In my house resides a family of gamers. There are five of us in total; myself, my husband, and our three children. As a family, we own about ten copies of Minecraft. That alone should tell you how much it is adored. It started off with an Xbox copy, then a PC version. Over time we've also purchased copies for newer consoles. Then, as the children got older and gained access to computers of their own, we expanded our PC copies so we all had one each and the family server was born.
Minecraft Mayhem Begins
Our first family server a couple of years back was incredibly random and disorganized. The children were a little younger then and still learning to play together. The intention was to use the server to teach them about helping and sharing as well as playing together, having fun and building bonds. You know, all that good stuff? What actually happened was that we got robbed and trolled, hard.
Our middle child is best described as a true Slytherin. We have no doubt at all that she was the instigator of this prank, that's gone down in family history. It all began when the kids were playing really nicely together. We should have known that this meant trouble but we left them to it, logging off to do other things. A while later they asked us to log in and we knew we'd been trolled.
The low-level pranks had already begun at this point. Taking cues from Minecraft YouTubers they adored like Stampy and Squid, we'd already had excessive chickens in our bases and rooms flooded but this was a cut above the rest. We logged in to find everything we owned had gone. Literally. The server was quite new so it wasn't an excessive amount of things but all our chests had vanished and instead we just saw a sign. It was a treasure hunt.
We were increasingly both annoyed and impressed by the scale of the task. Signs all over the base took us on a trail around everything we'd built so far. It took a good while to find the final sign that led us back to our base. It was at this moment that we realized we'd spent at least twenty minutes wandering around the server only to discover that our chests were behind a wall, approximately three blocks back from where they were originally. This prank was to set a tone for our family server going forward.
The Lockdown Reboot
We updated and restarted our family server just before lockdown and as we became confined to the house, Minecraft would become an escape for us all and a way to enjoy gaming together.
At this point, the server has grown and what's there truly reflects our personalities. My husband has built a literal fortress. It's a huge blocked off area surrounded by castle walls and filled with Redstone contraptions and an impressive recreation of the Eye of Sauron. Thanks to the disappearance of his supplies it's also filled with "Trespassers will be shot" signs and arrows reign down on anyone who goes in without asking.
My base is much more modest and has been adjusted by children. I have a small main home that houses my essentials and a guest house with basic supplies that I send the kids to when they frequently appear. Surrounding them are small farms I'm slowly upgrading, a mine with an exp farm and my very first beacon. I've also got a random fox house since my middle child decided I needed one and built it for me, and a stable I built because the youngest won't take his horse back home.
The kid's bases are a law unto themselves. Every child has at least three bases at this point. Some are built inside villages, some are utterly random and the youngest has a hobbit hole and jungle base in the middle of nowhere because he fell in love with the bases on Hermitcraft. At this point, they've all started again. The middle child is capturing every animal she can find, the eldest is building slowly, carefully, and considerately. The youngest, well I've no idea what he's doing if I'm honest, but apparently it doesn't involve moving the things he keeps leaving at my base.
Chaos and Creativity
The greatest things about our server are the levels of creativity and chaos. We fought the Ender Dragon together for the first time a couple of weeks ago and you've never seen such madness. You wouldn't think that we knew what we were doing as Endermen ran at us, kids jumped off towers, and chaos reigned. Shortly after our victory, the middle child raided the End, in style. Armed with her newly acquired Elytra and rockets she probably stole, she spent far too long making sure there are virtually no easy to find End Cities left to raid. She's now the proud owner of a ridiculously large number of Shulker boxes and I swear is building her own chest monster so she can sell them all to the rest of us.
Minecraft is an open world and for our family, this world has allowed us to have fun and be creative, together. We've also been watching Hermitcraft videos each night, laughing together, getting ideas for farms, bases and pranks, and watching our youngest take tips from his new idol, Grian. In fact, the biggest debate in our house right now is who should be Hermitcraft mayor; personally I'm quite enamored with Plopper.
Minecraft brings out both the best and occasionally worst in my family and it's the reason I adore it. This shared love allows us to adventure together, help each other, build our creativity, and of course troll each other. All of these are vital aspects of enjoying family life, especially when we're spending 24 hours a day together.