While I was trying to get the Chicken Run mini game to work the way I wanted, I created this map for my family to play in.

I built a town using schematic files that were posted by Amarok. I really liked his designs and wanted to see how a town with just these buildings would look.

It was a creative map with command blocks to switch between survival and creative as desired. We chose houses to call home as our base of operations, began decorating, building various projects, and checking out a bunch of different schematics.

My oldest son and I built a pair of “pirate ships” complete with dispenser cannons – neither one of us were great with red stone at the time, so the ships were close together. We first tried fire charges for realism only to find our ships burning down and in need of repair. So we switched to eggs and snowballs. We even tried squid spawn eggs, but that didn’t go well… they never made it across the gap to the other ship, flopped around in the sand, and died. It was kinda sad really.

My autistic son decided to join the server one day while I was puttering around the house. Then this happened thanks to a bit of Flint and Steel:

My autistic son had set fire to my oldest son’s house as well as building random pathways with stone block eggs. Thus I became aware of the problems with mitigating griefing. Chaos broke out in the house as well as on the map. My oldest son broke the command blocks that let you switch between game modes and set my autistic son to survival mode. While still in creative mode, my oldest son starting spawning an army of zombies into the town in the hopes of killing his brother since I had turned PvP off. And of course the zombies had to eat every villager first… then he spawned an army of slimes… the screaming across the house was awful.

So I had to shut the server down since no one was listening to me. I am very happy to have discovered the World Guard plugin later on. In retrospect it would have been nice to have had it for this map. I might not have been able to save my villagers but I at least could have restored the house.

Although I must say the next time those two get into a fight, I’m going to have them “duke it out” in a PvP map and put some headphones on.

Originally published on LiveJournal. Archived here on 09/13/2019.