With severe weaponized autism, the help of several people involved, thousands of dollars spent, and countless hours wasted, we present you the largest world download project ever
Never underestimate the power of severe weaponized autism!
>Yeah and we'd be better off. The modern world is quantifiably worse than the world we had even 10 years ago. That includes everything in software development and computer science.
Rather than killing this comment, how about we discuss quantification? I actually feel this way too but do not talk about it too much and sort of boil it down to a combination of advancing in age + yelling at clouds and "Stop putting computers in all my stuff!".
Can we reliably quantify that "weaponized autism", i.e. the aggressive monetization of nerds by capital to squeeze profit out of every possible corner of society (as I interpret it in a broad sense), is making things worse. Is it damaging the economy for most people? Making people less happy? Decreasing net social mobility or discrimination? Lowering life expectancy?
That's a redefinition of the term - while there is some merit to your interpretation, it's an already commonly used term that means something else. It'd seem to me that the modern tech is significantly less autistic than it used to be in the prior decades and will only continue to move in this direction; and aside of that, I'm pretty sure GP's "modern" was meant to mean prior thousands rather than tens of years.
-> "monetization of nerds by capital to squeeze profit "
Note. In case this is read incorrectly. For the most part the nerds are not profiting. The nerds are sitting hunched over their desk being fed coffee from a feeding tube, to keep them happy while the owners to make money.
And. To be more sad, these days you can't even get free coffee. Being fed free coffee and donuts, while others profit from us, is considered the golden age of computing.
We loved our cozy cells, not so much these more uncomfortable ones.
I think of it as a different algorithm to crawl the problem space of the real world.
In a general sense, humanity needs to be generalist (especially in the past) to accomplish all the things you need to do to stay alive. Having all 20 members of your tribe geek out and stare at a problem for 48 hours straight means a bear sneaks up and eats you. But having that one oddball (hey me) fall into a rabbit hole of observation and mental computation can lead the group out of a local maxima into a new paradigm of doing things.
I'm so continuously confused why Minecraft doesn't have a show-off mode where a team of people can build something, and then someone else can spectate it, without causing undue server load.
I should be able to give you a URL to some location, and when you click it, it opens up Minecraft, streams the blocks, and you're viewing it.
minecraft://server/loc?w=0&x=0&y=0&z=0
w is the overworld, nether, end, etc.
And if you want to set up a server where you and your friends can interact with each other and make edits, the server should be able to stream blocks from some backing server, but copy-on-write them to your own local storage.
How is this not a thing?
If you want to be really awesome, set it up like bittorrent, where you can share the load, so the central server isn't hammered.
And if bittorrent doesn't really work as a model, then set it up so that "downloader pays" for bandwidth, plus a small royalty for the creator. As a downloader, I get to set up rate limits, etc, to not accidentally spend more than I want to, etc.
This whole 2b2t would cost $2,111.04 to download from AWS, if I'm doing the math right. But that's a trillion blocks. You don't need a trillion blocks to enjoy flying around some awesome maps.
It's easy enough for a server which wants to provide some sort of "easy viewing cool builds" functionality to do it multiple ways such that something native would only be a minor convenience and many would still just use the more customized methods anyways.
2b2t wants to provide a certain anarchy server experience which would not align with that kind of functionality, spending quite a bit of effort in the opposite direction really, so this project is more about fighting to do cool things on the server than it is about dealing with Minecraft limitations.
Yes, the anarchy and inability to truly protect anything is part of the appeal of 2b2t.
There was an interesting base project wherein the true coordinates were only known to the top leaders. All other builders connected through a custom client that offset the coordinates to hide the true location. If anyone became untrusted, they were simply blocked from the client and could not expose the coordinates. There was care taken to ensure the area outside the proxy was never shown, block place directions were randomized to prevent reversing the proxy, etc.
The base apparently thrived for months or years before finally being discovered and destroyed.
If I remember one of these stories right, a screenshot of netherrite blocks on the floor. A member of the community calculated the block placement in the chunk and used this to determine where it was on the actual map.
It's not in the base game, but there is a plugin that generates a map of your server and hosts it, called Bluemap [0]. It has an example. [1] I always toss it on the servers I host.
> I should be able to give you a URL to some location, and when you click it, it opens up Minecraft, streams the blocks, and you're viewing it.
> minecraft://server/loc?w=0&x=0&y=0&z=0
Probably no real reason why not... but I think it'd make more sense to take a snapshot, upload, and then have it viewable on the web.
> And if you want to set up a server where you and your friends can interact with each other and make edits, the server should be able to stream blocks from some backing server, but copy-on-write them to your own local storage.
How is this different from just loading your world in a server and having your friends join?
> If you want to be really awesome, set it up like bittorrent, where you can share the load, so the central server isn't hammered.
BitTorrent isn't going to work. You could shard it so different parts of the world are handled by different servers. But it gets complicated and Minecraft's server software doesn't support doing this out of the box
I know 2b2t is old enough to have had many different eras, but when I heard about and checked it out in 2018, the spawn was barren, of course, but I had no problem leaving and surviving out to a pretty far distance to build a little base.
2B2T really has an extremely interesting and long history, and some of the most interesting exploits/security vulnerabilities found just for it, for example https://2b2t.miraheze.org/wiki/Nocom where the attackers had a blunt server DoS and through it influenced the server owner to report it to PaperMC, and the fix for the DoS gave them ability to track other players just as they had hoped.
> In July 2018, 0x22 and Babbaj created a coordinate exploit, using the groundwork laid out in the lag exploit. The two theorized that, if the server didn't return a response for unloaded chunks, but returned a response for loaded chunks, the rough location of players in 2b2t could be approximated. However, prplz's patch returned a response regardless of whether a chunk was loaded or unloaded, requiring a second patch to Paper that would only return a response if the chunk was loaded.
> Knowing that the issue would be resolved if Hausemaster reported it to Paper, likely through the method they laid out, 0x22 and Babbaj began intentionally, repeatedly, and blatantly sending CPacketPlayerDigging packets, causing the Paper watchdog process to output a stack trace, which included the line added by prplz.
They get griefed once in a while but the highway builders have pretty amazing automation these days so it’s not only very boring to grief they will also almost instantly be repaired.
This is a great video trying to understand the artistic side of 2b2t as a persistent world (rather than the anarchy its more well known for): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09m5BAkkOtw
Maybe a dumb question but since 2B2T (as I understand it) is a single instance of everyone modifying it to their heart's content, why does the download look like the standard biomes of a fresh minecraft map?
It is running on a single machine so the player count is relatively low. Today the limit is ~1500 concurrent players but it used to be much lower. And of the players online probably half are bots which don't build.
The map is 30Mx30M blocks so outside of the very center you'll not see that much player activity.
DonutSMP is the largest Minecraft server today, the overworld is 225,000x225,000 blocks and the map is modified wherever you look.
And because destroying other's builds is allowed most of the impressive builds are hidden in the middle of nowhere. Building within 50k blocks of spawn comes with the expectation that it might quickly turn into a crater or lava cast
You gotta zoom into the center to see the main chaos. And if you zoom in elsewhere, you can see all the generation differences from different versions of the game.
The TLDR is a Minecraft server with ""no"" rules, where hacked clients, item dupes, and griefing are allowed. Only thing that's really banned afaik are lag generators and things of that nature that explicitly stress the server and ruin the QoL for everyone.
> A search for vertical 5x5 obsidian/crying obsidian pinwheels was also made, and only 1258 were found, with only 613 within a 25k radius of spawn. There were many more than this in December of 2025, so this is either a sign of other players removing them, or the owner(s) of 2b2t worldediting them all out at some point.
Never underestimate the power of severe weaponized autism!
Rather than killing this comment, how about we discuss quantification? I actually feel this way too but do not talk about it too much and sort of boil it down to a combination of advancing in age + yelling at clouds and "Stop putting computers in all my stuff!".
Can we reliably quantify that "weaponized autism", i.e. the aggressive monetization of nerds by capital to squeeze profit out of every possible corner of society (as I interpret it in a broad sense), is making things worse. Is it damaging the economy for most people? Making people less happy? Decreasing net social mobility or discrimination? Lowering life expectancy?
Note. In case this is read incorrectly. For the most part the nerds are not profiting. The nerds are sitting hunched over their desk being fed coffee from a feeding tube, to keep them happy while the owners to make money.
And. To be more sad, these days you can't even get free coffee. Being fed free coffee and donuts, while others profit from us, is considered the golden age of computing.
We loved our cozy cells, not so much these more uncomfortable ones.
There are some theories that Autism was more useful in the wilderness. More adapted to the old world, not the modern world.
In a general sense, humanity needs to be generalist (especially in the past) to accomplish all the things you need to do to stay alive. Having all 20 members of your tribe geek out and stare at a problem for 48 hours straight means a bear sneaks up and eats you. But having that one oddball (hey me) fall into a rabbit hole of observation and mental computation can lead the group out of a local maxima into a new paradigm of doing things.
I should be able to give you a URL to some location, and when you click it, it opens up Minecraft, streams the blocks, and you're viewing it.
minecraft://server/loc?w=0&x=0&y=0&z=0
w is the overworld, nether, end, etc.
And if you want to set up a server where you and your friends can interact with each other and make edits, the server should be able to stream blocks from some backing server, but copy-on-write them to your own local storage.
How is this not a thing?
If you want to be really awesome, set it up like bittorrent, where you can share the load, so the central server isn't hammered.
And if bittorrent doesn't really work as a model, then set it up so that "downloader pays" for bandwidth, plus a small royalty for the creator. As a downloader, I get to set up rate limits, etc, to not accidentally spend more than I want to, etc.
This whole 2b2t would cost $2,111.04 to download from AWS, if I'm doing the math right. But that's a trillion blocks. You don't need a trillion blocks to enjoy flying around some awesome maps.
2b2t wants to provide a certain anarchy server experience which would not align with that kind of functionality, spending quite a bit of effort in the opposite direction really, so this project is more about fighting to do cool things on the server than it is about dealing with Minecraft limitations.
There was an interesting base project wherein the true coordinates were only known to the top leaders. All other builders connected through a custom client that offset the coordinates to hide the true location. If anyone became untrusted, they were simply blocked from the client and could not expose the coordinates. There was care taken to ensure the area outside the proxy was never shown, block place directions were randomized to prevent reversing the proxy, etc.
The base apparently thrived for months or years before finally being discovered and destroyed.
[0]: https://modrinth.com/mod/bluemap
[1]: https://bluecolored.de/bluemap/
> minecraft://server/loc?w=0&x=0&y=0&z=0
Probably no real reason why not... but I think it'd make more sense to take a snapshot, upload, and then have it viewable on the web.
> And if you want to set up a server where you and your friends can interact with each other and make edits, the server should be able to stream blocks from some backing server, but copy-on-write them to your own local storage.
How is this different from just loading your world in a server and having your friends join?
> If you want to be really awesome, set it up like bittorrent, where you can share the load, so the central server isn't hammered.
BitTorrent isn't going to work. You could shard it so different parts of the world are handled by different servers. But it gets complicated and Minecraft's server software doesn't support doing this out of the box
You can do absolutely anything on it. Modded client, x-raying, item duplication. There are no area protections. PvP enabled.
It is difficult to leave spawn :)
I know 2b2t is old enough to have had many different eras, but when I heard about and checked it out in 2018, the spawn was barren, of course, but I had no problem leaving and surviving out to a pretty far distance to build a little base.
Egregious bugs like item dupes are also patched; but while they last, they're allowed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2b2t_Uncensored/comments/1tefffd/in...
Ups.
> In July 2018, 0x22 and Babbaj created a coordinate exploit, using the groundwork laid out in the lag exploit. The two theorized that, if the server didn't return a response for unloaded chunks, but returned a response for loaded chunks, the rough location of players in 2b2t could be approximated. However, prplz's patch returned a response regardless of whether a chunk was loaded or unloaded, requiring a second patch to Paper that would only return a response if the chunk was loaded.
> Knowing that the issue would be resolved if Hausemaster reported it to Paper, likely through the method they laid out, 0x22 and Babbaj began intentionally, repeatedly, and blatantly sending CPacketPlayerDigging packets, causing the Paper watchdog process to output a stack trace, which included the line added by prplz.
https://github.com/GrimAnticheat/Grim/pull/1131
The map is 30Mx30M blocks so outside of the very center you'll not see that much player activity.
DonutSMP is the largest Minecraft server today, the overworld is 225,000x225,000 blocks and the map is modified wherever you look.
People sprawl far to prevent PvP encounters.
Background: Only heard the name of Minecraft.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181033
The TLDR is a Minecraft server with ""no"" rules, where hacked clients, item dupes, and griefing are allowed. Only thing that's really banned afaik are lag generators and things of that nature that explicitly stress the server and ruin the QoL for everyone.
And thanks to that, people are extremely motivated to find various 0days in anything related to minecraft, to gain an advantage.
This server spawned some notorious black hats :)
I did Nazi that coming.