challenges, timing myself and challenging friends to beat my time. Eventually, I grew bored of this, and went back to normal survival. Some time later, I decided I wanted to try out non-survival Minecraft servers again. Typed "Minecraft Servers" into Google, and clicked the first link that popped up. On the front page of the site, I saw the little floating Skyblock icon, and knew I had to go check it out. Direct connected myself to Skyblock.net, and begun trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

    Chat was filled with people auctioning things off for grass, asking who was selling what, and the occasional person complaining in chat about getting scammed, losing their items, or having had come back to seeing someone bridged to their island and stole their stuff. It was a lot to take in, so I just turned off chat and started my island. Went through the usual process of my Skyblock speed run, choppin' down a few logs, making a pickaxe, setting up my cobble gen, and then slowly building a platform under my island. Once I had a decent sized platform going, I cut down the rest of my starter tree, collected most of the dirt on my island, and built a new cobble gen, using cobble instead of dirt as the foundation. I continued expanding my platform, adding some more dirt plots for more trees to grow.

    I grew bored mining cobble and waiting for trees to grow/decay, so I decided to turn chat back on. Shortly there after, I saw a server message saying to use /vote for rewards. Wishing for free stuff, I typed in /vote went to all the links that popped up, and voted on each of the sites. For every vote, I was just given a single grass block.

    This felt odd to me.

    I asked in chat what the significance of these grass blocks were, and if they had any special properties on this server. Chat quickly informed me that grass was normal grass, and was used as currency here.

    Big brain moment. You're telling me all I need to do on this server is farm grass, and I'll be rich?

    I built out more of my platform, filled it with all my dirt, and placed a single one of my grass blocks in the center. While I waited for the grass to grow, I asked if anyone in chat had a silk touch shovel I could use. I was quickly met with a TPA request from a player. One /tpaccept later and there was now a mysterious man flying around my island with a glowing glass block on his head, and a glowing stick in his hand. He tossed me his stick, and then vanished back to wherever he came from. I picked up the strange glowing stick, hovered over it, and was mystified to see every enchantment in the game on it. It had silk touch, though, so I guess it'd do.

    After waiting a bit for some grass to grow, I decided it was time to start becoming rich. I attempted to mine some of the grass with the stick, but was met with a red error message in chat telling me I couldn't do that.

    My heart sunk a little.

    I asked in chat if silk touch worked on grass, only to be met with people laughing at me for thinking the economy would work like that. Depression began to set in. I only had three grass to my name, and I just spent one on my failed grass farming endeavor. Recollecting myself, I asked in chat how to get more grass. Chat told me there were two main options: voting, and selling items to players for grass. I already voted, so I guess we're gonna start selling things. First thought? I'm gonna start selling cobblestone! Everyone needs cobblestone, this is Skyblock after all. It took me quite a while to mine these two stacks of cobblestone, so surely I could sell them for a grass or two. I optimistically asked in chat how much cobblestone usually sells for. A player messaged me, saying that at a minimum, cobblestone sold 512 for 1 grass. For the mathematicians reading, you'll notice that this is a solid 6 stacks more of cobblestone than I had. Mining that much cobblestone would take me hours, this is ridiculous.

    Only other thing I had on my island was my trees, so I asked how much wood sold for, expecting them to tell me I needed even more wood than cobble to make a grass. To my surprise, I was informed I could sell wood to some players at just a couple stacks of logs per grass. That's not bad at all, I thought to myself, I could farm that out pretty quickly. If I got myself a good bit of bonemeal, along with a good axe, I could easily be farming tons of wood.

    Chapter 2: Stolen Goods
    I saw messages in chat about /warp passive and /warp mob, and figured those would be my best route for getting bonemeal. I quickly checked out each, noting /warp passive had cows I could farm for food and leather, and /warp mob had plenty of skeletons for me to kill and get their bones. I crafted myself a stone sword, and begun my cow slaughter. Once I had enough leather to make myself a full set of leather armor, I went back to my island, put on my leather armor, and cleared my inventory of everything except for my sword and freshly cooked steak. I began to get a little excited about this mob killing adventure I was about to embark on.

    I type in /warp mob, press enter, and quickly get back in position on my mouse and keyboard, ready to begin fighting off mobs. To my surprise, the first thing I saw was a pile of mob loot, with an enchanted iron sword and iron helmet in the mix. I immediately realized what this meant.

    Someone died here

    My indecisiveness quickly kicked in. Should I be a good person, and save this persons stuff and try to return it to them? Or should I pick it up and quickly head back home before someone else shows up? Being the greedy new player I was, I decided to steal all of the items and then quickly teleport back to my home.

    It was such a glorious haul, too. A max enchanted iron sword, an iron helmet, some gunpowder, string, and nearly half a stack of bones. All these bones should last me long enough to get a decent bit of farming done. It was probably best I stayed away from /warp mob for a bit anyways, so that nobody would suspect me of this crime I just committed.

    Chapter 3: Fredrick
    All of the panic and adrenaline now residing, I got back to my wood farming. I continuously mined cobble, expanded my island, chopped trees, and planted more on the newly expanded platform. There was no time for beauty here, I was a man on a mission, trying to get that grass as soon as possible (my island was a horrible platform of cobble with dirt awkwardly scattered across it growing trees, with a couple of chests and a cobble generator over by my bedrock). As the plot got larger, it began taking a decent bit of time to chop down all of the trees, and I was going through stone axes a bit more than I would like.

    I asked in chat if anyone had an iron axe I could have, and to my surprise, a player quickly messaged me offering me their axe. I invited him over to my island, and he tossed me an axe as he flew over me.

    It was glorious.

    Just like my sword and stick, it had every enchantment in the game. However, this item was renamed. Where I expected to see "Iron Axe", I instead saw "Fredrick". As I'm noticing this, the player messages me: "This is Fredrick. He is one of my beloved axes. Please keep him safe."

    I began to worry. I have no way to keep this axe safe. I had neither an anvil nor any iron. How could I use this axe and prevent it from breaking? It clearly seemed important to him, so I didn't want to betray his trust and break it, but I also didn't want to upset him by never using it.

    As if he was reading my mind, the player then messaged me informing me that he, and other donors with his color or higher were able to fix items for free, any time. He told me to message him, or another donor like him any time I needed it repaired. I thanked him, and wrote down his name on a piece of paper to make sure I never forgot (I have since lost that piece of paper and completely forgot who it was).

    Chapter 4: Becoming An Entrepreneur
    Chopping down trees became a breeze. Trees that once felt like mining cobble now felt like cutting through butter. I expanded my tree farm out so far that by the time I finished chopping all the trees, some of the trees had already regrown naturally. I built up a decent collection of wood, filling up the entire top row of my chest plus a few more stacks. It was finally time to start selling and earning more grass.

    I began asking around in chat if anyone wanted to buy wood, but nobody seemed to notice me. I tried to resend the same message again, but chat filter blocked me. I slightly changed my message, and sent it again. I repeated this process a few times until someone finally messaged me: "What kinda wood are you selling?".

    Oak, I told him.

    "Oh, I need spruce. Do you have any?". This was an obstacle I had not anticipated. I've never had a wood type on Skyblock besides oak.

    "How do you get spruce?" I asked.

    I like to imagine he then facepalmed and/or laughed at me before responding to me, telling me you can just grow it with spruce saplings. He offered to give me two spruce saplings to get me started. I gladly accepted his offer, and created a new section of my plot to begin planting spruce. Once I managed to build up some stacks of spruce, I sold them to the guy who originally gave me the spruce saplings, and we both thanked each other.

    Over time, I continued to expand my tree farming, and began adding some more aesthetically pleasing patterns and designs to my island. As I earned grass from voting and selling wood, I reinvested it in buying new sapling types from /warp grass. Fairly quickly into trying to expand my tree farm, though, I ran into an issue. I was all out of dirt.

    Chapter 5: Island Farming?
    I asked in chat how to acquire more dirt, and was sarcastically met by a player telling me to island farm. This was a new concept to me. I asked him what exactly island farming was, and he informed me it was a player repeatedly mining up all of the resources on their island, storing it away, and resetting their island. He also told me that this was super illegal, and that I shouldn't do it (why would you ever tell a noob how to island farm if you don't actually support island farming?)

    The issue was, the only alternative was placing grass to use as dirt for my tree farm. For some reason, I was perfectly fine at the time spending my grass on overpriced saplings at /warp grass, but the concept of reinvesting grass into my tree farm in the form of dirt seemed absurd.

    I couldn't reset my island since I had spent so much time on it already, and I didn't want to get caught and banned.

    I quickly devised a plan.

    My brother had recently gotten his own Minecraft account, but he barely used it. He was still riding the Roblox train real hard. I used to be a Roblox map creator, and was a god at tycoon servers (being good at doing repetitive tasks for hours on end is super impressive, right?). I had built up quite a bit of Tix fromt these things, Tix being the main economy you used at the time to buy cool clothes and items for your character. I negotiated with my brother, telling him that if he helped me on this Minecraft server, I'd pay him Tix on Roblox. He was hesitant, but agreed. I showed him how to connect to the server, how to create and reset islands, and the best way to gather all of the dirt without losing much. Once he was all setup, and our per island payment agreement was confirmed, I let him farm away. Any time he was about to reset his island, we'd meet at Skybase, and he'd give me all the dirt, sand, lava bucket, etc.

    This was a fool proof plan, I thought. Me and this player never talked in game. We never went on each other's islands. We traded in a public place where tons of chest transactions were always happening. There was no way they could trace this back to being my fault, we had no real connections. To a certain extent, I guess it was a decent plan. I never got caught, and I don't think my brother's account ever got caught or banned either. I kept a relatively clean conscience about the whole thing, telling myself it was fine since I wasn't the one actually doing the island farming.
     
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  2. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    Chapter 6: Becoming a True Skyblock Player
    After this short bought of island farming with my brother, I abandoned the life of crime and went on to earn an honest living. I developed a giant and well organized tree farm that I was constantly using to sell tons of logs, saplings, and leaves. I later learned how to make powerful stone generators using redstone contraptions, which allowed me to become fully self sufficient with stone and cobble (with my name, you'd imagine I would've already known about stone generators that used redstone. in my defense, did anyone know anything about stone generators before skyblock? I just made gigantic holes or strip mined when I needed stone in survival). Some cool players also kept me in the loop with all the coolest trends in glitches that you could use to earn grass. My favorite tended to be obsidian generators, partly due just to how wacky they looked and worked.

    Later down the line, megadorkvikki also showed me the wonders of wool farming, and helped get me my own giant floating sheep farm with all 16 colors of sheep. Not sure if it was true or not, but I used to like to believe that I was the second biggest wool dealer on the server during early to mid 2014.

    Over time I was able to earn a good bit of grass, eventually paying for donor ranks using grass and diamonds.

    Chapter 7: The End?
    This all came crashing down summer of 2014, though. Within a short span of time, I was scammed for something valuable, had a good friend quit the server, and one of my co-ops robbed me of half my stuff and left the island. I had also tried applying for staff, thinking at the time that I was going to join the staff team and prevent bad things from ever happening to players ever again. However, this was a short lived dream. I only got two replies to my moderator application, and quickly realized that you need to be actually well known on the server to gain much traction. Simply being helpful to new players and having good intentions isn't quite enough to get your brought on to staff.

    Realizing I wasn't going to get staff, and having suffered a bunch of losses, I quit the server. The people who I knew best on the server had quit for good, and many of the people I thought I was friends with turned out to not feel the same about me. I had a silent exit, and I do not believe anyone noticed that I had left.

    Though I never planned on playing the server again, I always kept it in my server list. It was the only server I had actually committed time to, and the only server that I had a donor rank on. I never could take the final step to saying goodbye to the server, and thought of it frequently.

    Chapter 8: The End
    Two years later, I got onto Classic for the final time. I had just graduated high school, but also had recently broken up with my girlfriend of nearly two years, after finding out she was cheating on me with a friend. I don't know why, but the first thing distraught me wanted to do was play Minecraft. None of my friends wanted to play survival with me, so I looked in my server list.

    There it was, Skyblock.net.

    It soundly strangely fun at the time. I hadn't done anything Skyblock related since I had previously quit. I got back on, and had some motivation to get back into the server. I collected my kits, reassessed my current situation on the server and where I left off, and decided I was going to remake my island. I began tearing everything down, but in doing so seemed to have triggered some hidden sadness in myself. I continued to push through it, tearing down my entire sheep farm, my tree farms, and my stone generator. I thought it was just life getting me down, but I realized that playing on that old island was making me feel worse, reminding me of bad times from my past.

    To this day, I cannot go onto Classic and see my island without feeling a bit of sadness. I still remember all of the great times I had there, but all of the memories are polluted with all of the bad. My island on Classic forever stands in a place of stasis for me. I've tried tearing it down multiple times, but can never bring myself to fully commit. As it stands, my island on classic exists purely as a relic of the past, and a reminder of all the joy, sadness, pain, and excitement I had felt on the server. An island half destroyed, half perfectly preserved.
     
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  3. Oakk
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    Oakk Experienced Member

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    Longest introduction so far? hmm
     
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  4. Archie38
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    Archie38 Well-Known Member

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    Little did we know in the beginning, the champion that this greybean would soon become.
     
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  5. Geo
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    Geo athyrix Premium

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    This thread is so meaningful, you've become such an amazing person and a helpful one too!
    Glad you were around in my time.
     
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  6. Adriansop
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    Adriansop Moderator Moderator

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    I'd summarise it to:
    Found the server
    Got titan
    Dominated
     
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  7. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    Bit of a 6 year gap between finding the server and getting Titan :rolleyes:

    Also, I'd add "Got dominated by Haberson" to the end of that summary :cri:
     
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  8. KingJonSnow
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    KingJonSnow Moderator Moderator

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    Its been great to get to know you redstone. you seem like an awesome dude and glad that you came back to the server.
     
  9. NorthYYY
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    NorthYYY Active Member

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    R.I.P. tix
     
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  10. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    Glad I came back, and glad I started being more active in the community and actually making friends. It's been great getting to know everyone and feeling like I have genuine friends in the community :)
     
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  11. Eddie
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    Eddie Active Member

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    Insane! How long did this take to write? :woot: Anyways, love your shop!
     
  12. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    It went through a couple iterations haha. Maybe a few hours all together. Started writing a story about why I loved the server, and next thing I knew I got side tracked and was writing about my entire Classic experience. Started going through my old messages on the forums and Skype piecing together lil bits here and there, until we finally had the full picture.

    Almost started writing about my experience joining back onto the new server shortly after it launched, and my experience over the last year of getting back into the server, but realized I was already wayyyy over the character limit.

    Also thanks :D I'll try and spend less time writing massive forum posts and more time keeping it stocked
     
  13. Davidx01
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    Davidx01 Active Member

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    WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAH
     
  14. Kai123
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    Kai123 What?

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    Get this published my guy lmao
     
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  15. RedstoneTrails
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    RedstoneTrails Moderator Moderator

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    Catch me on 2021 Amazon Best Seller list
     
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  16. 52Phenomenon
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    52Phenomenon Super Moderator Super Moderator Events Manager

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    This should be copyrighted as the signature RedstoneTrails essay :hilarious:
     
  17. Dinglesplat
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    Dinglesplat Well-Known Member

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    this is the longest and coolest story I have ever heard
    Imma put it in a book on the server
    And sell it
    And get rich
    Thank you redstonetrails, you made me rich
    This idea is copyrighted, anyone else who attempts it will be banned :D
    xD
     
  18. needtorename
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    needtorename Content Creator Premium

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    Dude classic mods were the real deal, 2016 :heart: love old sb
     
  19. Shep
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    Shep Well-Known Member Premium

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    what a cutie UwU :heart:
     
  20. bERYbERRY
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    bERYbERRY c000000000000000kies Builder Premium

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    Wooooh this was quite a journey but again we all had similar journeys. I remember megadorkvikki wool shop and it literally was the best! I could order dozens of wool from her and I remember it was for my island that was entirely made out of wool heh

    Glad ur still here !
     

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