in

blog (draft)

date

1/25/2024

During the peak of the COVID lockdown, me and my friends joined a small, tightly knit minecraft server named Piglin. Piglin is a survival server with some additional mechanics like currency and land claims. Certainly, it was much more focused on the community and creative building than on survival minecraft – just what we needed. It’s been 3 years since then, and the server has undergone a large number of map resets to accommodate new Minecraft versions. We quit right around the first reset, or perhaps directly as a result of it. You would think, then, that my base is gone, but you would be wrong.

You see, I had the forsight to break one of the server’s rules – the rule against downloading the map. I downloaded the map. It’s 11gb. Well worth it. It follows, then, that the world is a haystack, as I do not know the coordinates of my base. How much of a haystack? Each region file holds 1024 chunks, and is roughly 8mb. That means the server had 1,408,000 chunks, of which likely no more than 625 (0.04%) would be identifiable to me as holding my home.

There is something intrinsically frustrating about the situation I find myself in. I know, somewhere in this file that’s sitting right in front of me is the data I need, the data that I poured hundreds of hours of my life into. I do not know, however, how to find it.

The plan

Luckily, I am pretty good at making computers do hard things for me. While I cannot recall the cords, I still have a pretty good mental image of what my home looked like. I can say with confidence that