This is post two in the "Story time with Parz" series, to read all posts visit forums.stonebound.net/history.

Five years ago I was introduced to Minecraft by way of the ‘Unleashed’ FTB pack. A friend who just got into the game sent me a link to a video to ‘sell me’ on playing. It was Direwolf20 - with his one of a kind voice talking about his automatic tree farm build. Wait Minecraft isn’t just shitty graphics and tree punching?

I had tried Minecraft once before. At the time I thought any game that looked the way Minecraft looks must be terrible. And gave up on it within the first few minutes.

Modded minecraft looked interesting. Base building - technology progression. The depth and openness of the game had me interested and soon would have me hooked. Ultimately it’s the reason Minecraft is now my favorite game ever.

So a friend of mine brought his computer over. Old School lan party! He and I installed the FTB pack - Unleashed. We played all weekend, and every weekend for a month. Looking back I have fond memories of that first world. I’m sure many of you do of bases you have built along the way. I was really proud when I built a piston driven door that opened up our base.

It didn’t take long for us to realize we wanted to play without the hassle of lugging around our rigs. So we looked for a multiplayer server to play on. And if you're reading this, you have found yourself in this very situation. How do you find a community? What should you expect when looking for a server to play on? We stumbled into four or five different servers. Everything from small servers - to the mega population servers.

The experience to be honest sucked. Lag was rampant. And before Mojang cracked down on this behavior - it was common to join a server and find artificial paywalls. As an example in order to chunkload an area - you had to pay. Want to use a quarry? Pay. The servers would have elaborate Tiers or levels of support one would have to subscribe to in order to have access to particular blocks and features. yuck.

Now clearly not every community and server was trying to run it as a for profit business. I didn’t know it at the time but you can find great communities and servers to play on if you look in the right places.

After a few months of bouncing around from community to community. Losing progress with map resets - enduring unexpected server downtime. I rented the first server. It was from one of these companies who purchase a dedicated box from a Data Center - and then sell off Virtual servers to run Minecraft on.

That first servers functionality was highly gimped. It didn’t help that I had no idea what I was doing. It really wasn’t a server - it was an instance of Multicraft running on a server.
I spoke with my friends on what we should call ourselves. After a night or drinking and debate We decided on Mind-Bacon.

When I woke up - Mind-bacon was online. I purchased the now expired domain Mind-bacon.com. I thought this name was the coolest thing ever. I mean - who doesn’t like bacon. And get it - mine? Like minecraft? Jeeze guys - is this thing on?

The performance of the server sucked. So eventually I purchased the dedicated server that Stonebound uses today. This server sits in a data center. Faster - stronger but at by 4x the cost. Our limits were no longer the hardware - but my terrible admin skills.

Fast forward a few months later. My Friends started to log in less and less. Me on the other hand was becoming obsessed. If I wasn’t playing - I was watching youtube or reading reddit and learning new mods.

Time passed - and Counterstrike ate my friends. Now - I was alone on the server most of the time. I alone had to pay the bills. Plus I wanted to show off my increasingly complex builds to someone. So my plan was to let go of Mind Bacon - and join another community.

Wait - the server is paid for another 60 days. What if I open up mind bacon to the public? What do I have to lose?

The only problem with the plan - my Admin skills were ‘limited’. As an example - to get mindbacon setup. I paid a kid that lives on my block 30 bucks to ssh into the server - and install the Ubuntu OS, setup Multicraft and setup the pack. When he was done he gave me the credentials The Password was ‘Password123Changeme’.

I would have changed it - but I had no idea how…

Mindbacon Becomes Stonebound with a little help

More tomorrow,

parz

On June of 2014 the name Stonebound was born. It’s got me thinking about all the path we have traveled.

I’m going to submit a post every day for the next few days. I’m going to tell the origin story at least from my point of view and also make an announcement surrounding the future direction of Stonebound.

The process of thinking about the history of this place has been really fun. It’s humbling to think about the friendships and great people I’ve had the chance to meet and hang with along the road. Building and watching relationships that started here but transcend Stonebound is in my opinion the best part of this place.

Each year for my birthday my best mate and I take 10 days and canoe camp in the waters found at the border between the US and Canada. ‘The Boundary Waters’ If you haven’t heard of this magical spot. It’s incredible.

Three years ago - logging back in after my trip. My avatar was moved into a different place on the map. I was in a room with Graphika, phit, Twitch,Panda, Alleluid, and Dwaing to name a few. I was on teamspeak as they gave me a tour of what they had built.

A ‘mini’ city - floating on a huge Airship. The statues of everyone from the server could be found around town - fishing, or walking about. Some sitting at the brewery. Others hanging in the library. The level of detail and effort made this place really cool. Inside jokes were played out with statues of people recently banned. Or friends lost to time. A very cool build indeed.

The folks on teamspeak then sang me happy birthday. Pretty cool huh?

Stories like this have colored my experience and have made my time with Stonebound fun and memorable.

Many people along the way have helped to shape this community. Stonebound has survived massive change. We have lost some great people along the way - we have banned terrible annoying people. We have lifted bans - only to ban again. The leadership structure and makeup has changed - from a single leader to panel leadership - and back again.

Stonebound at its core is a community setup to allow you to play modded Minecraft with very few rules and without a pay-wall. But what makes it special is the people who hang out here.

I’m going to raddle on for a few posts on how we got here, share some stories that have stuck out and some changes we are making as we move forward.

Did you know that when Stonebound was first created - it was called Mind-bacon?

More tomorrow,

parz

FTB Revelation has received a big update, removing mods and adding new ones, including Thaumcraft, EnderIO, and Blood Magic. Due to the extensive nature of the update, we will be replacing our current Revelation server with a fresh map.

If you do not have Revelation yet, you can download it from the Twitch or FTB Launcher. Otherwise, update your pack to version 2.0.0.

The server will open Friday, June 22nd, 7pm UTC (click here for your timezone)

Server Address: revelation.stonebound.net

You can vote on the server map in our Discord until Thursday, the two options are Quark Realistic and Vanilla.

To free up resources for the new server, the old Revelation server will be shut down this week. For those that want to continue playing it, you can get a map download by contacting phit on the forums or Discord.

We look forward to seeing you on the server!

We are happy to announce our next server, FTB Continuum. It finally happened; FTB released their long awaited Expert pack for 1.12, including hundreds of quests, a custom mod and countless recipe tweaks.

You can download the pack from the Twitch Launcher. Just search for FTB Continuum in the Feed The Beast modpack section.

The server will open Friday, May 25th, around 8pm UTC (click here for your timezone)

Server Address: continuum.stonebound.net

As always, you can see the server map at map.stonebound.net/continuum and possibly pick a spot where you would want to live.
We look forward to seeing you on the server!

To free up resources for the new server, Rise of the Pack was shut down last weekend. For those that want to continue playing it, you can get a map download by contacting phit on the forums or Discord.

Based on the feedback we received from our recent age survey, the community is in overwhelming support of increasing our age requirement to 18+.

This means that we will no longer consider applicants that are 13-15 years old. Users that are 16+ will be considered, but will be under closer review than previously. We will be implementing this change in one month.

After 11:59PM UTC (click here for your timezone) on April 14th, 2018, we will no longer accept applicants that are under the age of 16.