Once upon a time, nearly half a decade ago, I was playing on a Minecraft server with a number of friends. Several of us were fairly serious players, and I particularly was a dedicated fan of the Hermitcraft server (season 6 to be specific). In service of that, I was a big believer in creating large farms for the production of materials and xp.
Sidebar: Minecraft is a really complicated game, and truly optimized farms often require incredibly complex and painful processes. The best example of this is probably when a man needed to place buttons on every spawnable surface in a given loading zone to make a fortress farm maximize drop rates and, in doing, was required to place tens and hundreds of thousands of buttons. I was playing on the high end of that large intermediate range of farm, where I was willing to dedicate hours, but not tens of hours to building any given farm.
What I really wanted was an xp farm, and, because this was before MumboJumbo showcased gnembon’s enderman farm, I wanted to build the guardian farm that was used by most of the hermits (members of the Hermitcraft server). I’d watched the instruction video and it seemed relatively simple and doable, if time consuming.
Step One: kill the Elder Guardians inside the monument so that you don’t constantly get mining fatigue. Done. Done a long time ago. Really more site prep than anything else.
It was at this point that I logged off with the following steps to complete.
Step Two: Set up a platform on top of the farm area and then set up the water streams to move the guardians into the designated area for killing on top of the platform. Cover the spawning area
Step Three: Demolish the monument and the scaffolding platform you built earlier and place soul sand which produces powerful upward bubble streams at the base of the monument.
Step Four: Profit.
My friends had a different plan. They decided to do two things.
First: Demolish the entire monument.
Second: Fill the base with soul sand.
The result of this was guardians flying ten blocks in the air all the while shooting nearby players and fish and lagging anyone who went anywhere near the area.
What did not result from this was the platform and mechanism required to move the guardians into the designated killing zone.
Further, creation of such a platform was essentially impossible because of the aforementioned flying guardians sniping anyone who attempted the feat, and ensuring that the percentage of hostile guardians with the capacity to hit the player was approximately 100% where it would have otherwise been 10-20%.
In other words, my friends dug out a lag machine and made the actual farm completely unbuildable.
Undeterred, I began the very slow process of draining the entire monument to build an even more efficient farm before realizing I didn’t care that much and giving up to move to greener, less laggy pastures and an enderman xp farm that was much simpler to build and didn’t rely on the assistance of well-meaning friends (who maybe should have skimmed the instruction video first).
Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell the story of how my base got nuked and then drained and then threatened repeatedly and how I set up correctly designed tnt fakeouts and filled another man’s base in retaliation.