Rules for a world without rules
Anarchy is a world where almost anything goes. But somebody has to define that “almost”: what drops from the dead, what an explosion breaks, who pays for someone else's head. Over two weeks in September Anarchy got its answers — and weapons the game never had before.
A month of silence
From September 7 all work went into Anarchy, while the players' server ran the September 4 version the whole time. Players saw everything this chapter describes all at once — on October 2, the day Anarchy came out.
The first days went into the foundation. On September 8 Anarchy got its own money and a protected square around the spawn point: you can't build or break in it, and every refusal is explained in words. The same day survival got experience — for mobs, with a shop that trades it for food. And thirteen effects with their own names: Briskness, Hobble, Zeal, Ache, Recovery, Taint, Blight, Satiety, Exhaustion, Tempering, Gills, Influx, Fracture. There was nowhere to get them yet — that would come later, together with flasks. But the death screen for “Taint” already named the cause honestly. Before, it said “You were killed by the game mode”.
Four questions
On September 10 we answered Anarchy's main questions in one go. Items drop on death — yes. There's a Buyer — but only in Anarchy; survival still doesn't have one. Explosions break blocks — yes. Until that day the game had not a single explosion that broke anything at all.
The same day Anarchy got its menu, a playtime counter with a top ten, the random move /rtp into the wild world, claims with the same three-dimensional borders as in survival, ranks and clans. Clans came with a funny story: nobody could create a clan — the game answered “You only have 0” with a full wallet. It was fixed the same day.
Everything you're carrying
On September 12–13 the rules started working. A hit gives both players a combat tag for 30 seconds, and every next hit extends it. While it's on, leaving the game means death, and you can't escape a fight by teleport. A combat bar appeared above the hotbar that runs down to exactly zero. Die in Anarchy — and everything in your pockets and on you falls to the ground.
Death got a price for the killer too — or rather a reward: they instantly get part of the victim's coins in their wallet. You can also put a bounty on someone's head from your own wallet, and whoever kills the target gets it. You can't put one on yourself, and you can't claim your own bounty. If the target leaves the server or is killed by the one who set the bounty, the money goes back to them.
And the Buyer appeared. At first his window sold one row per tap — someone back from the mine clicked about twenty times. So next to /sell came /sell all, which sells everything at once, and /worth — to find out the price without selling anything.
The first explosion
On September 12 TNT lit with a tinderbox exploded for the first time and blew a crater in the ground. The explosion spared the spawn, and some of the broken blocks dropped as loot. From September 15 explosions started to hurt too: armor soaks up the damage, and death got its own lines — “died in an explosion” and “blown up by a player”. A real fuse, chain explosions and TNT from the Buyer — that's the next chapter.
A spawn where you can't do anything
On September 11 it was said briefly: “nothing can be broken at spawn.” On September 16 the Anarchy spawn map — a 424-by-424-block build — became entirely unbreakable. You can't break or place anything on it, you can't even open a door or eat one of the build's cakes. The last part was found during testing: without a separate lock on clicks, anyone could have opened every door and eaten every cake without breaking a single block.
The same time we also decided about platinum: it's one for the whole network. Earned in one mode — spend it in any.
More than eighty bugs
On September 14 and 15 we did what usually gets put off: we reread all the game scripts in a row. The second pass alone was 111 files and almost 68 thousand lines. We found more than eighty bugs that had been living in the game. For example, in survival experience for killed mobs was never awarded once — from the very day experience appeared. And the spouses' “home” command cheerfully wrote “Welcome home” and took you nowhere. Now it honestly names the world where the house stands.
Meanwhile in survival
Survival got a kitchen. The cauldron cooks porridge, three soups — carrot, egg and chicken — and seven candies that differ only in color. The first candies and porridge crunched like rusks when eaten; the sound was fixed. And a dropped sword with powers stopped losing them: before, two swords on the floor “merged” into one, and the powers vanished silently.
The maul and the pike
The finale of these two weeks was weapons the game never had before. On September 16 the war maul appeared: a sledgehammer with an iridium head on a wooden handle. The higher you jumped before the hit, the harder it strikes. So that one jump can't flatten anyone you like, the maul rests for half a minute after a hit, and a lethal blow from above leaves the victim three hearts. It's made from four iridium and a stick.
On September 17 the war pike arrived: right-click into the air — and a thrust five blocks forward. A lethal thrust leaves one heart. It's made from iridium and two sticks. On September 18 the pike got the “Thrust” power — every thrust throws you forward, further the higher its level — and six sword powers: “Keenness”, “Heaven's Wrath”, “Insect Scourge”, “Shove”, “Fire Rite” and “Plunder”.
Along the way an old problem nobody had noticed turned up. If you hit a player standing on the ground, the knockback didn't move them sideways at all — exactly zero blocks, it only bounced them up. And for the same reason the golden trampoline in survival didn't push you forward. One fix — and a hit pushes again, 0.42 blocks instead of zero. Group fights were different after that.