Not too long ago, about halfway through my school year, I started playing Minecraft with my friends at UBC through a selfhosted world locally. It was a real blast; I got a motley of my new friends together and we sat around in various lounges throughout Vanier to connect up on LAN for the few hours of freedom we had from assignments (and let me tell you: there really were not many of those).

A screenshot from the server in question. There isn’t much to see in this image, as I unfortunately didn’t think to get many screenshots, but a whole lot of major conflicts went down in this area. If you look to the left of the image, you can see the beginnings of a cherry-pink wood house lying atop a Sakura tree. Don’t be fooled by the inviting allure of the house: it’s like this server’s version of the hotel from “The Shining”.

Our setup consisted of a bunch of houses surrounding this central abyss, dotted with sakura trees all-around it. It was a cool little thing, and I remember how I started work on a nice wooden house with a brick base and even made a little skyblock island in the center of the abyss to try out playing some skyblock with the others when the server came toward its end.

Part of what drew me to this sort of abyss landscape for building a base is the sort of spiritual connection that the area has to one of my favorite manga series, Made in Abyss, a series that I had begun reading (and caught up with) about three or so years ago. After that point, I’ve since felt that Minecraft is perhaps the best game to emulate the feeling of traversing the abyss, less so in the overworld but moreso in the Nether following update 1.16, the Nether expansion.

For those unaware, Made in Abyss follows the story of Riko, a young girl of about 10 or 12 (I forgot her exact age) as she journeys down into the bowels of a seemingly bottomless chasm known as The Abyss, a kind of magical wildnerness/hellscape filled with all kinds of unique animals and beasts. This abyss is extremely dangerous but contains artifacts with immense power scattered throughout, making it extremely valuable for the surrounding civilization of Orth, which depends on it for dominance on nations throughout the rest of the world.

The bends doesn’t look too fun. This album, though, is pretty fun.

One of the coolest plot points of Made in Abyss is the effect known as the “strain of ascent,” the counteracting force to any person wishing to return from the depths of the abyss. The strain of ascent is similar to the feeling of “the bends” for divers, its an extremely painful, disorienting, and nauseating feeling that results from going upward (which, in the real world, is due to a rapid change in pressure as you go toward the surface), essentially making the abyss like a finger trap: its much easier to leave the closer to the surface that you are already at, and you can go in as far as you like, but to do so, you must resign all hopes of ever escaping.

This is what a lavacast looks like. Imagine these completely eclipsing our precious town.

Anyway, going back to the previous Minecraft server, traversing the deep Abyss, which, when delved to its bottom, reached bedrock, felt just like the manga in question (and was a cool feeling setting up our own miniature Orth around the mouth of the abyss). The issue, however, was that this town quickly fell into chaos. I don’t have any good pictures of the chaos that ensued, but my house was burned down several times and one of my friends lavacasted over the entirety of our town.

It was complete and utter anarchy. People started to turn on each other, cannibalizing each other as our society hierarchy broke down. However, that chaos was fine too. I’m not really a stranger to anarchic Minecraft.

This is a very, very old screenshot from when I used to play on a server known as 9builders9tools, or 9b9t.

I honestly found the anarchy fun, perhaps not on a server where I had intended to play normal, casual Minecraft, but I used to play anarchy Minecraft servers such as 2builders2tools and 9builders9tools for fun until I got really bored of the genre. Largely, I played because of the presence of some other high school friends I had to play alongside, but they’re off doing more important things with their lives than Minecraft now, haha.

And so came the end of my abyss anarchy server, because school came ‘round to kick my ass again, and I had to get back to work. I forget exactly what it was that I had to get back to work on, probably CPSC 110 (“How to Design Programs”) or Science One Chemistry or something. I was always stressed out back then, for one reason or another. Well, both courses are done, and with them both complete, I don’t regret the time I spent playing Minecraft with my friends.