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

The Resource Hut’s lower furnaces running full-tilt to catch up to demand.

Early Troubles

While I’d had an opportunity or two to step in on the project during that first day, with an eye to ensure things were being accomplished by the math we’d crunched the night before, we were quickly running into a big problem. The crewmen working on the project were full of enthusiasm, but little focus, sending everyone’s efforts in a million directions. The resource hut was being constructed on top of a small padding I’d set aside so workers wouldn’t need to dump their furnaces and storage chests on the tunnel walls that were being quickly encased in glass.

The transit spokes to the higher levels (dubbed ‘diagonals’) had been designed and were being implemented despite the fact that the keel of the pyramid had yet to be laid down in its entirety. As a result, we ended up having to move several of these nodes completely, in some cases more than once, so they would work well as we scaled upward. I grabbed several stacks of dirt and began to finish the dirt grid of the structure: the lines that the first tunnels would eventually be built around. It wasn’t long into the evening that Paul had arrived and I had been named project lead, put in charge of ultimately bringing this pyramid to life. Sleepless nights awaited me.

Several challenges immediately emerged:

• Keeping elevation away. With the dirt grid in place, it was time to lay down the ground level, a series of 36 nodes (6×6) and their accompanying tunnels, a task that seemed relatively mundane against the prospect of watching the frame stretch into the sky. With various, critical elements of the pyramid independently invented by various workers, I was required to reverse-engineer them so I could build them on my own while others could work on other tasks. The complexity only got worse with the floating nodes in which I had to assemble a diagram to help myself and others put together. I haven’t conquered the diagonals yet, but they’re next on my list.
• Positioning and standards. Like previously mentioned, despite my best efforts, we still needed to shift structures around. Workers like Alec, Gloor, Midwestkel (our very own!), Fangorn1, and several others worked tirelessly as we needed to put everything in its proper location. The three already-constructed second-level nodes all had to be leveled and rebuilt as several came out to bizarre dimensions to handle the diagonals feeding them from below.
• Transportation. Early on in the project, moderators were pegged nonstop to provide teleports to Oceana. The pyramid’s incredible distance from home meant that the only easy (and relatively safe) way to reach it was a fifteen-minute cart ride from Verge City through Seatown. This was alleviated as more people set Oceana as their home base, but to this day, a direct rail to Oceana from Verge City is still not quite ready for action.
• The Arena. It wasn’t long after Paul had begun to take longer trips away from Oceana that moderator Connor had gotten bored with the project and started working on a replica of The Hunger Games arena, in which players would hunt each other using only field-provided equipment. (Ask Johnny about it.) While the Vergecraft server had dozens of regulars, it was hardly a large enough scene to handle two major projects simultaneously. To prevent resource robbing from Oceana, Connor was instructed to use Creative mode and build the arena using methods that would otherwise be resource-intensive and drain manpower. Unfortunately, Connor’s schedule and ability to teleport people to the arena at request (and my vanilla status in the chat logs as a non-mod) meant that virtually all of the manpower that had been working on bringing resources and work to Oceana was shifted to the Arena. At times, Alec and I toiled alone while others placed grass and sand on the Arena’s fields. As a result, Oceana ran out of resources that these workers would’ve provided — including valuable cobblestone, coal, and sand, which together produce the smoothstone and glass that serve as the primary building blocks of the pyramid. Oceana’s builders needed to stop their tasks entirely, pull out their pickaxes and shovels, and begin mining the land again for the resources needed to continue. With the arena completed, many incredible workers helped Oceana return to full steam, but the Arena had already taken its toll on Oceana’s pace.

With these major obstacles out of the way, it’s really only a push of talent and resources to get the pyramid constructed.