Minecraft
The Talkhaus' interest in Minecraft started in 2010 and originated from the IRC. Minecraft is, according to it's official website "a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine." There are two versions of Minecraft and each has had their own following and for a time they ran concurrently Minecraft Classic was the first introduction of Minecraft into the talkhaus. It was, and will always be as far as I now,be free and is purely for building structures and whatever your imagination can think of.
Minecraft Classic
Minecraft Classic was the precursor to Minecraft Alpha, a paid game ($10 at the Alpha stage) that took the idea of Minecraft Classic and built upon it. Instead of been given infinite blocks in a finite space you have to harvest blocks,make tools etc so that you can build what you want. This mode was called “Survival”. Minecraft Alpha (and Beta 1.7 as of July 1 2011) has many more features and is still having more added to it which makes it vastly superior to Classic. On the IRC, different people would build structures on different peoples Minecraft Classic servers. O-Card was one of the first to create a server for the IRCers. One of the first servers had a castle with moat and inside were Four in a Row and Checkers boards. GanonTEK's server was the least popular Minecraft Classic server in the IRC but soon began to be phased out as Minecraft Alpha started taking over.
History of Talkhaus Minecraft Servers
In a way, the Talkhaus and Minecraft have always gone hand in hand. Both ideas had been conceived at around the same time, and both have gathered a growing following during the years 2009 and 2010. It is therefore no surprise that Minecraft had always had a special place within the community, especially since it had the power to connect the forums, Skype, and the IRC together.
Minecraft Classic Servers (May - November 2010)
Talkhaus first took notice of Minecraft in mid-2010, around the same time that the rest of the internet did. It is unclear who was the first to mention it on the IRC, but what is known is that people quickly took to the idea of creating a server for the free-to-play game, especially since it was easily playable in everyone's browser. O-Card was one of the first ones to host a talkhaus minecraft server between June and July of 2010. Since hosting was session-based at that time, there was no continuous server admin, and worlds were often lost when quitting the game (unless saved to a file prior to closure). Today, nothing remains of the early Minecraft Classic maps.
Notable members of the early classic servers included: O-Card, Wareng, Argumentable, GanonTEK and Rena.
Minecraft Alpha on the rawcritics server (July 2010 - February 2011)
Use of the Minecraft Classic servers was shortlived, however, since in July 2010, Minecraft was announced to have reached the Alpha stage. At this point, it suddenly gained a huge following from all over the internet, partly due to its low price of 10$. This also drew a lot of Talkhausers in, and by the end of the year, most people had migrated to Minecraft Alpha.
During the first few months, there was no clear community server where everyone could meet up. Often, people server-jumped and tried to decide on a place to stay. It wasn't until October 2010 that a few people from the IRC decided they wanted to build a talkhaus village on a server called “minecraft.rawcritics.com”. The village was situated a few thousand blocks away from the spawn and thus was generally unknown on the server, but it quickly grew into a medium-sized settlement of over 15 players.
The rawcritics server was well frequented during the turn of the year 2010/2011, but interest in it quickly died down after the admins announced they would replace the current world with a new one due to their update to Minecraft Beta.
A full report on the state of the settlement just before deletion of the server can be found here.
Notable members of the rawcritics server included: Wareng, Cobalt, O-Card, m00npirate, Rena.
Minecraft Beta and BTYM's server (February 2011 - July 2012)
In the desperate need for a new server, the IRC figured it'd be best to let a member of the Talkhaus itself host the next server - a server for the community, and the community only. This was discussed in the IRC for a while, and eventually, BTYM suggested he could host the server remotely, costing him about 10$ each month (later on, this rose to 30$ per month). This was the start of a series of professional server hosting for talkhaus MC-servers. Not only did BTYM pay for external server hosting, he also registered the website talkha.us (now redirects to the forums - BTYM still uses the server and domain for other projects) and installed various administration mods. At first, the server was survival-only, but quickly turned into a weird mixture of creative with survival-elements. The first few days started out with people building their houses, as well as some erecting sprite art all over the place. In late February, a Cat Planet face was built near the spawn. In April, kilon built a spleef arena.
Generally, much fun was had, and BTYM's server still stands as the longest running MC server of them all. However, during early 2012, the server suddenly entered a steep decline as BTYM posted about it on the MC forums in the hopes of attracting new people. For the next few days, the server was swarmed with griefers and new people building things all over the place, and BTYM was forced to use world reset and excessive managing tools to stop the server from being totally destroyed. The massive influx of new players kept the server active for a long time, but BTYM started having to manage the server on a daily basis. Adding to those problems was the fact that Minecraft underwent a very hectic update schedule in late 2011, preparing it for the final release (1.0) planned for the end of the year. As a consequence of this, the managing mod Canary, used by BTYM back then, frequently broke (one time deleting almost 2 months of work), and people who wanted to use the server had to hold back on updates, sometimes for as long as a whole month.
This problem was eventually resolved by switching to Bukkit in December 2011. It was around that time too, that BTYM decided to start a seperate world on the same server, mainly for people who wanted to play pure survival. But even with all those new changes, people just didn't want to come to the server anymore - especially after having lost almost 2 months worth of creations. How exactly the server died, nobody knows. The last update from BTYM himself was posted on the 15th of April 2012, with him saying that he's not interested in Minecraft anymore but would keep the server running. The only other thing that is known of this late period of decay is that eventually, the server was largely dead, except for some 14-year-olds hogging the place every now and then.
As of the 6th of July 2012, the server is permanently down, and a TF2 randomizer server has been hosted on talkha.us instead (so much less maintenance!)
Notable members of BTYM's server included : Loud (btym), Punisher, CityReselection, kilon, Demenstar, Septentrion_P, RikunFrances, CondorTalon, BeatBoxingBoo, Wareng, Chdata, SayAnything, Argumentable, Kadj, freelop, warioeagle, GanonTEK, SheerCold, maket000, TheReptile, Rastman007
Rena's Server (Summer 2012)
After the decline of BTYM's server in early 2012, interest in Minecraft had mostly died down throughout the Talkhaus community. From April to June, there were a few attempts at reviving the game, but none really proved effective for more than a few weeks. The arguably most long lived attempt was Rena's server, started in March or April [verification?] of 2012. During its short lifetime of ~4 months, it hosted mostly people from the IRC and was a pure survival server.
Notable members of Rena's server included: Rena, Wareng, m00npirate, Cup, BeatBoxingBoo
LunarNeedle's Server (March 2013 - June 2014)
From the middle of 2012 until the beginning of 2013, Minecraft played little to no role in the community. Interest in it was considered dead and the few people that still played the game did so mostly in private or on other servers.
The fact that Minecraft got revived is all thanks to exactly one person - LunarNeedle. Having joined in March 2013, he mostly only participated in MAGL, in which he was effectively awarded with 24th place. He mostly dissapeared for a couple days until he joined Skypehaus. Soon after joining, he proposed the idea of hosting a Minecraft Server on his new PC, and, for some reason, people were all over it. The first few members were people from the Skypehaus, but eventually, Lunar made a thread on the forums and many other Talkhausers joined in.
Lunar's server is hosted on his own computer and runs ~23/7. It's a pure survival server with difficulty settings on “Hard”. Currently, the world is ~3000×3000 blocks big, featuring a central city around the spawn point, a mob grinder, community farms, a harbor, an extensive rail network, and a remote settlement mostly built by Lunar, around 250 blocks from the spawn.
In early Fall 2013, Lunarneedle started having port issues. This lead the ownership to transfer to BeatBoxingBoo after the Talkhaustrophe, who kept the server mostly up and running until the end of the year, when interest waned once again and the server experienced regular downtimes, only being opened periodically for UHCs and similar events. During this time, the server was hosted on BBB's private computer and thus had quite noticeable lag spikes. This issue disappeared when BeatBoxingBoo decided to invest into a hosted server once more in May 2014. On the 31st, the server was back up, running LunarNeedle's map full-time once more. However, during the subsequent days, BBB decided to replace the old map with a completely new one, a plan that was put into action on the 4th and 5th of June. The new map under BBB's adminship will from here on be seen as a “new server”.
Notable members of LunarNeedle's server were: LunarNeedle, BeatBoxingBoo, Bwarch, Paralars, Kerkec, dashta, darkychao, Holy, validon98, GanonTEK
Other servers
Throughout the 3 years of Minecraft activity on Talkhaus, there has also been a number of very short-lived attempts made by lesser known members to start community servers on their own. One of them included a Skypehaus-only server made in early 2011, by an unknown person (possibly associated with Demenstar). Demenstar himself also often invited people to join him to other servers when he and his friends were playing adventure maps. This happened largely during the first few months of 2012 and then rapidly died off as Demenstar switched to League of Legends.
A notable exception was TLs4's server, set up somewhen in 2010 [when exactly?]. It ran for the better part of a year, but rarely had any visitors, as most people preferred to go either to the rawcritics or BTYM's server. Eventually, it was deleted at some point in 2011 [when exactly?]. Its address was TLs4.c2mcs.net.
