StarQuest Background (#1-#5, abridged)

Posts #6 - #14 of the original StarQuest blog are reproduced here word for word. However, posts #1 - #5 are significantly less interesting in content for the reader on my personal website in 2019+ than they were for the blog’s original audience of StarQuest players; they were very minecraft-focused. They were also very long-winded compared to the later posts. Provided here instead is a summary.

I purchased Minecraft in 2011 and began to experiment with building servers a few months later. This was my first exposure to the command line and things like router configuration. My first efforts in hosting private servers for my friend group were fairly successful, and I learned many lessons about leadership and abuse of power. I discovered more and more about the customization potential of the minecraft server during this time.

Over the next year or two, I took two semesters of basic programming at school (in adobe flash and basic java) and began to play on larger public servers. I developed a couple of public bukkit plugins, one of which, called MoreMobs, enjoyed some modest success. When my favorite multiplayer server, Madrealms, mentioned that they needed some help with development, I told them that I knew how to write plugins. The plugins they wanted me to write were far more complicated than anything I’d made before, but I stuck with it and eventually succeeded. Madrealms didn’t pay me.

I used my experience on Madrealms to get a paid contract at a server called Digital Forge Online. They paid me a small lump sum, and I wrote a single plugin for them. I was planning to write another for them when their organization collapsed due to internal drama. What followed was a fairly vicious online war (there was some legitimate hacking involved) between the two separate descendant communities of Digital Forge Online. The leader of the other side (called DigitalForgeMC) was known as Zreed; he shows up later. Over the course of this war, I was promoted several times. By the time that my side was called Regal Phoenix MC, I was a full-fledged paid developer working immediately under the owners. At one point, the owners proposed expanding their server offerings with a new roleplay themed server. I showed them the space concept I had been working on, and they loved it. They put me in charge of the project and away we went.