DM Bugle

Fixing DMU

By Encfa17

Hey all! Ben here! We have an awesome guest article today, which reminds me of a past initiative called “Green DMU”. I really recommend we all learn from Encfa17 and work to make DMU prettier! Enjoy the article!

Hello everybody, I’m Encfa17! Ben allowed me to write this article so here we go! I wanted to tell you about what I mainly do on DMU public server these days. Basically, I try to restore the landscapes.

You know those places where all the dirt is missing because players mined it all and it looks like a nuke was dropped there? Those are my main targets. But how do I restore them?

I don’t just cover it with a layer of dirt (because mobs would be able to spawn under it), so I usually need a lot of dirt to fill all the holes to make it look natural. I have to go in caves to get it, just like you would look for diorite, andesite or granite (I don’t take dirt from the surface because then it would destroy the landscape so it’s counter-productive). Plus, sometimes I find some cool minerals just behind the dirt I mine, so it’s a win-win.

(Also, I take the example of dirt, but I do it with rock if it’s a mountain or sand for a desert)

Once the crater is completely filled and it looks natural, I usually plant some trees and grow flowers on the said area. That way, players can do something new where nobody was doing stuff because of the poor maltreated landscape.

Even though this is my main activity on the public server, it’s not the only thing I do to restore landscapes. I also do some other minor stuff, which I’ll go through now.

You know that very relatable moment when you walk in a forest to get some wood, but the only things you see are floating single wood blocks with tons of leaves because little Timmy, 8 years old, was too lazy to place a dirt block under him to break the entire tree? Well don’t worry, because one of the other main things I do is breaking those said wood blocks and replant the trees from the baby trees I get from the leaves, then make them grow with bone powder. That way, the forest looks alive again, players can get wood, and let’s be honest, trees are kinda neat.

Another thing I do is leveling the water in those cute little lakes, rivers, or just anywhere the water isn’t at the same level everywhere. It can be annoying to swim in it because of the different streams or because it takes too damn long to reach the surface again. We all know it’s because little Timmy broke some blocks around the water and left it that way. Silly Timmy. Once the water is “fixed”, it’s not as painfully slow to swim in it as it was before.

When the “destruction level” of a place is acceptable, I don’t do anything crazy. For example, I place trap doors where there’s a hole or a staircase leading to a cave (so people don’t accidentally fell in it); I fill random holes with the correct blocks; I grow flowers and trees; I break all the random out-of-place blocks that don’t appear to have any use or belong to anyone (usually, those are cobblestone blocks that were placed to make space in an inventory). And finally, when I find a player’s house with holes in the walls or missing blocks because little Timmy didn’t understand griefing was against the rules, (if I can easily guess what’s the type of block that’s missing) I replace the said blocks so the house is complete again.

The area that often need my work are usually near spawn because that’s where new players go to begin their adventure on the Dalek Mod. So if around spawn, you see 3 trap doors leading to a staircase leading to a mine, there’s a high chance I was the one placing them. I also try to restore the Nether sometimes by replacing netherrack or destroying single pillars that were used only once to reach a high place.

Here’s a before/after comparison of a crater I found somewhere.

OK, I think that’s all I wanted to say. I do that to help people enjoying the public server by restoring the landscapes. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Bye!