To Kunniagaming and Kunniacraft | Love letter to Minecraft and its strange people

This one is not related to XIV at all but it goes back in time to a period of my life I cherish almost fanatically. It goes back further than the "Let's Play" craze. This all happened sometime between 2010-2012. I don't think it went for as long as 2012 but it might've. Mathias115 if you're reading this: I'm very sorry.

Minecraft - Early beginnings 

I wasn't caught up with anything online, I didn't really use the internet the way people usually did. It was mostly a place I would log on to chat with people, arrange to meet up IRL and such, at most I probably spent 30min to an hour on it every day. I barely knew about memes, and overall I just didn't care too much about the whole internet culture. I wasn't a jock but it just didn't interest me. I think my little brother actually told me about Minecraft, at the time I hadn't even heard about it. He gave me his account and I downloaded the game and played some. Mostly I just messed around, built a couple pure brick houses or a massive dirt house, I had no clue what the goal of the game was or even how it was meant to be played. It didn't really catch my attention until I saw a video by PaulSoaresJr titled something like "How to survive your first night".

After that video, everything changed for me. I had built up so much hype for the game now that I played it quite actively, I think this was around 2010? Maybe late 2009. Anyway, I played the singleplayer quite a bit, I even built my hometown, at least some of it. Obviously not in any way that's presentable but the fact that I was able to build it was cool. Eventually though singleplayer got boring and I looked for alternatives, I had from the start seen that you could play on servers but I didn't know how to set that up. I went online looking for a server to play on, I went through a couple servers. Some were griefer haven, just obsidian, and bedrock in the spawn because the entire landscape had been blown up. Others had more structure but nothing really pulled me in. Then I discovered Kunniagaming.net.

Application 

It was the sort of server you had to apply to join through a website, I quickly did that. Sadly the forum and the site itself is down, only a few pages available through the waybackmachine.

I found a reply I had written on the forum in July (Sat Jul 16, 2011 5:02 am) but by that point I had already posted 121 times. I was unable to find my first post, my application or anything else. 

I can't recall everything perfectly, but I do remember my first time on that server. I also remember my very first "house". When you first logged onto the server you were made some entry-level rank and had fairly basic privileges. You only had access to a certain few blocks and it was all rather strict, you couldn't really move out beyond a certain area. Because of that, almost every block in that area was already built on, no room for anything to build so I went looking and found a rather large hill/mountain. I dug into it and that was my home until I got the standard rank and was allowed to move out. Sadly I think I didn't save the screenshots I took, I'll look through an old computer and check if I got some.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/archive/alpha/minecraft-survival-servers/993979-kunniacraft-24-7-mumble-craftbook-iconomy-pvp-smp | Found this, worth checking out while it's still there.

I don't remember much from the very start of my time on that server. I remember moving out and making my own place, taking cues from the first spot and that I built my second house inside a hill. I remember making some farms, and some really basic mob farms. Nothing crazy, I built most of it out of my own creativity but it was very ineffective stuff.

This isn't anything I made but something Vindurza made on the old map. I remember it and figured I'd showcase it here, sadly I didn't really save much if any screenshots from the first map. I regret not asking for the map files.

Oh, I should probably say that this was on the first map. The server ran some plugins and because of that you couldn't update as fast as the vanilla game updated, each update would break every plugin so the server was almost always one update behind for a long period immediately following a new update. Eventually, the map got cluttered and we had to reset it. I think I joined the server around Minecraft Beta 1.5, this video (a trailer for 1.6) really captures the mood and is one I remember fondly.

On the first map I made some friends but no one I really wanted to build with. I tried to hang out with a few people, two of them got banned, one griefed me and another just stole everything. The plugins definitively helped but you need a certain amount of human trust. I basically just built, helped some people out with mining and went on by myself. I made one friend fairly early on called Daniel0814 I think, I'm sorry if the numbers aren't correct. But he ditched the game after an update. You weren't really notified that an update was launched so it was always a surprise when you couldn't log back onto the server and not everyone bothered downgrading.

This is either from the first or the second map but I'm putting it here because I'm not certain. 

At the time the only way to get cookies was to hack them in I think, so I believe the reason I got cookies in this picture was due to the plugin used on the server. Every now and then when you shoveled dirt or used a hoe on it you'd get cookies and other random items. 

If you take a look you can notice the lack of food bar, the hearts, the chests being a full block inside the ground. I can't remember any of this place so I'm not sure if this was my base or if I was just passing through here. From what I can tell though Fraps created a bunch of screenshots of this place, but they don't really make sense. 

Pay attention to the chest in the corner there. Because it has a name tag I suspect this was a base I built with someone, or at least someone shared this base with this person. UTFD_Dannyy's chest ;D or something. I remember Danny but I can't quite place all of this.

I used to chat with some people, Vindurza comes to mind. SkellatorOfLife was a constant troll in the funny sense, really nice people - both of them. I just wish I could turn back the time and experience the server and Minecraft for the first time again. There are a couple I have forgotten due to time but I do remember more people and if I saw their names again I would instantly recognize them, I'm sure. Jinux, Drakyn_Ral, ThePiedPiper, Vault13_Martyr, Deoxys3, UTFD_Dannyy, Nonces, Daniel0814. I'll probably add more names as I remember them.

I remember getting to know one person in particular really well - Mathias115. After several attempts to try settling with other people we finally settled together on a nice area. I might have it all mixed up now but I think we got to know each other on the first map because I needed some help with redstone, and then we settled on an island and made a huge wooden house. I think we also tried making a passive mob farm and we flooded the neighboring island. No, actually I remember flooding that island much to Math's dismay. It just looked awful so I think we cleaned it up or maybe that's why we ditched the area?  That might've been on the second map though. I remember that huge wooden house, this was before the adventure update. It had chests with everything you could need. Every chest had a sign saying which items were in which chest, I don't think we did a whole lot on that island but it was great. Wow, Minecraft was just great. I mean it was very simplistic and from an outside point of view, it must've appeared like you're just doing the same thing day in and day out but it was magic.

Second Map

Mathias115 and I settled quite a distance away from everyone. I remember the area well. Now, this might not have been our first area on the second map but it is one of the areas I remember fondly. We settled ontop a hill, or rather halfway inside it. The area looked like a long u with hills on both sides. I and Math settled on one side and Vindurza settled on the other side. I and Math were more into the practical and technical side of Minecraft so we built a huge underground structure. Vindurza was more of a builder so he tore down the entire hill and built a large house on the surface instead. If I remember correctly it had a certain treehouse aspect to it.

I and Math built deep underground, I think at this point in time you had to be below a certain level (y16?) to get slimes to spawn so we built below that so we could later incorporate a slime farm. Just thinking about it makes me angry that I didn't demand to get the world map files, we built something truly magnificent down there. We hollowed out an entire room to make a massive circle shaped area. It had every farm imaginable (and possible at the time), wheat, pumpkin, eggs, mobs, passive mobs, exp farm (this was after the Adventure Update). It just had everything, I remember it so well.

If I remember correctly we didn't properly hollow out the area with the circle shape structure inside it, I think that might've been the reason that we eventually ditched that whole area. We had to dig out like 30,000 blocks or something and TnT was disabled on the server.

At this point in time, I think a new update was released every 2-3 months, the next update was the 1.9 one which added a lot of things. I remember being amazed by Math's crazy 3x3 piston door design. I was maybe more creative than Math but he was much more technically skilled and if I had any issues he would sort them out. So every 2-3 months the server was lagging behind waiting for plugins to be updated, at most that could take a whole month to be fixed.
If I remember correctly Mojang didn't actually give us the 1.9 update but rather something like 1.91 or 1.93 or something. So no trailer. Because of the changes, we decided to move out and away from that area. With new updates you'd often find old things broken, I think our EXP farms broke and they added cool new things that required a new area.

This time we settled on building on the surface. I'll add some screenshots if I can find some, I also think I have some videos. Math and I had made a YouTube channel where we messed around with things so with any luck I didn't delete much. The structure we built on the surface was crazy cool. If you watched Ethoslab's old LP videos from his old base we had something similar. Upon watching some of the videos captured from that period I've found that it was a lot more epic than I first anticipated. Sadly though I used a horrible texture pack for some of the videos and thus I won't be able to show you how great some of it really was.

Vindurza's tree house

I don't remember what purpose this building served.
I believe you can make some of it out in the picture above

The plugin installed on the server allowed
you to make elevators with signs.

Our nice zombie EXP farm. Many hours were spent here.

Our surface chicken farm, and a fishing place in the background
 (the island with the diagonal path leading to it)

The surface EXP farm. Now, I don't remember how we set these up,
 but I think we built one on the surface and one underground,
 though we might've just repurposed this surface one
to work underground instead.

Another angle.
In need of a time machine so I can capture everything.

Vindurza's tree house in the background.
Our place was directly behind "me" in this picture, you just needed to go up a hill.

You can see the chicken farm and a lighthouse/guard tower thing too.
I think that was made purely for looks,
you can also sort of make out the mob farm in
 between the chicken farm and the guard tower.

Last base 

We moved away from the underground base eventually. This time we weren't gonna clutter things, originally we had some ideas for a structure but it's Minecraft so eventually you just mess around. Damn, I miss this so much. It really was just great. Sometimes I'll just put one of the old videos on fullscreen and pretend I'm back there. 

This was the treefarm we built. The design was really simplistic but man, I loved it. I would build one of these in everything after I saw it the first time, even in Tekkit - a very technical mod for Minecraft I built one of these.

This was from the last base me and Math had on the server. This gif showcases our iron farm, in the end we had to kill off all the villagers because they went berserk and duplicated. At one point we had like 1k villagers there or something, 2FPS, just had to blow it up.

Another thing I always built was a Day/Night detector-sensor-thingie. Day/Night detector doesn't sound right but I can't remember what it was called. Basically it would detect if it was daytime or nighttime by checking if the grass had grown or not. It wasn't light enough during the night for the grass to grow. It had very niche use but I built one of these everywhere. Math was the redstone guy mostly though. 

Looking back and seeing all of this again is very bittersweet. It's in a way like looking at a photo album of someone you know, it almost feels like I wasn't there.

If there was any doubt as to the age of this whole thing. Testificate was a sort of precursor to villagers. I think at the point this screenshot was taken you could trade with them, thus why we have it locked inside. I don't honestly remember why we named it Albert or what the "Mathgenious" thing was. I suspect internal humor or something.

Ok, I found out why he was there. He must've glitched into one of the tubes in the mob farm. We had so many testificates/villagers around that they were everywhere. You'd go caving and run into 10 stuck inside a small pocket of air. Lag combined with server loading and unloading chunks meant they could teleport almost anywhere around their central spawn location (shown in the gif above).

I and Math had a Youtube channel. Math used to type rather fast and when you do you can be prone to errors in your writing. We were discussing names and he wrote Prodotion instead of Production. I found the name to be adorable, almost cute-like so we went with that. The only thing that remains of Prodotion today is a Minecraft forum user, dead YT links, and descriptions. The channel itself is long gone, like years gone. We both had access to it but Math had the email registered to it and I believe he deleted it after we parted ways (not on the best terms hence the apology in the beginning). I still have old videos we made for it but most of it was deleted because when you record with Fraps (or maybe any recording software) you end up with a 10min clip taking like 4gb of space.

My biggest regret or rather one of several regrets I have is the way everything ended. I just don't know what happened. I was an avid PC gamer between 2010-2011/12. Like I barely touched my PS3, barely did anything on there, I mainly played Minecraft and the few times I did touch my PS3 it was to play with family. I remember playing Black Ops 1 in 2010 a lot, like 20-40 days in-game time but sometime in 2010 I stopped playing and I started playing Minecraft instead. This would later change. I don't remember the chronology of it all, I don't quite remember when things happened or how or even why to an extent. I remember that I sort of ditched Minecraft and everything after Kunniagaming died down.

Death of Kunniagaming

Math and I had messed around with a private server and we had a blast doing that but we really only did that as a substitute for Kunniagaming. Kunnia died out slowly due to the plugins forcing the servers to almost always be one update behind and at one point it was even two updates behind. You can, perhaps, get people to downgrade one update but two? No. The server also suffered from an inactive admin at this point, I think Jinux was mostly tired of the game. Drakyn_Ral took over some of it but it wasn't enough. He kept the ship sailing for a while, but eventually, it had to die out. Mods can extend the life of a server for quite a while but without a dedicated admin, it will just die. Anyway, with the server now dying and Kunnia not really responding to a new update the way it used to we all could see that it was closing time. I was incredibly sad about this, the server itself had become the game for me. I didn't play Minecraft for Minecraft but for all the incredible people I had met in the game. I don't blame anyone for it ending, everything must end, I was just sad. The worst part of a digital life like that is that you can't really go back and visit it. I can go back and visit the town I grew up in IRL, but I can't visit Kunniacraft. I doubt the world files exist anymore.

As a reference for the plugins forcing the servers to die out I can only talk about one time when we were fully up to date rather quickly. We had like 20-40 people online, the chat really came alive, with trolls and humor and serious discussion. It was just awesome, I made so many friends there, friends I had contact with outside the game through Skype and Steam but once an update rolled around the 20-40 people dwindled down to maybe 5-12 people on a good day. I have a lot of screenshots of moments where we were just 1-3 people online. And because it often took quite a while to get back up to date it always meant that the people who had previously been on and made a home for themselves never came back. We had a few who would come back but mostly they never did. The world map was littered with houses and areas indicating that someone had lived there but no longer did. The plugins installed on the server meant that you could actually see who had locked a chest and that was always sad to see. I often went exploring because we had a world map on the forums and I enjoyed seeing what other people were up to but it was just sad discovering a chest of someone I hadn't seen in a year, or the worst someone I had never even heard of. I remember visiting a house that was very neatly built but I didn't recognize the person on it meaning it had to have been quite a while since they were there last.

My memory now is quite jumbled. Honestly, I just wish I could walk the map one more time and see what we were all doing. I remember having a family member join in on the server TheRokk but he ditched Minecraft after a while due to playing on a laptop. I remember hearing some talk, and this was at the very end of Kunniagaming, on the forums about the admin making the map available for download but I never saw anything like that. For quite a while after the servers shut down the site was still alive, not really running but like you could visit the forums and see stuff. Half a year later it only featured the mumble links, and half a year after that the page was completely blank. If you try to visit it now it'll only load and fail after a bit. If you're interested this is the link.

The end of Minecraft

After the death of Kunnia I felt like I had become homeless, I tried joining a couple servers but it just wasn't the same. Math was a mod on a server dedicated to a YouTuber but I can't remember who it was, I played there for a bit but it just wasn't the same. I remember making my home in a mountain, I had a day/night sensor and everything of course. That was probably my last server. I just can't remember who that YouTuber was. The server had substantial lag, you'd dig out a block, move into it and suffocate. 1-3sec of lag at the worst. Kunniagaming never really had any lag. Anyway, after that server, I kinda just ditched Minecraft altogether. And then I ditched PC gaming in favor of playing Black Ops 2 on the PS3 with friends, IRL or otherwise. I was very hyped for Black Ops 2 so it felt natural to leave at that point.

I'm not quite sure what the point of this article was or is. If you've read through this then thank you. I went by the name of xErl (shortened at least) and I've been thinking about you all. No videos of Kunniacraft survived, all I found was a thumbnail for a video on Steam uploaded in 2011 but long gone. I hope all of you are okay. It was my home for a long time and I still miss it every now and then, I wish I had kept in touch with some of you in particular. I still have some videos on my old computer which I'll try to get uploaded but most of it is sadly gone. Think YouTube sneakily copyright striked a lot of my videos in 2014 and I never noticed but they're gone and the channel me and Math had is also gone. Thank you again for reading and I hope you've taken care of yourself and that this has perhaps made you a little nostalgic too. 

Written in January of 2018.