Survival Introduction

This is intended as a guide, by no means should it become religious phrase, material of sexual fantasy or quoted text in a ban appeal.

Let me start off by saying Survival is not an overly friendly place. While players form alliances in time and find some measure of security through partnerships with clans or through dominance in PvP (see: weizbox), life for a new player is tough.

Survival is based around a player vs player (PvP) style. Whether you attack your opponents with swords, bows, ingenious traps, or (if you really feel like trolling) feathers, it’s ultimately a game of competition and survival.

One of the first decisions you will ultimately be faced with on survival is where to build your home. Because there is no /sethome on survival, all players respawn at the original spawn location (0, 0). Given that players mostly congregate around the center of the map

THIS IS NOT THE PLACE FOR YOU TO BE

While it is tempting for a new player to want to live near a road or spawn, those areas being easily accessible and easy to find, a new player should also not live in those regions for the exact same reason. Roads are the first place most players will look to find players to kill, and might be camped by players wearing iron armor with a diamond sword as per standard PvP kit (More on that later).

Ultimately, there are two gameplay styles a player may choose on survival:

1. live far from a road and far from spawn, or
2. live close to a road or close to spawn.

Your location of settlement on the map really depends on your play-style and experience with the game and the server.

Option (1) allows you to build up a base and gather resources in relative peace, allowing you to choose when to interact with other players, but ultimately may feel very similar to playing single-player. (It’s also a long walk from spawn if you die!)

Many players have found success with option (2), building a house right off the road and/or as close to spawn as they can possibly build. Such a location gives you easy access to your supplies (and players to kill!), the ability to show off your buildings, and the ability to ban lots of griefers via mod requests. It’s a very exciting style of play, but can be quite challenging for new players to maintain.

Where should new players build then?

Far, far away! The farther away from spawn and roads you are, the less likely people are to stumble across your base and hence the less likely you are to be killed by another player. If you’re interested in play-style (2), building your home even 100 blocks off the road is often enough to stay away from most players, while keeping you close to the action.

So how should I get started?

Your first priority should be to find a place to build, consistent with your desired gameplay style. Picking a random direction and walking for a minute or two is generally a good method to find a nice spot. Always do a quick check of your surroundings, making sure no one is already building there, and the area is sufficient to build on. Make sureto write down the coordinates of your base using F3! ( X and 'Z are the ones you are interested in )

Next, follow the same game as you would in single player - mine! The sooner you acquire resources, the faster you are on your way to becoming a good PvP player. Your first priority should be to defend yourself (with at least an iron sword and chestplate) before you worry about defending and securing your base.

Starting a renewable source of food, such as a wheat or mushroom farm should shortly follow establishing a base, PvP fights are often decided by who had more food.

The Secure Base...dun dun dunnnnn

Just like there are many ways to pick a base location, there are many ways to secure it. We’re not going to tell you which way is the best way to secure a base, but here are some ideas to keep in mind.

1. Hide your base! - The most secure base is the base no one knows exists. On chaos servers, players often hide their base by digging a player-sized hole into the ground or into the side of a mountain, and sealing the entrance. Some of the most secure bases on survival were a fortress carved out of a mountain in revision 4, with a maze on the inside so intruders would get lost, and an underground base with an underwater entrance on revision 5. On survival, you can lock your chests, so you don’t have to worry about your supplies getting stolen. But anything that keeps your base hidden - or keeps the entrance hidden, even if the base is visible - keeps you safer.
2. Create bottlenecks for PvP. - Forcing players to use a long ladder to get to you in your base gives you plenty of chances to attack them before they get to you. Know the ways people can get into your base and make sure you can defend them. Adding a 1 block wide bridge or ladder allows arrows to easily be shot from somewhere outside the bottleneck at the invaders. Even a floating base may not be secure - a player can still build a 1x1 “tard tower” into it. Building underground is the most reliable thing to do, and easiest to bottleneck. They won’t dig a 1x1 shaft down, because fixing it would be impossible, and they would have a hard time mining into it if it’s well hidden, and even that would be a pain for them to fix, especially if you line your base with the best materials (see below). Building a presence on top of the surface with the majority of your base underground is often a good method, as it resolves land claim disputes easily and also takes attention away from the hidden entrance to your ‘main’ base.
3. Use traps. - PvP servers are the place where clever traps really shine. While there are some restrictions in place on what you can use (no TNT, no ridiculous amounts of lava), there are many good options available for traps. Just remember that if a trap doesn’t kill a player, they are allowed to grief to get out if necessary.
4. Building a bridge to your entrance with redstone-triggered trapdoors
5. Placing random holes around your base
6. Trap players somewhere where you can shower them with arrows (perhaps from dispensers)
7. Trap the player between iron doors
8. Use pistons with pressure plates to open huge holes, release lava, …
9. Placing cactus around your base area not only helps to keep mobs down but can also provide buffer zones when placed properly.
10. Use alarms. - Even an open base can be safe if you always know when someone’s coming. Use pressure plates / switches in combination with noteblocks (and doors/trapdoors for added sound) to give yourself a warning when someone enters your base.

Building materials. - As discussed in the rules below, players can grief into your base if there is no other safe way in, but they must fix the griefing ASAP (ideally on the way in). So the materials you choose to build your base can have a huge impact on how players try to get in. Bad choices: - materials that can be broken and replaced without any tools. Examples: dirt, planks, fences, wool. Okay choices: - materials that can be broken and replaced with cheap tools, like stone picks. Examples: cobblestone, sandstone, iron doors. Good choices: - materials that can’t be replaced unless you bring replacements with you. Examples: smoothstone, glass. Great choices: - valuable materials that are very hard to break and even harder to replace. Examples: obsidian, brick. Lava can also make it harder for players to break in - but remember that only mods can place lava, and will only do so for reasonably-sized requests (since lava is so easy to grief with). Don’t expect to get your floor, ceiling, and walls lined with lava.

The Rules (and those grumpy mods)

There are a number of rules that govern the Survival server that you should be familiar with. A complete and likely more current version of the rules can be found at this page

Some of the static rules are general politeness, such as not using homophobic words like fag or racist words designed to insult people. Other rules you should know about is our strong stance on griefing and the use of hacked clients. Griefing is currently not tolerated on any of the nerd.nu servers. (Chaos is the exception, but is currently not available.)

Griefing is the act of placing or removing blocks in other players’ structures without their permission. This includes (but is not limited to) breaking glass, wood, stone and all manner of blocks, placing chests/furnaces on someone else’s land, spamming obsidian, etc. The only time you may break anther's creation is for the purposes of PvP (more on that in a minute).

Hacked clients include any mods/hacks that give a player an unfair advantage on the server. These include (but are not limited to) x-ray hacks / wireframe texture packs, mini-maps that show player locations or hidden caves, auto-click hacks, reach hacks, fly hacks, and speed hacks. Flying and speed hacks are usually an immediate ban from our servers.

As mentioned above there are special occasions where you are allowed to break blocks of another user, for the purposes of PvP, if there is no safe entrance in. In such a situation you may break blocks in your effort to get into a base/house to kill someone on the proviso that you repair the damage immediately. Should you fail to repair the damage, you will often be given a warning from a staff member and given a chance to fix the damage, repeat offenders may simply be banned.

Logging in or out to gain an advantage is not tolerated and will quickly earn you a bad reputation with other players, a 5 second delay has been added to log out times to combat people doing this, so now when you log out you will still be able to take damage from player/mobs/environment. It is best to log out away from other players, inside your own base if possible.

Now there has been a lot of talk about the staff but little to explain what they are.

The staff are comprised of 5 levels with varying permissions, hierarchy, and experience: Mods, Tech Admins, Server Admins, and Head Admins.

Moderators

Mods make up the greater staff population. They are people who have dedicated a lot of time to the servers, and have been deemed to be trustworthy. To contact a mod or ask for banned items such as water/lava type ”/helpreq [short sentence]” into your chat, no quotes needed. This will add your request to a queue which will be completed when a staff member is next available to help. Note that your /helpreq stores the location where you are standing when you make it.

Tech Admins

Tech admins are the ones responsible for a lot of the features of the servers (including the server hardware), such as writing/implementing plugins and bugfixes to make the game more fun for everyone and the running of the server itself. Should there be technical problems, they will be the ones to fix them. Though they carry some extra responsibility than any other group of staff, they also administer the servers the same as mods.

Server Admins

The server admins are the head staff members for a specific server. These players have the full range of in-game powers for that server, and are often asked to handle the most difficult conflicts on the server (moving locked chests, land disputes, etc.). While server admins cannot make rules, they can interpret them to situations or scenarios, which moderators then follow. They are also allowed to extrapolate on current rules. On survival, the current admins are CarnThorn1, draggin_low, LordSalisbury, and weizbox. They are all very approachable so don’t hesitate to message one in game if you feel a moderator has treated you unfairly.

Head Admins

The head admins deal with issues such as moderators abusing power and generally just provide an overview of the server. Any problems you face that a moderator cannot resolve will be bumped up to an admin to look at. Any problems with a moderator should be reported to admins. Also, Head Admins make rules and have the final say on the Server Admins’ interpretation of rules and their extrapolations of current rules.

A complete list of staff can be found here.

The staff of the server play a vital role in keeping it clean of bad players looking to make your gaming experience a bad one, but also deal with things like the placing of banned items for you.

Banned Items

1. Fire (flint and steel)
2. TNT
3. Boats
4. Lava buckets (can’t be used or dropped, but can be used for furnace fuel)
5. Water buckets
6. Pistons and sticky pistons (can’t be placed unless given to a mod)

Water and lava may be placed a mod through the /helpreq system. For example, use “/helpreq need water here” to request water to be placed - no need to include coordinates, as they are stored when the helpreq is placed. Other uses for /helpreq include placing your pistons and sticky pistons, reporting griefing, and settling land disputes.

I’m banned!!? what do I do now?

Should you find yourself banned, the best approach to getting back on the server as fast as possible is to create an appeal at nerd.nu/appeal. Please remain calm and helpful through this process; using proper grammar and full sentences will go a long way to getting you unbanned. The appeal process can take time, so please do not bump (post recursively) in your appeal thread until you have been responded to by a moderator. Only post if you have new information to add to your appeal.

If you have not had a response from a moderator within 2 days you may ‘bump’ your appeal. To do so simply post a comment with the line “bump - no response within 2 days” and we will rush through your appeal to the banning moderator, if that process is unsuccessful an admin may take over your appeal.

Provided you keep a cool head and you are apologetic in your appeal, the chances you will be allowed back on the server are extremely high.

Clans

Clans are a large part of survival, they can range from just a few people to 30 or more. Clans are not an official part of the server - if you would like to join a clan, you simply need to contact the leaders of that group. Rather, they have emerged naturally over the history of the server. There are advantages and disadvantages to aligning with a clan.

Advantages

1. Protection - often clans will have a large area of land walled off with secure entrances, as well as other members on to help you out should an attack come your way.
2. Shared resources - a lot of clans have community chests, where people may take and use resources acquired by the clan, such as iron for armor, coal etc. Often a well-coordinated clan can construct in a day what might take a single player weeks to build.
3. Direction - while it may not seem like a huge deal for newer players, a well-coordinated clan is often a great way to learn about Survival.
4. PvP coordination - PvP-ing with a large group, coordinated by leaders, is some of the most fun you will ever have on the server. Try it! This also trains you to become a better PvP player.

Disadvantage

1. A clan base, while offering protection, also attracts a lot of attacks from rival clans or singular players. The larger your clan, the more likely someone in your clan is online at your base, making that base a magnet for PvP.
2. You are often expected to contribute to community chests, meaning the effort you have spent mining may be exploited by someone else.
3. Drama often follows clans, with leadership issues and people associating bad views of a clan with you.

Your decision to join a clan or not is entirely your own, most clans will welcome you with open arms, and its generally helpful while you’re still starting out on Survival.

Suggestions for Clan Leaders

1. Play by the rules - clans who have even a single cheater get an automatic bad reputation on the server. Enact clan discipline and boot out players who cheat, exploit, log during PvP, and engage in other taboo actions on the server.
2. Medium is good- small clans can’t sustain protection and builds. Large clans are unstable and lead to the most drama.
3. Be very selective with adding clan members - don’t start a clan with new players who will quit the next day, or people who you don’t recognize and have experience with. Talk to them on mumble, get a few friends on there, and make sure you trust them entirely, especially if your clan is communist/anarchist with community chests and/or no defined leaders.
4. Keep track of who is in the clan, a wall of signs is often really helpful to the staff of the server as they can check who should be building in your base and who should not.
5. Get in mumble! ( " Mumble Server: mumble.nerd.nu port 6162 )It is a lot easier to coordinate with people when you can all talk to each other, building becomes more defined, and pvp is a lot more fun.

PvP - do’s and dont’s

While everyone has their own views on the best way to attack players/bases there are some generic rules that are worth keeping in mind while you discover your personal style.

Weapons

PvP is often settled by who has the best gear

A standard PvP kit will normally include

1. Iron helmet
2. Iron chestplate
3. Iron leggings
4. Iron boots
5. Diamond " sword
6. 6-7 pieces of health (pork, bread, soup - given how easy mushrooms are to farm, you should strive to use soup 100% of the time)
7. Bow and arrows (necessary for long range combat, and also keeping zergers off your back)

How you decide to arm yourself is entirely up to you, some players simply craft a stone sword, some go all out with diamond armor, find what works for you.

Blocks While it may seem like an odd thing it is extremely useful to carry some blocks with you on your PvP raids.

1. Smoothstone - to repair damage when entering a building, sometimes glass too
2. Dirt - for scaling walls or navigating drop tunnels; at the moment leaves work even better, as they will naturally decay away after being paced
3. Pick - Easy to make and allows you to enter through a lot more blocks. A stone pick allows you to break and replace many blocks like cobblestone and brick. A diamond pick is necessary to break and replace obsidian, but is also very expensive to carry around for PvP.
4. Lever || Redstone torch - entering through iron doors with no button/lever - a great option since it allows entry without having to replace doors/blocks later.

Navigation

While it is tempting to follow the roads when traveling to your attack destination it is also the most likely place to encounter other players and/or scouts should the base your attacking be well prepared. Keeping off the roads will often allow you to sneak up on your target a lot easier, seeing as you will not be approaching from the normal direction.

Choosing your target

It may be fun to attack everyone you come across often it is good to think about who your target is, there are lots of friendships on the server, some unspoken, and killing the wrong person can gain you unwanted attention while you are still starting out. You’re going to get attacked eventually, but if you keep away from clan bases while you are very new it gives you time to practice your PvP skills on less organized folk.

Don’t complain when you die

It happens to everyone, and will only hurt your chances of making friends. Take it on the chin, congratulate them if they did a really nice job. Then walk back to your base, if they are still there then hang around the area but best not to enter again until they leave, its no fun having to walk back again, if you have another chest with items gear up and try and reclaim your items while you have the advantage of the home ground. Also, complaining about any sort, especially about camping, is like asking for more camping and to be killed more often.

Don’t log out during PvP

Everyone has the temptation to keep their items by avoiding a PvP battle, or prematurely ending one, by logging out. Don’t do it. It makes you and your clan get a bad reputation on the server, and admins start thinking about banning you. A 5 second delay from the time you press the log out button until the time your player entity actually leaves the game has been enabled on the server to prevent logging during the middle of a battle.

The Map

The map usually consists of a center spawn area with 4 roads leading off into the distance, the roads are not only for navigation but give a kind of direction to building, with many people having small shacks along the road, with some players building their main base off the road.

Building on the road comes with some advantages, it’s easy to get to, allows people to find you easily and sometimes offers you with easy attacking distance to surrounding bases.

The disadvantages often outweigh these points though, for the exact reason its good to build on the roads it is also a bad reason. While easy access for you may be nice keep in mind that it’s also easy access to everyone else, being able to find you easily makes you a target and an easy attacking distance can also work against you, should your neighbors take a liking to attacking your base.

Other than the roads there is also the Arena.

The arena is a admin run event, where special matches are held in a designated field. A tourney will often result in large amounts of prizes for the winner and plenty for the runners up, previous winners have won things such as diamonds, bricks, iron, cake, bookshelves and other valuables. Free for all style matches are also held in the lead up to the main event. If you have been saving armor all map and keep forgetting to dust it off and wear it, now is the time!