so I found and rebuilt a base on cloudworld survival.
Did I claim the land the base was on? No.
Do I know anything about the player or players who started and then abandoned the area? No.
I just flew over it one day while I was tooling around trying to figure out coordinates. It was so clearly an abandoned build, probably a bunch of kids screwing around on a free server only to abandon it the moment it wasn't Unstable or a PVP server.
Still I couldn't just LEAVE it.
Mostly because of the graveyard.
Whoever logged out there last had built graves- one for the server's owner, one for their best friend, one for their first ever teammate and one for another player they (according to the oak sign epitaph) 'always annoyed'.
There were poppies all over.
This base remnant was in a sparse jungle biome.
To get poppies, they had to bonemeal the grass- a lot.
So whoever was basing there, they'd cared enough to leave a mark. Even if it was a joke graveyard, they'd put effort into it.
It only seemed fair that the effort be rewarded, in some way.
I think a lot of the younger players who populate public servers could do with lessons in humility, in asking questions, in patience. I also know that there's nothing so hard to teach as a kid who already thinks they know everything, or worse figures they don't HAVE to know anything, because someone will be doing the thinking for them.
I also think if you build nice things, it encourages people to continue making them nice.
So I used the footprint of the barely-built house they left- a big boxy thing I turned into two levels with a blackstone roof. I gave their nether portal a makeover with gold blocks, chains, stone bricks. I put a rustic wall around the graveyard, added some lanterns, mirrored that same rustic wall on the far side of the house where I made a little farm complete with beehives.
Made the floors inside a checkerboard, iron doors with buttons in, pressure plates out. Three beds upstairs (you never know) and a full enchantment set up. There's a staircase in the basement that leads to the start of a simplistic mine. I built a pond about twenty blocks from the house deep enough to fish treasure out of.
It's not FINISHED, not by any means; where would the fun in that be? But it's a start. It could be a home for someone, coming across it out in the wild.
It's entirely possible the kids who made that wreck of a creeper-griefed base will never log back in. It will likely stand empty for a long time, possibly until the server inevitably closes.
It doesn't much matter to me.
In a huge survival server where I parallel play, quietly making my trailer park while CloudWorld's dramas great and small play out just around the corner, there was a mess.
I cleaned it up, and maybe it will become a mess again. Maybe it will become something better.
Whatever it is, I'm glad to have done it, and I hope someday- remote as the possibility might be- someone makes use of it.
