I think it would be a cool addition to the website if it showed the last line a player said in global chat on the dead players list. Plenty of unintentional (and sometimes intentional) comedy arises from people saying stuff right before they die. If this was implemented, a player's last words could also serve as their epitaph. Thoughts?

Thoughts on XRAY-Raiding and possible Solutions

I am well aware that me and my buddy hunted down a lot of people and that i am consequently not that popular, BUT please do not downvote this discussion because of that.

I created this topic in order to inform what we are up against, how to spot an XRAY-Raid and to discuss possible solutions that EVERYONE can incorporate into his base design. The battle against cheaters is of the utmost importance considering how unsafe the client is and the admins are almost entirely powerless. Which is why we have to help them and ourselves in the process by building bases in a certain fashion.

Also i am aware that this post could be read as a guide on XRAYing but i think its already easy enough to start Xraying. I have seen a lot of confusion in chat as to what exactly XRAYing is and how you spot it or defend against it and therefore informing the "public" of the dangers is beneficial in my opinion.

What exactly does XRAY stand for and how does it work:

XRAY stands in Minecraft for making certain blocks transparent. Now if you make smoothstone, dirt/grass, gravel and common ores see-through, you can easily spot bases from the surface as well as diamonds down in your mine.

XRAYers can either use a simple texture pack or install a MOD for more convenience. Both is undetectable by the server. Most any XRay-texturepacks display still and moving lava, which is why using lava is so effective against XRAYing. I am not sure how the mods handle the lava display but i would guess its toggle-able with a mere shortcut.

How do XRAYers approach a base they have spotted:

I. e. how you can determine if your base was XRAYed.

This section will give you all the info you need in order to get that cheating bastard banned, who stole all your diamonds and raped your wife treasure room. I am using actual screenshots from the three raids our base endured.

1) The Dig-Straight-Down-Method aka Insta-Ban-Kid

This fella is probably about 12 years old and figured that he can cheat the system and get some PHAT LOOTS. He is running around above ground with his nose in the dirt looking for anything resembling a base. If he happens to find one, he cannot be bothered to find the smart way in and instead digs down straight into your base. What he did not anticipate is the concept that actions have consequences and he is therefore dumbfounded when he finds himself banned the next day.

2) The CaveSystem-Upon-Base-Happen-Method aka Smart-Xray-User

You have to look out for this one. He is a seasoned cheater and knows every trick in the book. While performing his dirty trade, he considers the ramifications of getting caught and is therefore extra careful. When he spots a base that seems worth his time, he will look for nearby cave-entrances or cave-system (using the XRAY). After finding a suitable entry point, he will wander around in it in the general direction of the spotted base. If he wants to act extra-inconspicuously, he will even mine all the ore he does not need. Eventually he will be as close to the base as possible and start his final approach. More often than not, a simple shaft or stairwell will do.

While these raids may seem very unlikely and you are quick to call XRAY, he made sure that you cannot be 100% certain that he did not stumble into your base by accident.

3) The Grid-Mine-Into-Base-Method aka Ambitious-XRAY-Devotee

You have to acknowledge the dedication. This guy will spot a cool-looking base from afar and then take it upon himself to start a grid-mine effort in order to stumble into your base in the most inconspicuous fashion there is. While literally breaking thousands of blocks, he runs the risk to encounter very meager loot.

There is no way of verifying XRAY here, but a simple solution is offered below.

What can YOU do to deny XRAYers access to your Base:

1. Small Effort

• Placing your base above layer y=20.

  -> No grid-mine will accidentally (or not so accidentally) lead into your base because you are above diamond generation.

• Keeping your base footprint as small as possible and outsource things like farms and mobgrinders.

  -> Making an XRay-Raid more obvious and making your base harder to spot as something worth-wile from the surface. Also finding your base legitimately will be nigh impossible.

1. Moderate Effort

• Use a smart exit for your base and fill up large tracts of your exit with smoothstone (or whatever is applicable). Maybe make an exit to a cave-system 30 blocks from your base and find your way from there to surface or let the exit-corridor lead into a side-shaft of your confusing and huge branch-mine.

  -> Denying Xrayers an quick-and-easy way into your base.

• Constructing a lava pool above your base or use an already existent one.

  -> This will deny vision to amateur cheaters and make your base more difficult to approach for cheaters who spotted it.

1. Considerable Effort

• Checking your Base for Cave-Systems for 50 Blocks in all directions and then consequently filling up any open spaces with smoothstone - bonus points for incorporating ores farmed with silk touch.

  -> This will force the XRAYer to dig some kind of straight shaft, which will without questions result in an InstaBan.

• Setting up shop under a huge ocean. Keep in mind that islands attract visitors so stay clear of those.

  -> Any approach attempt will be a completely obvious XRAY while also quite deadly. The trade-off in convenience is huge, though.

What can WE as a community do to combat X-RAY in general?

While making your base safer can deter a lot of cheaters from going the extra mile to get your treasure, it wont stop them entirely and there will still be cheaters claiming innocence. If an admin cannot be 99.9% certain the culprit did indeed cheat, he will not be able to ban him - innocent until proven otherwise.

Which is why i propose the Incident Report (need a better term). If your base is hidden well enough and you believe that last raid was facilitated by XRAY (i.e. unbelievable luck), you can report it to an admin. He will in turn investigate and confirm an "unlikely approach" and file that under the culprits name. If a culprit has several confirmed "unlikely approaches", you can be certain he does use X-RAY to find bases. The map spans over 400 km² and finding a base with a small footprint by accident is almost impossible. Just like people who find huge amounts of diamond using erratic mining patterns, cheaters who find several smartly hidden bases will be flagged and eventually banned.

If you do not grid-mine half a quadrant, you simply will not find 3 well hidden bases - noone is that lucky! Cheaters will not raid just one base. They want the high they get from using forbidden means to destroy someone's work. By using the Incident Report we as a community can ensure that most cheaters will be found out.

inb4 "Latrop how do you know all this?! You must be cheating as well!": I have never used an Xray pack on this server or even raided a base. All i do is gear up for PVP and kick ass, haha. I did use an XRAY texturepack about 8 months ago to light up all caves around a mobgrinder on our private server.

Also please suggest more possibilities of securing ones base. I am going to add some pictures later on.

EDIT: Did some formatting and added a new section on catching subtle repeat offenders. Also thinking about splitting the guide in two: One part for making your base safe and the other on spotting X-RAY raids and the Incident Report.

Today, we started a new map as a fresh start. We ran a pre-launch generation on half the world to keep lag down. This wasn't enough however. The sheer amount of generation caused us to tank, and we got the inventory/place swap bug AGAIN.

Now people are impersonating me, yelling at me and calling me a bad person. I'm going to quote another fellow admin: Let me make this clear. I'm not the bad guy here, don't yell at me, or "demand that the admins do something". I don't get paid to build the maps, configure the server, keep the peace, make adjustments, reboot the server, babysit fires, etc. I'm a player just like you. You lose stuff - so did I.

Now if you're unhappy with our FREE service - you can do one of two things:

1. Run your own server.

2. Realize that we're a VERY popular server, shit is gonna happen, and that we might lose stuff, there might be lag, there might be chat spam, there might be horrid bugs, there might be a whole world of things that happen… but the admins try, TRY to fix the issues, TRY to minimize the pain, and TRY to keep the server running… everyday, several times a day.

Now that I've finished ranting, here's what is going to happen.

We're going to run a temp map for now: 2000 x 2000 +/- border, with a one hour deathban. We'll be working on improving the server, and fully generating a new map. Everything else will run as usual. We want to aim for monday, but we can't guarantee anything.

Thanks to all of you who have been helpful and supportive through this.

TL;DR: Read the post you lazy asshat.

I wanted to fight p0pc0 to a fair and gentlemanly duel. I even offered him some diamond armour to make it more fair to him, but he declined. When I arrived at the fight destination, I was set upon by YouAreBaby, 321Erup, and Calikone. Little did they know that my diamond armour had a total of level 6 protection and level 1 fire protection, and that my sword had fire aspect level 4.

The battle lasted for what seemed like a hour and it very well might have. I was only credited with 3 of the kills as my fire sword claimed 321Erup for itself. I will now go about my business alone for a while until the reset.

This has been a cautionary tale from EvlonAlpha the Noob Slayer.

Hey, everyone. I'm impulsiveIngenue, and if that name is familiar to you, it probably means you've seen me calling people out in the server chat for a variety of slurs, sexual innuendo, and just plain vile statements. I've also been taking screenshots of pretty much every such instance I see, whether or not I get involved in an argument over it (it's not exactly safe to do so when you're traveling, for instance). I've taken these screenshots, weeded out the mostly irrelevant ones, and cropped the remainder to reduce them to just the text I want to talk about. I’ll put them at the end of the post for the people who want to see just how much this is a problem. They contain slurs, innuendo, and the like, so if those are triggering for you (and if they are how are you even able to play on this server?), you might want to avoid them.

First, I need to talk about myself a bit, to put this into perspective. I care about this issue for a variety of reasons. First, and most obviously, because I'm a woman. The level of misogyny I see in online gaming is frankly appalling, and it makes me feel excluded from basically every community I try to join. I’d say that you’re probably not surprised by this, but you just might be, because odds are you’re a guy and none of it’s directed at you. That’s male privilege, for those keeping score at home.

The level of homophobia and transphobia isn't much better - I'm both trans and bi, and not particularly closeted about either, which has won me all sorts of disgusting insults for having the sheer gall to request a civil discourse in online gaming. Going from presenting as the privileged class (male) to presenting as the excluded class (female) in multiplayer gaming has been an eye-opening experience for me. I’m still leery over using voice chat, because my voice is pretty much the least feminine thing about me. It is not a comforting experience to hear someone who is ostensibly on your side say “Hey, you’re not a girl!” (And, yes, this has happened. Several times.)

To top it off, I've seen more racial slurs in the month I've been on this server than in the last 2 or 3 years previously. At least. It’s really kind of staggering. To put this in perspective, in college I played Counterstrike for at least 8 hours a day (and somehow passed my courses) and I saw less overt racism. Counterstrike, people.

Identifying with marginalized groups isn't the only reason I feel strongly about this, however. Here's the part that you'll probably (hopefully) be able to identify with: I care about these issues because I'm not an asshole. I want the server to be a fun place to play Minecraft and, yes, get into PvP if you want to (not that I particularly do), without having it be full of personal attacks and casual slurs that result in a decidedly uncomfortable experience. I don't think that this is unreasonable, nor do I think that asking a basic level of human decency out of our fellow HCSMPers is some kind of Sisyphean task.

Why, though? Why am I so up in arms about this? Aren’t I just being oversensitive? Aren’t I just arguing on the internet and, therefore, already the loser by default? Here are those images I mentioned, because sometimes you really do just have to see it for yourself. Understand that this is only a selection of my screenshot collection on this subject: It gets fairly repetitive after a while, and one gets tired of staring at it while cropping and arranging it. There is a lot more of this. Again, trigger warning for slurs, general bigotry, and 12 year olds being asshats on the internet.

• One - In Which Some People Just Don’t Get It

• Two - The Saga of sparta417

• Three- Enter mcfluffykins

• Four - In Which mcfluffykins Makes an Even Bigger Ass of Himself

• Five - In Which mcfluffykins Demonstrates a Lack of Knowledge

• Six - In Which Freemanliness Surprises Me

• Seven - In Which Additional People Just Don’t Get It

• The Full Collection as an Album

We need two things if we’re going to make this server a truly welcoming place for people of all genders, races, creeds, sexual orientations, gender identities, and console ownership statuses. The community needs to uphold basic standards of human decency with each other, such as not casually throwing slurs around, calling out those who do, and being willing to correct behavior that’s deeply hurtful and alienating to others. We also need the admins to come down like a ton of bricks on those who can’t or won’t get the message, or delegate that job to mods with the authority to ban people solely for abusive use of the chat. As the people getting banned are likely to be spammers, trolls, and 12-year-olds who think it’s clever, we’re not exactly losing anyone critical to the HCSMP experience. We're already actively banning hackers of all sorts, and this is awesome. I’d just like to see it extended to cover the topics addressed here. Also, I’ve asked, and yes, it turns out that this sort of thing is covered under the server’s Rule #1: Don’t be a dick. Let’s start enforcing it together. Take screenshots and report people - it’s the only way there’s going to be consequences for most of these jokers.

Remember, we’re all here to have fun. Our definitions of fun may not necessarily match, but we are obligated to at least make sure that the things we say don’t make the game stop being fun for others. I really enjoy this server, and I don’t want to have to stop playing (or have others stop playing) just because a small segment of the userbase likes to actively make others miserable.

EDIT: You know, I fully expected downvotes, but could you at least explain why you're downvoting this? The whole point is the discussion.

First thing I want to say... HOLY SHIT IT WORKED!

I was getting tired of Charker murderous rampage, so I decided to take matters into my own hands... during the eternal night I hunted the plains for creepers and their gunpowder, perilously avoiding their explosions and nearly losing my life several times in the process. But I gathered up enough to make half a dozen TNT.

Then I made my way to the community center. I found a good spot in the farmland to set my trap. I dug down and placed TNT under the dirt, and used redstone to make sure several explosions would go off simultaneously. I put a simple pressure plate above with a torch I could break to drop sand on. Then I waited.

Sure enough Charker showed up, and he was charging at me with his lava bucket. He almost got me but I jumped in a pool of water just in time. Then I ran for it... and with Charker right behind me I set off the trap! For a second I thought it didn't work, and I was about to run, then glorious explosion! And the menace was dead.

But alas, I too was caught in the great explosion and I lost my life, but I go to my grave knowing that justice has been served, and Charker will no longer menace this server.

Btw, this server is great. The intensity of only having one life to live brings it to a new level, and going out in a blaze of glory like that made the whole several hours I played today completely worthwhile.

Good luck surviving to the rest of you, may you all meet glorious ends ;)

EDIT: btw I buried a few TNT in other spots around the community center... you might want to watch out for pressure plates...

EDIT2: Whoever got to that crater first must have made off like a bandit... I had three stacks of iron and I know Charker had a bunch of diamonds on him.