Building Oceana: The Verge’s Minecraft Pyramid – Week One

Verge City, with globe icon in lower right representing the world respawn point.

Vergecraft

Started on March 10, 2012, The Verge’s server has been host to some of the most fascinating architecture I’ve ever seen from a Survival world. Skyscrapers are constructed by players knowing full well they will plummet to their deaths if they remove the wrong block. At the center of the experience is Verge City, a frantic puzzle of concrete, wood, and glass. Despite an array of signs that greet new users upon arrival, it’s not difficult to get lost in the T-shaped town. The moderators, helmed by Verge staffers, have worked incredibly hard to keep the server as stock an experience as possible, forgoing many extensive mods that would make the impossible reality, even in game terms, going so far as to restrict structures that couldn’t potentially exist in real-life (such as “floating” buildings). After some initial waves of griefing (in which players destroy or modify structures to, well, cause grief) membership to the Vergecraft server was restricted to a white-list, accessible only by the Verge’s forums.

I started on Vergecraft having not played the game in nearly eight months. Wandering away from the maze of Verge City (it really does get easier to navigate), I found myself in the Suburbs, next to a large spherical object called the Death Star and a massive Creeper statue (modeled after one of the game’s nemesis) fashioned by area man Tahl and his wife Nicole. At this point, I staked out a large 52×52 square in a swamp nearby alongside a hut and began work on a super-sized version of a tower I’d built on a private FleshEatingZipper server. TFXR Tower is twelve times the volume of its predecessor from that world, also designed for the newly-doubled height cap. I mined out 45% of the cobble used in its construction and others gracefully donated the rest. I worked alone for two weeks building it level by level, fabricating a full mid-deck for a future night club that still sits lonely. The tower was temporarily abandoned as work on Oceana began, but it’s still visible from virtually every wide map of the server.

TFXR Tower as it stands today: incomplete.

While Verge City has grown substantially and players have been able to stake out locations to call their own beyond the metropolis, there was an accelerating undercurrent around the idea of producing a megastructure far beyond the reach of Verge City, away from the noise, the pollution, the traffic. While Verge City started humbly along the ground, an elaborate skybridge was built over it to facilitate navigation, but eventually allowing a new layer of city to be constructed, stilted over the earlier version. As skyscrapers have taken height, the maze has only gotten deeper and deeper. The call for some controlled urban chaos on a relatively-controlled server seemed in order, but no one quite knew how it was going to work or what it would be.

Until…