Story time with Parz, Mind-Bacon - Come on it was a good name!
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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
