Keep It Secure!

I have been spending about a third of my gaming time in Minecraft. I like it so much, I decided to spend 5 dollars a month at Beastnode and set up a server my friends and family can play on with me. I stepped into my newly generated world and my heart skipped a beat. It's like they knew I was a girly girl at heart!

Blues skies, green grass, water, and flowers!

 This is, of course, a picture of my world now, because back then I could have taken the shot of the full lake with flowers all around and trees and, sigh, I can't now because all those pictures went poof, along with, hopefully, the malware that my daughter found for me on a Minecraft fan page. Ugh.

My friends joined in, and we built a town near the lake, walled in, with gardens and pens of animals and houses, a roller coaster, a water slide, a wishing well, and houses. It was beautiful. Then, two nights ago, we were invaded.

To the right, my small house completely buried in random blocks.

To the left in the picture, under the gravel, is a nether wort garden. Behind that pillar of wood planks? This.

I think I may have started clearing before I realized what this was.

Of course, those blocks of redstone were not there before, or the window panes (what a waste!). My whole town was buried in the contents of all of our chests. Well, not the ender chests, thank goodness for that, but we had a lot of random resource blocks and made items laying around, and this guy used them all. Oh, and he used all my saplings, too. See?

The saplings next to the house didn't get enough sun?

The trees surround the house. They were at least 5 blocks deep behind the houses!

So, set to me is the task of locking down my little server. I started with whitelisting, which was rather easy to do. Still, my kids and husband say I need to add a password. Do I really need to? We are on day one of a very short whitelist. Clearing is taking forever because before I made the list the guy filled in more garbage in more areas, this time letting the animals loose in my gardens. Gah! I'm fortunate to still have the items to replant, but the fact that I have to is enough to make me want to cry and stomp off to play something that makes me happy!

Several days after I started this post, I decided to finish it. I haven't had enough time to do much of anything, with kids and work and school and all the other little things that have to be done. My little server is safe and cleaned up. No password protection was needed. Take a word of advice, if you have or will have a small, seemingly unknown server, someone will find it. Set up your walls not only in game, but outside it!