On Raiding and Pillaging Other People’s Bases

A Minecraft server I play on is announcing that they’re wiping everything and having a fresh start. The catch is that you can transfer your items to the new server. There will also be two new, fresh servers, where everyone will start from scratch. But basically, we have a limited amount of time to strip everything down and move it to the ‘legacy’ server, before the six existing mini-servers all get nuked.

The server owners have set up various processes and a timeline, so people know what they can do. Money and items can be ported over, no problem, albeit slowly. You need a lot of shulker boxes, which are expensive at the best of times, but cheap ones have been provided. But part of this server wipe has an additional consequence. Like many friendly servers, this server allows you to claim land, which only you can modify and mine from. As part of the server changes, these claims are being wiped for any players who have not been recently active.

This means that a lot of landmarks and bases are now freely accessible.

It’s time to loot!

I’m not normally someone who maliciously takes items, but since all this server stuff is going to be deleted, I might as well take what I can while I can.

With claims wiped out aside from active players, that means there’s lots of things to loot. If you can find them. Even on a somewhat small 30,000 x 30,000 block map, it’s a long way to travel. Heck, even with commands like RTP (random teleport), it’s hard to find stuff. Sure, the mini-server I was on definitely wasn’t the most popular, but structures are few and far between.

And half the time, you end up running into the still-claimed mega structures owned by the super rich VIP players.

I have noticed a few things though. Most of the structures I’ve found seem to vary between biomes. You’re more likely to find already abandoned homes in plains biomes, and the fancier bases always tend to be either in hill biomes or on floating islands.

There’s very little left though.

You really need to be quick. It’s first come, first served. There’s only so many no longer claimed structures, so time is of the essence.

Unfortunately though, even being a few hours late is enough time for everything to be raided. Mostly because people with VIP benefits, already far, far richer than normal players, have access to Fly and multiple homes, so they can just grab everything with ease.

Most of the time, unless you are looting in the first few hours, most places have been picked clean already.

I have a looting etiquette.

I mean, you could just go and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Heck, some people will take pretty much everything. Including the useless crap. As for me? I have a few rules: I try not to break into buildings, I leave structures intact and I don’t steal literally everything.

The first two rules are pretty simple. If it’s a nice building, there’s no reason to destroy it. Unless it’s literally made of diamond blocks or something. Seems a shame to destroy someone else’s building work for no reason. With crappy wooden shacks, these rules are a bit more lax, but if someone has clearly put effort into a home, it’s not worth destroying.

As for the last rule? It’s logic. Even with Shulker Boxes, you have limited inventory space. So why do you need to take those iron tools or that seventh diamond hoe? Just take the valuables and don’t leave them with absolutely nothing. After all, they might come back at some point. And if they do come back and see that not all their stuff is gone, they might continue and then leave again, leaving more stuff to loot later.

The weirdest thing though…

What spurred me to write this article though was a very strange event. I had written down the coordinates of an old base that I wanted to see was still claimed. It was a massive base with huge pixel art everywhere. The entire base however was completely overshadowed by a HUGE piece of heavy metal pixel art.

I’d been checking up on the place every couple of weeks because I hadn’t seen the base’s owner in months and I knew about the server wipe. But when I went to check on the place later… it was completely gone.

By “completely gone”, I mean removed to the point that the original terrain was back where it was.

Pretty damn freaky, if you ask me…