My Lava Cherry 2019-01-22

For a while now I have been playing Guild Wars. The problem is that one day NCSoft or ArenaNet or whatever will get tired of paying for the GW servers and will turn them off. Then all of the work and accomplishments I have ever done in the game will be gone. I have wanted to find a game that I can host for myself and that I can keep digitally forever but haven't really come up with anything yet. I like the cooprpg style of Guild Wars, but most MMO type games are either really short on content or are run by bigass corporations that won't let me backup my own content. Even if they allowed users to run their own servers, it probably wouldn't make sense to since you need a minimum number of players to keep the game economy from collapsing.

Some time ago someone suggested that I try Minecraft. It doesn't require huge resources and you can run your own server... but it DOES require Java. So I never played it. I did however try Minetest at some point. I liked the fact that it does not require a crappy framework like Java, but I was irritated at how most of the things that make the game fun are plugins and most plugins require the most recent version of the application. Sure I get that security patches and blah blah, but MT is a pain in my ass to get running on a cheap OVZ VPS. Basically it came down to a lot of fighting with meeting dependencies and compiling Minetest in order to have pretty stock features such as mobs or area protection. Sure I get that people may want different mobs or different areas protection but FFS if you don't fight the dependencies and compiling then you have a very empty game.

So I gave up on Minetest and some time passed... I still didn't find a game that I could play digitally forever, and eventually gave Minetest another shot. This time I setup a Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which went end-of-life back in 2010) virtual machine with 256MB of memory and it works perfectly. It has only one port open to the outside world and I am not worried at all about the fact that it has no AV or updates of any kind. I just use the most recent binary distribution of the application and add in whatever plugins I want. The client (on any platform) uses the plugins without having to install them locally at all.

Having said all that... One of the things I knew about Minetest that I had not seen for myself was lava. Well, last night I finally found some out past -800 down. This morning I was able to find my way to the top and turn some of the lava source in to obsidian. Here's some eye-candy to remind myself of what it was like to find my first lavafall.

Now to find my way to the top.