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Beyond the edge of reason on the RPS Minecraft server: a gallery"It was all starting to feel a bit like the end of a China Miéville novel."
“It was all starting to feel a bit like the end of a China Miéville novel.”
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve beenpostingphotographsfrom an archaeological expedition into the RPSMinecraftserver. Having left the place to go fallow last October, I had assumed it had been quietly abandoned, as often happens to these multiplayer sandboxes when their founders move on.
But I should have had more faith in the server’s denizens, for it turns out that this strange place didn’t fall into dilapidation at all, when the winter set in. Quite the opposite: using the mod powers I granted them all as a farewell gift, it seems the occupants quietly got on with reshaping the entire world into a sprawling monument to their collective, gestalt whimsy. Here are some of the things I saw in the final part of that expedition:.
Still recovering from passing through thedigestivesystemof atrain, I continued to follow the rails into a rain-lashed sunset. I had thought us to be heading east, but clearly my bearings had become confused, for though I am no great navigator, I know where the sun sets. As the rackety-clackety tracks continued to bear us away from the relatively sanity of the spawn settlement, we passed a wooded hill where gigantic effigies of zombies roamed beneath the gathering twilight.
A way further on, the track jinked north to pass around a huge, drum-shaped tower of glass, seemingly with water inside. As our carts ascended onto an elevated railway, we peered inside and saw a zoo of sorts - different biomes had been constructed in arc-shaped segments around a cylindrical core, where dolphins swam among arches of coral. It seemed the zoo had been in disrepair for some time: wolves had broken free inside and, having consumed many of their neighbours, were now staring hungrily at the dolphins through the glass.
After continuing across the western plains for a long while, the railway plunged abruptly into the side of a hill, where it began to pass at high speed through what I can only describe as a simulation of a migraine. It went on and on, and I had to close my eyes after a while.
As we left the city behind and proceeded into the forest under the cover of darkness, an immense shape became visible in the gloom ahead. It looked like a gate of some kind, but we could see no wall, nor even the remnant of one, for it to affix to. Then I saw the torches glowing on its posts, and all became clear. Someone had, of course, recreated the entirety ofJurassic Parkin the depths of the wood.
There were loads of dinosaurs made out of coloured concrete, and it reminded me of thischarmingly rubbish Norfolk tourist attractionI used to visit as a kid. Only more convincing, somehow. I particularly liked this rendition of the naughty albinosaurus from the recent movies that the Parks & Rec guy did after he became a musclebound bellend.
The highlight of Jurassic Park, however, was this extremely eerie reclining Goldblum, which had gigantic Ozymandian energy as it gazed forlornly out into the rainy dark with piss-hole eyes.
I just had time to think “wait, whatisbelow us?”, when the track disappeared in front of me, and my cart fell a hundred blocks or more into a flaming, lava-flooded underworld. Oh, good: we had found hell. The rails rattled us around tight corners, steep ascents and sudden, stomach-dropping falls for a terribly long time, as infernal machines thundered above our heads. “Who had built this place?”, we asked each other in mounting bewilderment, “and will we ever get out of it?”
Shaking with relief, we made our way back to the weird underground Deadwood pub, where a bit of further exploration turned up this subterranean alleyway - presumably once open to the sky. Opposite the pub was a door to a small theatre, long-abandoned, but with posters up outside for its final performance of “Yorick 2: Tokyo Drift”. The seat prices were listed in eggs, with the dubious-sounding “VIP seats” going for 69 eggs apiece. A chest next to the sign was, indeed, packed to the brim with eggs.
The rails were broken in places, so after a while we gave up our carts and took to the air to fly the rest of the way. We began to pass over a sprawling ocean, and a mile or so out from land, things got odd. Because of the constraints of Minecraft Realms' server hosting, we ended up in a disconcerting situation where the world was loading slower than our zooming through it, leading reality to constrict to a single stripe of ocean and railway beneath us, with yawning emptiness to either side. It was all starting to feel a bit like the end of a China Miéville novel.
We passed this half-constructed, haunted-looking disco ball…
…and this lighthouse on an isolated rock, pulsing with a shaft of green, Shrek-coloured light.
But eventually, the ocean came to an end, and we swooped in to land on its far shore. After a day’s trekking through rugged, untouched hill country beside the lonely rail, we came upon a lush river valley on the edge of a jungle. And there, beside the rails, stood a tiny, modernist house. There was a vine-clad hot tub inside, and so we settled ourselves into the bubbling water to toast what felt was the approaching conclusion of our odyssey.
And there it was - the very end of the line at last. A moss-coated temple in the deep jungle, where the 7,000-block railway ended in nothing but a plain wooden buffer. There was no further left to travel. But what was inside?
Just three green beds, and a single green parrot, forever echoing the hiss of a creeper. Now that’s what I call environmental storytelling.
The journey was over. But as we said our farewells and prepared to call our expedition to a close, a single image appeared in the Minecraft server’s discord. This was that image:
Garfield, standing with an expression of smug challenge, in a colossal, empty glass dome. I could only see this as a provocation, akin to Robotnik juggling uncollected chaos emeralds at the end of an imperfectly-completed game of Sonic. Perhaps this server has further secrets yet to be uncovered.
