Hiya!

I'm Gotterdammer. Formally, I go by Gotter D. Ammer, but prefer my "first name": Gotter. I chose this name ages ago, early Beta I think, while listening to Wagner's Götterdämmerung, which is why some people say "I recognize your name from somewhere...". No, I'm not a Rotterdammer.

As many n00bs do, I started playing multiplayer on the general servers, such as /r/Minecraft's server, for a little while. I then migrated to MinerAp where I joined Schneider's Farms (SF), had a good reputation (I was even the leader of SF, the largest and strongest faction at the time, for about a month), and made great friends. After about 6 months of that, the server had slowly turned to shit less than its former glory (yes, it had a lovely golden age!) and some IRL stuff got in the way, so I quit Minecraft for a few months.

After a break, I poke around for new servers to join, preferably survival servers that have some mechanics or mods to protect builders. I stumble upon /r/Civcraft through the random button and decide to give it a go. This was sometime November 2012.

My memory is a bit fuzzy here, but I think I spawned in the wilderness and found a small lake to build a house on. After hearing voices for a while, I ask around, and discover I live right outside Communa. I talk with HMARS for a while and he greeted me very kindly. I was considering joining the town. I squated on the edge of town for a while and decided to go exploring the world before joining anyone. The town gifted me a partial set of leather armor and an iron sword for my journey, and sent me in the direction of Columbia and Mt. Augusta via the overworld (the nether seemed too dangerous to me at the time and I hoped to bump into more towns that way).

After about a day of adventuring, I figured Columbia is too far away to reach by foot, so I searched the subreddit and wiki a bit for closer towns and groups. This was the first time I heard of Prussia. I checked out some of their screenshots and posts, and I immediately fell in love with Danzig. I decide to venture there since it was a bit closer.

My first encounter with the town was smashing! I took the boat route from the north and sailed to the town, and, as I usually do, space out while boating in a straight line. Next thing I know, my boat is in pieces from smacking the castle foundation's ocean wall.

Nobody was in town, so I explored a little while. This is late November or early December now. It was only a few days later that I met a Prussian. Sadly I can't recall who it was. Might have been Gezoerksel. Amazed by Danzig's lovely building style, scale, and splendor, I ask to join and was quickly made a citizen. I soon built my house in the New District which only had 2 or 3 other houses, the theater, and the bath house at the time.

The next two or so months were very calm and lovely. Sure, the HCF War was raging in the background, but Prussia and I remained isolated. We were only struck by griefing maybe twice or thrice during those long winter months. I kept to my business in Danzig, kept social, and occasionally went out of my safe hole to explore the cities I originally intended to visit, including Mount Augusta, Gerald, Nine(?), and Aristopolis. By then I was trusted with a set of Prot, which I occasionally had to wear when Danzig was on high alert or I had to escort someone. The only fighting I ended up in during the War was near the end of it when I and 2 other Prussians were traveling through the nether and we passed by two other fellows in full armor. It took a second to click, but we realized they were HCF right as they started attacking us. We fought in the cramped tunnels for a minute or so. I was struck down by Spurion and pearled, though I was quickly released outside some random nether portal in an ocean. The only other hunt I participated in was a lengthy chase through Sayvard which resulted in no pearlings, AFAIK.

Disregarding that bit of fighting, I expanded my house, helped build new roads in town, gathered resources for general use, and just tried to be helpful in general. During this time, I noticed Danzig only had one formal source of cobblestone and one small tree farm, and figured I could put my ability to use: to build a redstone factory. I had built two previously on MinerAp, but since the server only has vanilla building and protection, they remained small (only a cobblestone generator). This one, however, was going to be big and useful! I began planning in December.

To my surprise, I quickly gained favor by Parliament. I was told I was the main candidate for the currently-vacant Ministry of Ordnung. However, in a sleep-deprived stupor, I pearled a fellow Prussian. I had been awake the whole day and it was around 3am. The city was on high alert since we had two petty griefer-raiders that day. I was the only Prussian logged on (so I thought). The_High_Ace, a travelling salesman who was in town, had been chatting with me a for a while. I then realize our light DRO storage had been broken into. Unknown to me, Ace was pearled by two Bay City visitors building their embassy for setting buildings on fire; Ace told me kaithefirstson broke into the vault, stupidly enough I believed him, and pearled kaith. I had no access to snitchlogs at the time and thought kaith was also only a visitor. Oops! Everything was sorted out the next day, I apologized, and Ace was put in a deep vault. I'd say that, along with the "discussions" on the subreddit, was the most drama I've witnessed in Prussia in the first world...

I thought my chances at the Ministry and stay in Prussia were over, but again to my surprise, I was made Minister three weeks later (20 February, 2013). Basically, I sorted the chest room and cleaned up stuff around Danzig. It was around this time that I had also picked a location for the Factory (on the SW corner of the New District) and had finalized plans. I began leveling the land and building the foundation. During this time, I don't recall when exactly, Koentinius (the Minister of Consruction) and I had talked about creating a subway system within Danzig. With my redstone knowledge, I figured I could come up with a system, and so I did. We built the Hauptbahnhof (HBF for short, meaning "Main Train Station" in German) on the plaza, two stations in the Old District, and three in the New District. From the HBF, you could travel directly to every station, and from each to the HBF as well as its adjacent stations. It worked beautifully once it was operational in early March and fully completed a while later. It was my pride and joy.

I built my Factory and the subway system at the same time, alternating between the two frequently because they were both high-stress, complicated, and daunting tasks. Thankfully, Koen and a few others helped me all the time! I didn't have a name for the factory before the server reset, so it was just always "the Factory" or "Gotter's Factory". Since I already wrote on it, check out its wiki page for more info (I named it and wrote the page posthumously). While discussing how to deal with griefers and reparations, I suggested I could make them work in my Factory. A few jokes then began how it resembled Auschwitz, and the main gate coincidentally looked eerily similar. Too bad I liked the gate as it was. Someone posted "Arbeit Macht Frei" on it for a short while...

This was in Spring, around March and April, so the whole RKWildCard and Hamster drama started which lead to the server reset. I didn't do much else once I completed the subway system and most of the Factory. I spent quite some time playing CivTest, though, and tried to help a bit with the RealisticBiomes bugs. I also used to play around a lot with WorldPainter, fantasy worldbuilding, and psychogeography, so I offered my service to Orthzar to maybe possibly making a hand-made world for Civcraft 2.0. This didn't go anywhere, but I kept messing around with worldbuilding through WorldPainter and other tools.

I also started regularly editing the Wiki in the spring, and still do so since there's a ton of fascinating stuff on here (but not enough!). I write my own articles and edit others for order and clarity.

Also, backtracking a bit for a sidestory, I ventured with a friend from SF to a new server during my time there to test some redstone mechanics and obsidian glitches to use in MinerAp. Unbeknownst to me, that server was actually Civcraft right after its opening day. I built a barn-house-thing on a hill near our obsidian testing site while my friends messed with that. It was only one year later while playing Civcraft that I realized it was this very server. I then ventured out and dug through mounds of reddit messages to find the coords of the site, and to my surprise, it still stood!... mostly. I reclaimed the site as Gottersheim for Prussia and spent two weeks there digging around our old contraptions and my house, which seems to have been remodeled a few times. Actually, it was never reinforced! I didn't know that was a mod and nobody else did. Sadly, Civcraft 1.0 ended shortly afterwards. To think, had I stayed on this server, which him and I were considering, I could have influenced history from the beginning!

So, we were in limbo. Prussia had its own creative server and we played a lot on that, made plenty of cool buildings. I had always considered myself good at building, but I feel I really developed here since I now had an architectural goal and plenty of time for it. I'm damn proud of my Cathedral, which we'll be building in-game soon. I considered making an architectural company in Civcraft 2.0.

Then Civcraft 2.0 came online and we hit the ground running. Many players wanted to settle in one area we had found within the first two days of the server, but I insisted on exploring more since that was the only actual option we had found. By the grace of ttk2 the gods, I discovered the perfect location. Breslau was founded there a day later.

We dug a hole in the ground and began stockpiling materials. But we needed a plan. This was to be the most marvelous Prussian city yet! Koen and I talked a lot and decided to individually make plans for the city before we influence each other too much. I made mine in MS Paint overnight, presented it, and it was immediately accepted. The modern Breslau almost exactly still follows this plan. So we built roads, harvested materials, explored the region, and figured out how to build the future. Most people were getting antsy since Koen and I were building everything because it had to be exact, so we scrambled to get the house-building system in place. Two days later, the plan went into effect flawlessly and houses were popping up everywhere. I then began work on the first large project: the harbor. To make a harbor with a surface of smoothstone the size of a small town (about 3-4x the size of the KPISb harbor area), the easiest way was to make a layer of dirt below the soon-to-be stone layer, fill it with water, and dump lava on it. Filling it with water was fun since I got to ride the waves as they spread over the dirt area! Breslau now had the world's largest pool. Turning it all to stone was agonizing work and took 3ish days.

Sometime late May, I decided to follow through with making an architecture company. I still wanted to experiment with economics in Civraft and to see if I am able to run a company in-game, so I founded Baukunst with Koen as my co-founder. After completing my first commission, sjdewall expressed interest in joining, so I hired him too. We each had too many projects in Breslau, though, so the company stalled. I also went on vacation IRL during this time. I'm considering bringing it back to life.

This brings us to the present: late July. I'm still extending my hiatus. I have a ton of stuff to do in the near future, so I'm trying to wind down my activity. I'm not sure if I would quit, though.

So there you have it: a quickly-written autobiography without doublechecking facts or spelling!

Projects and Goals and Stuff

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Written and last updated on the 26th of July, 2013.