BACKGROUND STORY OF OUR PROJECT

When I properly joined CivCraft back in the first week of 2.0, I spawned in the middle of the mountains and thought "Yeah, here looks good." I was terrified of the prospect of spawning randomly or getting robbed, so I immediately started hollowing out a little dugout for me to live in.

Then I had a crazy idea: What if, just maybe, I were to make a huge, sprawling underground city right under the mountain?

And so it began. I spent days upon days tunneling away into the mountain, only coming up occasionally for food from the small farm I kept nearby. The days turned into months, and the crazy, paranoid hermit digging in the mountain turned into several crazy, paranoid hermits digging in the mountain as my friends joined me. We were dirt poor, digging with stone tools and sporting dodgy iron armour, with about three diamonds between us.

Eventually we befriended Peter5930 (a long time before his fall from grace, put your pitchforks down) and TrampyCrabCake, some of the coolest guys on the server. They helped us out with gear, labour, goods and logistics in order to set us up with a small trickle of income and increase the rate of our monotonous digging. Meanwhile, we started threshing out a constitution - being a Philosophy/Politics student, I wanted to put some of the more fanciful ideas that we'd studied over the years into practice. It was a crazy dream: a state that looked like a philosophical Frankenstein's Monster and a subterranean city sprawling across 500 blocks. But it was MY dream, and I stuck to it.

A lot of people left the area. Atlas, the regional power in our neck of the woods, became abandoned and subject to a brief period of local drama. But we stayed, still kept digging like there was no goddamn world above us.

Eventually we acquired a nearby town, Kelnas, after the inhabitants were either slaughtered by griefers or left CivCraft never to return. We cleaned up the lava flows, attempted to reconstruct the beautiful medieval buildings, and began to use it as a cover for our actual project. Surely if people thought we were from a shitty little village in the arse-end of nowhere, they wouldn't come snooping for our real city?

We supplied food, armour, weapons and escorts to anyone who passed through our area. We took them to Atlas, the CW, Carbon, Lio, Hobbiton - anywhere that had a stable population at the time and could set us up. We explained the plugins to newfriends and talked about the drama happening elsewhere in the word (perhaps not from the most unbiased of positions; most of the drama posts I read on the sub and 90% of the time I didn't have a first-hand account. I didn't leave town much.)

After myself and the other townsfolk went on hiatus for a few months due to real-life commitments, I was astounded to find that our city/digsite, Urbem Abyssi, was still intact and undiscovered, save for a brief pearling when a member of the CivCraft public accidentally began digging into the concealed entrance. We began work with renewed intensity, and I began to think we were goddamn invincible.

THE ISSUE

I thought we were invincible. I was wrong.

A group of newfriend raiders moved into the area. They robbed a nearby estate belonging to a friend of ours; burning his tree farm to the ground, slaughtering every last one of his livestock, and busting IR'd chests in his gold farm and his estate to gear themselves. They also broke into a nearby town we'd befriended and stole all their valuables. Not content with that, they harassed myself and another of our townsfolk for about six hours - both of us were to scared to log off, we were expecting our town to be looted and razed as soon as we left it unguarded. So at 4am when they finally logged off, we did the only thing we COULD do: Call them out on their shit, and begin taking them out.

We eventually found their hideout purely by accident - I had started to map out our area, and was in the process of placing bollards along the fringes of our territory as a symbolic border when I came across a small farm we hadn't built ourselves. There was no sign of any man-made structure in the area, so we dug around the area a bit and, lo and behold, stumbled across their hideout. After watching the area for about a week, we geared up for an assault. While they were sleeping we broke in, stole back all the goods which had been taken, broke all of their beds and filled their base top-to-bottom with dirt, cobble and lava. The idea was to force them out of the area by not only depriving them of resources which weren't rightfully theirs in the first place, but by having them respawn and suffocate to death - we figured newfriends weren't dedicated enough to travel 12km back home, and even if they did we had a hastily constructed vault, several stacks of coal, a handful of pearls and enchanted diamond gear to convince them it was a bad idea to fuck around with us and our neighbours.

That didn't go to plan. The only person we managed to take out was the other ringleader of their group. Not that it mattered anyway - both TheTightestBox and Jferrero613 jumped straight back on alts and kept building like nothing had happened. What's more, their new town was only 500 blocks away from the base we'd hit - perhaps most distressing of all, right above our fucking city digsite.

We could have pearled them then and there, we had so many opportunities to end it through force. Hell, the others wanted to take out their alts and lock them away for months. But I, not wanting to have any more bloodshed or hostilities on my hands, decided to instead offer to pay them to piss off out of our area. I was even prepared and offered to pull up and reconstruct their new town elsewhere, brick by brick.

Instead, I was pearled and threatened by this motherfucker.

Turns out this 'Fizzyjuice95' character was an alt of everyone's favourite 0,0 cretin: Soapbucket. Although I'd only met Soap once on a brief trip to see the early CivCraft world, I'd read the name enough times to know that this shitstorm had just taken a turn for the worse.

So, after a heated Mumble conversation which mostly composed of Soap claiming we had no legitimate claims on the land we'd lived in for a fucking year and threatening to break my vault if TheTightestBox and Jferrero613 weren't released, I willingly cracked it open and handed them over. Funnily enough, it wasn't my own safety I was afraid for - it was the prospect of having those two bastards let loose in our vault room, geared by one of the richest guys around and smashing the shit out of everything of value.

Not that that mattered anyway, because less than two days later the fuckers jumped on their alts and began trashing and cleaning out everything they could get their grubby little hands on. They somehow found and broke all of our snitches the very next day, so while more damage was done we have no hard evidence that it was them (although we have a fairly fucking good idea).

So, here we are today: Well over half our possessions stolen from us, our year-long project griefed and assimilated into a town filled with bastards, and living in exile.

But you know what, Soap? You and your little mates haven't broken us yet. We'll come back from this one way or another. I came to this server with a dream, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up on that for a bunch of cunts.

A REQUEST FOR HELP (The important shit)

Despite knowing Jarl and his crew are still on the loose, it'd be greatly appreciated if we could have some help to grab our lands back and bring these guys to justice. We don't really have much to give in terms of a bounty anymore, but I'm sure we could work something out. We can definitely offer some coal towards the upkeep of locking them away in a vault, which is a start, but I'd prefer it if we worked out payments AFTER these guys are removed from the area. Known collaborators include:

• TheTightestBox/cristmccrackin
• Jferrero613/F1nalEpisode
• Fizzyjuice95/Fear6000
• tynftw
• ~Pwnzoar~ Turns out Pwnzoar had no idea he was moving and hiding stolen goods until much later, the bounty has been removed
• Cymbalik (Possibly was a compromised account at time of snitch logs)

Our town, Kelnas, is located just below the Nether Biome at -1400, 5000. Their town is just southwest on the same plateau as us.

TL;DR: I've lived and worked in my area all my CivCraft life. Soapbucket and friends are twats who have extorted us, threatened us, stolen both land and loot from us and have pretty much ruined a year of planning and work. We want them pearled and removed from the area so we can mine and build in peace.

FINAL NOTE: I'm sorry for the absurdly long post. I felt like I needed a bit of a vent.

EDIT #1: Due to the overwhelming kindness and charity of the people I've spoken to over the last few hours, we are now able to offer bounties: 70D per head for TheTightestBox/cristmccrackin, Jferrero613/F1nalEpisode, and Fizzyjuice95/Fear6000, and 25D for tynftw (That's a total of 445 diamonds worth of bounties!)

EDIT #2: Pwnzoar is acquitted of any crime, bounty or request for pearling. Turns out that he was lied to about the nature of the goods he was safeguarding.