Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am using some kind of new WordPress backend interface to tell you a story this week about something that happened on a creative Minecraft server I run. Let’s get Started.
A while back, I did a project where I revitalized an old, boat race minigame from a previous season of the Minecraft server I play on. I set up a private server to test this operation. Later, my family started projects on that server for others to come in visit before they were built for real. Part of the boat race required people to have OP privileges to work, and not everyone knew about the work on the race. Those that knew ended up being those with OP privileges.
Last week, I heard a report of confused member wondering where the warp points to the different projects went. I logged in and found tell tale signs of explosions around spawn. The pad with all the warps was gone, its command blocks smashed.
I found a name and what looked like a method of destruction. This person had gotten an advancement related to spawning the Wither Boss, a very destructive enemy in the game, and thought it didn’t quite look like a Wither Boss’s direction of destruction, it was close enough to get me to pursue that line of investigation.
My mother was my primary ally this time. Over the course of a day, we questioned the suspect and assembled a story out of they told us. Apparently, a younger sibling had logged in from school with her account, having mysteriously gotten the IP from somewhere, spawned the wither, [smashed the command blocks], and left. Later, they logged back in and quickly left, fearing they were being framed.
The story didn’t seem quite in line with what the command line was saying, but with only a mouse on Derpy Chips, the computer the creative server is hosted on, things were going a bit painfully slow. I found the IP the griefer was using, and an IP associated with a legitimate access where they had a conversation in chat. The IP’s matched. I know a little about how IP addresses work, but I’m no guru with them. What it looked like to me was that I was getting the IPv4 of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) for the city they were in, and that that was a dead end for investigation for the time.
No matter the story, I was already thinking of how to fix the mess. I knew I had several, old backups and I could just use some of the files from good files instead of the griefed ones. I set Derpy up for work, but found it impossible to easily move the needed files from the latest backup to a copy of the current world.
I thought it would be a good time to try working on my next blog post (today’s), where I wanted to set something up so I didn’t need to ever switch screens and controls around again. Long story short, I tried to plug a different keyboard in from another computer, and it worked. I moved the appropriate files to the copy and had someone look at spawn… and it was the old, bland spawn. I didn’t have a copy of the nice spawn that got ruined. Oh well.
Meanwhile, my mother was still suspicious of the prime user of the grief the account that did the deed. I went chatting with them late at night, getting their story out of them in text before eventually pointing out that it didn’t match up with what I remembered of the logs. I went to sleep, and in the morning, I found a full confession. It was TNT, the wither skull was just meant to look cool, and the self-given command block I had originally assumed had been used to kill the non-existent Wither Boss was a red-herring. They were the guilty party, and they were truly sorry.
In that moment, I felt sort of like how a villain might describe the rush they get when they have their foe begging them for mercy but are still going in for the kill, but my only I thought was to forgive the party who had wronged us. It took me a while to word my response, and my mother had actually gotten back to them before I could respond, but we all were leaning toward forgiving them. OP privileges were revoked, of course, but while flying over the destruction, I was thinking to myself, ‘That would make a really nice lake if it were properly decorated.’ We asked them to repair the damage as a friend.
I was most surprised at their reaction to being offered forgiveness. They were expecting us to get mad, toss around bad names, badmouth them, ban them, and hate them forever “to put it nicely.” I honestly cannot relate.
We asked for a chance to share God on this server, and we can hope that they go and do likewise.
“‘If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.'” (Luke 17:3 NIV)
Final Question: Have you ever been forgiven of something, or been a position to forgive someone seeking forgiveness?