Flatlands
The flatlands was a flat world for all players that was added to the server in late 2011 and continued to exist until the server's closure on August 17, 2023. The world was initially generated using the Multiverse plugin[1], but functionality to generate the world was migrated to the TotalFreedomMod on March 6, 2012.[2] The world was considered temporary for years and was reset almost weekly. Builds were often preserved as individual schematics saved with the WorldEdit plugin.
In late 2020, a suggestion was created to stop resetting the world altogether. The suggestion was approved sometime afterwards, but code to wipe the worlds wasn't removed from the TotalFreedomMod until May 3, 2021[3]. While this change was mostly popular with the community, a side-effect was that the world began to grow in size until it became unmanageable. The world was planned to be reset when the server was going to update to 1.19.4, but the server shut down before that would have happened.
Archived Iterations
Due to the temporary nature of the world between its introduction to late 2020, archives of the worlds from before that time period are extremely rare. Even when the world became more permanent, the huge world size and lack of proper file access meant that archiving the world in the first place is difficult. With that being said, some iterations of the world have survived the tests of time and have been archived.
October 2020 to August 2023
The final iteration of the world was first generated in October 2020. This iteration has not been officially archived yet[fn 1], however efforts have been made to archive the world unofficially using external mods and proxies.
Due to the longevity of this iteration in particular, the world size has been reported to be larger than 330 GB in total.
October to November 2021 Archival Project
Following the September 2021 Shutdown Crisis and Wild1145's refusal to provide FTP access, videogamesm12 started a project to archive the world unofficially using a combination of mods including Baritone, World Downloader, Meteor Client, and a world map mod to help automate the process. To try to download as many chunks as possible within a short time frame, he left his computer on connected to the server practically 24/7 for nearly 2 months. The project was abruptly ended after the server updated to 1.17.1, but not before it grabbed ~105GB worth of chunk data.
The resulting world file has since been made available on the Internet Archive. Because the project involved a brute-force method of loading as many chunks as possible to find builds, the project ironically ended up greatly contributing to the growing problem of the world size.
Footnotes
- ↑ This was due to security concerns surrounding the breach that led to the server's closure in the first place.