What happened to the Nether Highway Group after the dig to the + + corner? What happened to the Melon Group after the fall of Summermelon? What if I told you we’ve been living on a mountain in a 1k wide hole millions of blocks away from spawn, and we’ve been living there since 2017? And some South Canal diggers as well and various other have joined in on the fun. 36 total members! The recent account hacking exploit finally let the cat out of the bag, so it’s time to talk about what we’ve been up to. This is the story of Mu Megabase.
The name Mu was Offtopia’s idea, based on the legendary lost continent that has appeared in literature. More info about the name can be found on this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(lost_continent)
The story begins in May of 2017 when Summermelon was griefed, leaving many of its skilled1 builders homeless.
Willyroof and Offtopia knew members of both the melon group and the Nether Highway group. Thus a natural link was there to be made. Joeilk and Offtopia begin early discussions on base ideas in July 2017.
Of course the NHG was still busy digging to the corner while these discussions were getting more serious. When the corner was reached, it marked the end of the NHG being a ‘public’ group. We dropped some inactive and not 110% trustworthy members and started filling the discord for the new base. If you weren’t around back then, all of the old posts are linked in this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/2b2t/comments/e6udsq/today_is_the_third_anniversary_of_the_start_of/
Tip
“Wdym” is an abbreviation for “What do you mean?”
Remember the chunk dupe that went public in late 2018? We had that a year before everyone else. The above screenshot is from the moment it was discovered by Auion.
Resources would not be an issue at this base. Because of this, ideas expanded in scope a great deal for what would be built at Mu. After the corner was reached, travel began. Early NHG travelers applied their great digging experience to create a network of tunnels. Each tunnel had several thousand blocks of raw nether afterwards to ward off potential explorers.
The players who discovered the dupe decided to keep it solely to themselves in order to keep it safe. Since this would end up being a private dupe for more than a year, it ended up being a pretty good call.
November 20th, 2017: Hammernaut arrives at the location chosen for Mu. Not too long afterwards, the coordinates to one of the tunnels is accidentally leaked in chat. After discussion, it is decided that Mu’s original location will be left as a griefed decoy base, and Mu would be moved slightly further out. The Mu floating platform was a staging area with beds and essentials. This was everybody’s first home when they arrived at the final location of the base. Created by l_amp. Since only a small group was allowed to know the dupe, the other base members had to make requests for items. These requests were done via a storefront on the floating platform.
There was a lot of duping to be done! Base members contributed to a spreadsheet to ensure that enough items were duped. No, we did not end up using all 148 dubs of quartz blocks! Overall, we probably duped nearly 200 million items. We were pretty damn wealthy…
In an effort to emphasize the fact that this base was three groups coming together (Melon Group, NHG, some SCC members), three boats were made in the nether, each bearing insignia and banners of one of the groups. This is Mu Landing.
The Mu banner was provided by Offtopia - signifying a ‘Secret Society of Builders’.
With the travelling done, planning began. Eventually, the above was agreed on - a giant basin with terraformed terrain and a giant mountain on the inside. It would be surrounded by 12 canals, with each canal separating a different themed ‘district’. It was a big plan. Perhaps too big, as much of this never ended up happening. It’s always good to aim high though!
Getting a good bomber design that worked on 2b2t was a struggle that several players (mainly Thebes and Totaldarkness) experimented with. Issues resulted from lag as well as the fact that the base was so far from spawn. Eventually, a working design was found and implemented.
The bombing of the basin began in January 2018. A whole lot of TNT needed to be dropped.
Originally TNT did not drop far enough to reach the desired depth. To go deep enough, 2 layers of bombers had to be built. The task was absolutely daunting, and took several weeks.
A highly efficient bombing system was designed for this task.
The bombing itself was extremely time consuming. With 2b2t’s short entity render distance, only a few bombing modules could be launched at one time. (and lag made it worse). If you got out of render distance, the bomber would stop or blow up, and would have to be destroyed and rebuilt. But with many players working together, it could be done. Running bombers in teams was preferred - if someone fell, the other person could take over for them and safely lead the bombers back.
Progress shot. You can see the floating platform in the top left. Also note that a lot of lakes had to be removed with sponges - a project in itself.
Ever seen the movie ‘Holes’?
The “Miracle Cocoa Beans of Mu” were discovered by Drud14 while clearing debris.
Turns out a lot of lava can fit into a 1000 block wide circle!
Totaldarkness was instrumental in clearing out the remaining floating blocks left over from the bombing.
2/17/18: Much of the group comes together for a screenshot in the basin. By this point, most of the invitees had arrived at Mu.
As the bombing finished up, Toshie began work on designing the centerpiece: Mt. Mu…
The first of many strips of grass covering the bottom of the basin.
Watch your step!
The builders quickly realized that they were creating a giant mob spawner below the grass.
The effort took several dubs of duped grass shulkers. Luckily, grass was not in short supply!
How many blocks is a double chest?
A single chest can store 27 stacks of items. Create a double chest by placing two single chests side by side. The double chest stores up to 54 stacks of items.
The placing of the final grass block.
With the exterior grass placed, it was now time to build Mu Mountain - the centerpiece of the gape.
Scribblefoxx was primarily responsible for building the mountain Toshie designed. This was NOT an easy task! Oldschool, Totaldarkness, and Offtopia also assisted.
2B2T: superflat edition
The mountain was hollow of course. The inside looked nothing like anything else ever seen on 2b2t.
Mountain construction started on Feb 25th 2018 and was completed on April 7th 2018.
After several months, the canvas had been set. Now the real work would begin. You’ll see an exterior circle of floating slime blocks around the gape in the above screenshot. That 1600 block diameter was the original proposed size of the basin before decisions were made to shrink it to 1000. Probably a good call…
My main contribution to the base was the Mu Grand Pearling Area (and the fancy alphabet banners- I never see those on 2b2t, hopefully I start a trend…)
Each account at the base had the right to claim one tower, at which they could throw three pearls. This made loading pearls simple - everybody’s was in one place. By the time the base fell, more than 35 of the 40 towers were in use.
The GIant Ghast was built mainly by Twinkletard, and served as the welcoming portal to the base (its mouth portal led to the floating platform). The red nether brick path coming out of its mouth was known as the Ghast Tongue Highway. This base was active when colored signs were a thing for a few weeks, so you’ll see some in these screenshots periodically. This one is cool, but its existence meant that the netherrack block below it could never be removed ever, which annoyed the shit out of me after a year or two!
The ghast contained MU’s main signboard. A great many accounts made the journey to Mu, some by walking and some by name-change pearling. Many players brought over multiple accounts.
Pig speed was how transportation worked for much of the base’s life. Pig stations were set up along the ghast tongue and near major stashes, along with Carrot-on-a-stick refill stations. I named the first generation of pigs after US Presidents. I think only George here survived up until the time of writing…
As per tradition, Auion made a torus at Mu.
I won’t go into a whole lot of detail about the builds in the basin. I’m sure some other base members or bald youtubers will make some features eventually. I’ll try to do brief descriptions of a few though.
The centerpiece was the Mu Hall of Statues. I designed a statue for each base member in a similar style, based on some old Mindcrack videos. Each one was displayed along with the date the player arrived at Mu,
…Star’s became a bit of a meme.
The Pokemon Mew became Mu’s unofficial mascot for obvious reasons. If we try this again, maybe we’ll call it Mu-two?
(Mural design by l_amp)
The mountain was meant to be topped by this castle Aaron_Alvin designed. It was never completed on the server however.
A large swamp occupied the north-east quarter of the basin, created by Drud14. The swamp would include glowing green rivers, fishing villages, a giant mushroom and village, custom trees, glowing mushroom caves, and other secrets, all under the shade of a gigantic swamp tree
Swamp at night.
The swamp was far from complete when the base became public. The water hid layers of illuminated glass, giving it a foggy look.
Drud also built a Greek-themed area in the basin.
This temple was built to house a giant portal that was able to be made because of the same glitch that caused the chunk dupe. Unfortunately, the portal broke eventually…
Mountain view from the front of the temple.
Offtopia made this tower, a rebuild of one of his contributions to the Rainbow Islands. It was waiting for some 1.13 blocks that never quite were able to be added…
l_amp’s floating house.
The mountain was surrounded by custom terrain. Here’s a mesa section built by Scribblefoxx.
Did I mention that Scribble is very good at minecraft?
A couple of small, detailed villages popped up around the mountain to inhabit and accent the custom terrain. Again, mainly Scribblefoxx being very good at minecraft.
With peaceful builds like this, it was easy to forget you were on 2b2t.
This one has already been getting around on DIscord. The mountain provided ample opportunities for cool paths and additional custom terrain. It all fit together like a puzzle.
Walltown - another Scribblefoxx contribution. Builds attached to the side of the mountain overlooking a detailed town.
aaron_alvin has already revealed his Temple of the Melon Goddess on this subreddit… He did not reveal that it was at Mu! A bit outside the basin.
The place is kind of big.
Aaron’s build is absolutely fucking bonkers and you should probably worship him…
His full post is linked below - but this will need a video to do it justice…
to do sth as well as you can in order to show other people how good you are 充分发挥自己的能力
She didn’t do herself justice in the exam.
她在考试中没有充分发挥出自己的水平。
www.reddit.com/r/2b2t/comments/aa871j/the_cathedral_of_the_melon_goddess/
Our over-the-top plan would have us build 12 huge canals around the basin. The canals would have led to waterfalls entering the basin itself. These would have made Mu’s diameter more than 5k blocks if completed. Most of them never got dug however, and none of them got flooded.
I haven’t gone through everything, and I hope some people do proper tours soon. There’s a bunch more to explore, both within and outside of the basin.
Now to finish the story…
In October 2018 the chunk dupe finally went public. With that, ThebesAndSound could finally put his skills to work on engineering the shit out of it. This is stash 2. When duping, it could produce an estimated 37 shulker boxes per second.
Maybe 1% of these chests were ever actually used!
A lot of fun was had with how the chunk dupe could mess with nether portals…
Thebes’ magnum opus was stash 3. Extra care was taken to ensure we were getting about ten DCs of nearly every item in the game. There were ten DCs of poison potatoes in here somewhere - priorities.
On Christmas eve 2018, Hause edited stash 3 away. We sort of had it coming - it lagged the server something fierce whenever someone visited it for about a week. But anyway, after that contribution we considered Hause a base member. We asked Hause if he would build a base with us (by summoning him with lag), and he complied!
Hause…Hause…hause
Hause’s data center is also at Mu! And he deleted this screenshot when I posted it on its own, so I’ll sneak it in a larger post this time… I’m pretty sure you can still get player heads onto villagers with dispensers?
2019 was a largely inactive year for the base. It was at this point that the scope of the project started burning some players out, while others just got distracted by real life. Despite this, several players kept building, most notably Scribblefoxx who continued his tireless work of terraforming the Basin Then the excitement began…
To help make the base active again, several players were invited by Scribblefoxx in February 2020. This included players from Valerian City among others.
Hawkedonfonix made this sick fortress pretty quickly after arriving. The other new members were excited to join in on the fun, assisting with terraforming and making some grand plans. New life was being breathed into the base! But it would be short lived…
When the account exploit was discovered in late February, some of the ‘famous’ names at this base were obvious targets to have their accounts logged into. It felt like it took an act of god, but Mu would finally end because of this exploit…
Players banded together to finish the ceiling of the nether hub at this time, designed by l_amp. This was Mu’s final build.
Because of the base’s remote location, we had a week or two to react as Jared made his way out to do his thing. Enter operation NOAH. We flooded the Basin with water to protect it from griefing (or at least mildly annoy people who try). Players grabbed most of the items in Mu’s stashes and moved them to personal areas to ensure they weren’t blown up or charged onto your parent’s credit card. Some other… surprises were left at the base too!
So this was the story Mu Megabase. It was probably 2b2t’s most interesting place for the last two or so years, and I’m glad we were finally able to tell the story of our big ol’ hole millions of blocks from spawn. Thanks for taking a walk down memory lane with me. See you in like 2027 when I make my next imgur post about a big project I somehow find myself involved with??
Footnotes
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having enough ability, experience and knowledge to be able to do sth well ↩