The island that never was

The last day of July. We put the server and client together into one workshop, opened the world — and didn't find in it the main island every player knew.

Flat grass and a handful of villagers

On July 31, at ten to three in the afternoon, two big programs landed in one folder: our server and our client. Before that they lived apart and held on to each other by a thread. The move showed it right away — we had to untie knots nobody had noticed before.

By that day the new server could do quite a lot: fifty kinds of creatures, more than two thousand crafting recipes checked by the server, villagers and signs, the islands mode, and moving between worlds in a twentieth of a second — without reconnecting. But the worlds themselves were placeholders: three flat fields of five layers of dirt labeled “Hub”, “Islands”, “Survival”.

A couple of hours later the placeholders were replaced with real maps: the hub's ground and the spleef arena. In the evening we went in to take a look — and saw flat grass with a handful of villagers. So where was the island?

The island lived only in code

Everyone who played on Mypex before remembers the floating hub island. We looked for it in the map files and didn't find it. It turned out the old server rebuilt the island from scratch on every launch — with code — and never saved it anywhere. It only existed for as long as the server was running.

We restored the island from the blueprint, piece by piece: a radius of thirty blocks with a wavy edge, a plaza of quartz and prismarine with a ring and diagonals, a light well in the middle, eight lanterns in a circle, two spruces and two oaks, a red arrow above the well and four little satellite islands around it. The well, as before, led to the survival world.

Jumping ahead: just a week later we would give up this island. But that evening it came back — and it became clear how much would have to be built anew rather than carried over.

“Who's building the main hub?” — “Nobody”

That was the honest answer to the question of who's in charge of the place where everyone lands on joining. By eight in the evening it existed: the stone hall of the shared lobby. Dark slate, white quartz, a colonnade and two big arches into the modes with stained glass over the passage, lit by turquoise lanterns, two greeters and a scoreboard “here now: N”. The materials were chosen on purpose: no survival grass, no island sand — a third place you recognize without a single word.

From that evening on, every login to the server went through the shared lobby, each mode got its own lobby, and items and health stopped moving between modes. And one more important little thing: every island became a separate world. Before, all islands lay side by side, and you could see other people's from your own plot.

Things that live

August 1 went into what makes a world feel lived-in. Chests became real storage — before that, a chest differed from a brick only by its picture. The client learned to draw furniture, and the first item was an ordinary chair. The islands got a recoloring brush, cooking in the smokehouse and the oven, a sink you can draw water from, and a garden bed that grows even while its owner is away. A newcomer found bread, a guidebook and a wooden axe in the chest of the starter hut.

Dashes were vanishing from chat. A leaderboard line “1. Player — 1,000” arrived without its dash, because that character wasn't in the font. There were 665 occurrences of such “invisible” characters, 425 of them dashes. The font almost doubled, and an unknown character is now drawn as a little box instead of disappearing.

The emergency brake

August 2 was the busiest day of the week — more than five hundred changes. And on that day came the first decision that changed the plans in one stroke: the big furniture catalog was put on pause — “just don't do it… at all for now.” The effort went where a player would feel the difference without a single new picture.

Combat, for example. Until then a fist and the best sword did the same damage, and peaceful creatures could never fight back. Now damage depends on the weapon, creatures hit back and drop loot. Other players' arms came alive: the client had long been sending the swing, but the server never passed it on to anyone, and other players' arms hung like a mannequin's.

Life appeared in the survival world for the first time: a pasture with animals around spawn, wastelands with monsters to the north. Until that day there were no creature spawning rules in any world. Breaking became fair: the server counts the breaking time from the block's hardness. Spleef turned into a real game: a tower of four grass floors, the floors vanish one by one, and at the end of the round the block under everyone's feet disappears. On the old server, entering the arena wiped your items forever — with us they're put away and given back on any exit.

And the first “workstation” was a cauldron that cooks by recipes on its own. In the first version beetroot soup was unreachable: the cauldron counted slots, and beetroots stack in a single slot. We taught it to count pieces.

Caught before players

Part of these days' work no player will ever see — and that's a good thing. Reconnecting could lose everything you'd earned in your second session. A network packet arriving twice dropped a chunk of the world into a hole. The very bottom, indestructible layer of the imported maps arrived as air — 224,640 blocks you could fall through. Water and lava stood still. All of this was found and fixed before the new server saw its first player.