For all the support this community gave me throughout the year, especially during the hard times I faced. Time and time again, BronyTales has proved to me that it's way more than a Minecraft server. Don't even get me started on the roleplaying side of things.
Thank you for being besides me throughout all this time. Abella, Aurora, Endless Skies, Blacklight and- many others I don't have space to list. Especially with how bleak my friendships were at the Ponyville Schoolhouse before this whole thing began.

Thank you again, for everything. Time and time again I get proven just how impactful this fandom has been to my life and why I wouldn't change my mind not a single time if I could've had that choice.
You all are magical. Thank you for tagging along and supporting me on all this journey. You all mean a world to me.

im thankful for being in this server, it has helped me when i was down, and the community is none like any other i seen, its great :D

-Valas

My Name's MRSUNSET and I am very thankful for my friends, family, for the food that gets produced. Also, appreciate all the movie producers, novel writers, animators, drawing and music artists for keeping me entertained through my whole year.
But most importantly, I'm thankful for myself for changing my life up in a positive way to love myself and let all bygones be bygones cause My Past Is Not Today.

When I think of BronyTales the first thing that comes to mind is the Community. It is so welcoming and kind. I can't thank you all enough for this place. You staff, players and my friends make the server a safe place where I feel like I can be myself quirks and all.
I hope that new players can experience the wonder that is this server. The second thing that comes to mind is the Fandom. The fandom hold a great place in my heart. I grew up on watching Gen4 with my sister, I enjoyed every moment of every episode with her. We talked about it with friends and family and sometimes we would hypothesize what would happen next, It was the BEST! One of my fondest memories with her was my eighth birthday. we invited over some friends and we sat down in front of the TV and my dad turned on the HUB network and we all watched "Twilights Kingdom". That episode holds a great place in my heart cause of it.

So Thank you Bronytales for bringing so many memories new and old to me. I hope this place continues to thrive in this beautiful community.

All my love and wishes to you.

Radiant Hope

Had a good year

I'm thankful for my family and friends who love and support me, the beauty of nature and the world we share, and all the wonderful communities I'm a part of (including this one of course).

^c^

I'm thankful for the following:

• BT Staff
  
• BT Community
  
• Can't think of anything else :P

I'm thankful for a lot of things, but to name the ones that are relevant to BT:

thankful for my friends, the BT community, the minecraft and discord server, and being a member of the staff team

As always, I'm thankful for the warm and friendly community of BronyTales.

I've been playing for many years, and I don't love this community any less than I did on my first day.

-Applejack

I am thankful for friends and family and I get to have mac and cheese for Thanksgiving Day. I also thankful to be part of this My Little Pony minecraft server. This is the best My Little Pony minecraft server ever.

I'm thankful mostly for how I can socialize better now, be it my family or in BT :)

I've been thankful for all of the love and support the BT Community has offered me over the past few months I've been here.

Every single creature I've encountered during my time here has become a friend or acquaintance, I don't think I've met a singular one who hasn't been kind, offered charity, or expressed integrity. The laughter and joy I've experienced by being around everybody on this server in the short time I've been here is unrivaled by any other community. I've been in.

Even when I've felt disillusioned, or not been at my best, the magic in this community draws me back in.

The community here has earned my Loyalty. And I hope to be able to offer it again next year.

-Rainbow

Im really grateful/thankful for all the friends i made here and how nice you all were <333/p (/p means platonic), im also thankful for my time here, been very nice, everyone's been super helpful and kind makes me wish i came here first rather than ponytown or ashestown, every single one of you made my days since i joined so so much better, i wanna expecally thank remmy (or erebus), delta, rarity, dash, discord, and a few other people i met along the way, if it wasnt for you guys, i wouldnt be as happy as i am now, thank you so so so much <3333/p

I am thankful for all my friends in this community! It's because of BT that I've been able to re-connect with the brony fandom!
I was definitely too shy when I first joined the server, but nowadays I'm in calls, playing video games, doing events and so much more with all my amazing friends!

Looking forward to all that is coming for the server! To all the amazing staff that keeps BT running, thank you! The events, the updates, and everything in between, you all have been working so hard to bring everything to life for the server! We all very much appreciate what you do! I know 1.21 is going to be freaking amazing, as well as the upcoming event!

PS. I hope in the future there is a Crystal Empire for me to enslave live in! Yes.

i am thankful for meeting lots of friends

This year, I am thankful for my friends and family. I'm glad for the things that they have given me such as food, water, and all of those good things. I am very happy to have them by my side even though I've had ups and downs with them. I am also thankful for Sonic and MLP because of the lessons in friendship and life they've taught in general. I am happy and glad to be in these communities while still learning about friendship. I'm trying to be a good person in general but still, I'm grateful for my friends and family and what they've given me, even though they care for me and love me very much. I'm glad to be with my family and friends and I think it is a very nice thing to be with them. I'm glad to have both friends and family by my side :)
I am very happy to have a good life and it’s been very good so far. I'm thankful to live a good and happy life in general and I'm hoping to learn more little by little. Take baby steps and all that. I may be autistic, but just know that I'm having a pretty good life in general :)

Everything and everyone. But most importantly, I'm thankful for the expectations of the greatness to come from all of us~

Am thankfull for my frens, shoutout to blueblood for helping me with loads of stuff, luna for giving me many memes , pipp for the item sorter and ebony for not stealing my stuff recently c:

I'm so, so thankful for BT! I've met many friends who I talk to on the daily, which is something that is priceless! I have tons of fun and have finally found a community I feel comfortable being myself in! :)

That I haven't been banned yet and that people endure my humour silently.

I am grateful for the friends I have made on BT, the player base as a whole for allowing this amazing space to exist with your interest in the server, and HRT. Bronytales has been an amazing environment for me to explore aspects of myself, and to meet a ton of really cool people. Discovering this space has been one of the best things to happen to me in a long time, I love you all.

I am thankful for meeting everyone on this server. This place has opened my eyes to who I am and what I want to be. I cannot describe how grateful I am to have met each and everyone one of you. You guys have helped me change my life. Without the people here I would have never discovered something I never really knew about myself. When joining this server I thought I was just going to play here to alleviate boredom, but I think I found something more here than I realized. I just can't thank everyone enough for helping me get here. Thank you, Derpy, Daring, Luna, Sombra, Fidget, Blueblood, Eevii, Smolder(happy birthday smolder), Lumi, Sanny, Opaline(cozy), and many others. Without all of you, I would be a sad lump. I would have never thought joining an MLP minecraft server could have such a large impact on my life, but it did. I am happier for it. Thank you. <3

I'm thankful for being part of BT community and meeting so many friends on it which mean a lot to me... I'm also the most thankful for meeting my BF kinda in a way through BT (BT ROCKS :P)

I am thankful for indoor heating as it is very cold and also my dogs cause dogs are very cool and lovable

I'm thankful for my family and for all the wonderful friends I've made on Bronytales over these past four years.

Am thankful for all of my friends and the existence of Pipp Petals in G5 cccc:

I am thankful for all the various groups of friends, both inside BT and out, that put up with me on a daily basis. It's very strange going from being very self-focused with my time years ago, to suddenly feeling like I would cry if I couldn't access or talk to my online friends anymore.
So to all of you out there reading this: Thanks for being there for me, even if I'm sometimes a depressive lump.

My family and I find a new coffee house to try out every weekend since the beginning of the year.

Gay people <3

I am thankful for this community. The friends I have made. For being able to, for the most part, tolerate my antics. And allow me to rejoin so many times and fit in just as well each time. I love you all, hope for a great December and 2023 on this server <3

I'm thankful for all the new friends that i have made on here :)

The inevitable heat-death of the universe.

As far as BT goes, everything!! You guys have done an amazing job and I love the community we have. MC in general - litematica and the pixel map world - tytyty i don't have to build that all in survival :D Extra muffins for Derpy!

my friends

I am thankful for this server and all of the people on it. You are all wonderful people and getting to meet and become friends with all of you has been a wonderful experience. All of you have had a positive impact on my life, and I appreciate every single one of you very much.
A few people I want to thank for specific things:
Luna, Daring, & Opaline: Thank you for giving me a chance. I know I have tried your patience and caused you stress more than once. Hopefully in the future I can help you solve more problems than I cause.
Max, Oceana, & Frosty: Thank you for always having my back and being down to do silly things with me.
Smolder & Sany: Thank you for consistently being kind. It's rare to find someone who always makes my day better, every time, by just talking to them, but both of you do.
Last, I have done A LOT of things during my 4 months on the server, from exploring server history, to leveling MCMMO, to playing chess, to just building. Thank you to everyone who has taken time to play this videogame with me.

I'm grateful that I was homeschooled.
Because I was homeschooled, I met people I never would have met otherwise. I met my oldest friend, who helped me through quite a lot.
Because I was homeschooled, I was sent to a different school for High School, and met my high school friends, who have been there for me through the good times and the bad.
Through them, I discovered Friendship is Magic. Because of that, I found the reddit channel. Because I got into MLP generally, I discovered that there's a card game. I then found a group that plays the MLP Card Game. And then I found someone trying to make their own card game. And they introduced me to Derpy, who mentioned Bronytales, and that's when I joined the Bronytales server.
And it only happened because of a series of fortunate events. So, thank you all for that!

I'm thankful for the community BronyTales has fostered. In late 2019 and throughout 2020, I slowly lost contact with all my real life friends. I drifted away, and my social anxiety only got exasperated by the lockdown. At that point, really all I had was the Fortnite community, which is notoriously toxic.
It wasn't good for my mental health. Most days I ended up more miserable then happy interacting with them. In February of 2020, I joined BronyTales. I didn't make a lot of friends at first, in fact, I was more or less a loner. A watcher. I didn't roleplay, and for a short time, I was primarily on the modded server.
It took a while for me to break through that shell, but with the help of some cool people (especially you two, Penny and Opaline,) I was able to push through that shell. I got my first and only canon, and the rest is history.
Now, here I am, a Community Admin, and Head Builder for the staff team. I cut out the toxicity of the Fortnite community, and despite some days being rough, I think I'm in a much better place now. I'm just glad to still be here, roleplaying, and chatting.

Man, this got sappy. uhhh, something something FORTNITE!!! but thank you all, for real.

I am most thankful for: Being invited to the family that is this server. Meeting all the ponies with life stories so diverse and wonderful. Hearing your struggles, and having you let me help from time to time. Thank you for letting me be a part of this!

I am most thankful for:
This entire community in Brony Tales! This whole year has been some of the most fun I've had in minecraft, and I cherish the time I've been having with everyone!
-Sombra

I am most thankful for:
Sith
The Force
food
my home

I am most thankful for:
Discovering sriracha sauce

[I am most thankful for:
Being able to find communities and groups that accept me with all my quirks. I've been able to take a break from my shyness to talk and make memories with others. It brings me to tears to know I have a place to come to when the outside world becomes too scary. BronyTales is one of the communties where I am less of a wall blossom and can jump in from time to time. A year ago, talking and joining in server lore would terrify me and I would feel lonely due to it and I would kick myself for it...
All in all, I'm thankful for a safe place to call home and have fun.
~Novae|843* ]

I am most thankful for:
my grandkids :-)

I am most thankful for: All the people on here who accept me for who i am. no matter how weird i act.

I am most thankful for:
The life I'm able to live and experience, and all those I meet along this great journey, fellow travellers, I wish you well on your paths.

Lets make every moment one worth living.

I am most thankful for:

My Friends and Family, and My own life.

I am most thankful for:
I am thankful for Equestrian lifeforms being the easiest to fight in battle. All these kingdoms use sticks and stones while we use rockets and tanks. Their fleets are wooden ships on balloons and in the sea while ours travel the stars.
Nobody here has been able to win a all out war against us only convince us to cease fire for a peace pact it is total domination!
Ive got to see big cities both as visitor and conquerer. The best part is when I think I wiped out the last of one enemy force another will rise to take our fire.
For useless resistance they all put up a good fight. Dont hide away from a impossible fight it is almost something I could admire. Im thankful I decided to liberate this planet from it's own tyranny!

I am most thankful for:

how wholesome the community here has been.

I am most thankful for:

My friends. Who support me and my decisions, unless those decisions just back-crap crazy and might get me in trouble...

I am most thankful for:

The love and acceptance that this server has given me the chance to experience.
I love you all with my whole heart, and I wouldn't trade y'all for the world. <3 <3

-AJ/Marcy

I am most thankful for:

idk i dont do thanksgiving where im from but i hope the people that do enjoy it

I am most thankful for:
My husband Omiimo-HeartTop

I am most thankful for:

my wonderful gf hearttop.... and pudding

I am most thankful for:

Being a part of this great community. Just being around the ponies of this server makes my day. Anytime I need to get away from the hardships of IRL, I come here to spend my time. Thank you so much for everything. Sincerely yours, Crystal.

I am most thankful for:

Being able to go to my first MLP Convention this year. It allowed me to meet some friends from this server for the first time. I'll meet some more in December.

Feather
(Just a feather. Not even a note, just a feather. I guess they just like feathers?)

I am most thankful for:

All of my friends: MageMeadowBrook, Rabia, Zull, Cosmos, Sombra, Nyx, Smolder, Cardgambit and so many others! Also this wonderful community, I never would have thought I would find a server like this ever! So it is a blessing to be here, I also love all the events that happen here whether its is Crystallic Sombers (CS) or in BronyTales. I can't wait to see what each time i'm on brings and to each year that passes by.

Thank you staff and community for a wonderful place to be in.

With love and Happy Thanksgiving!

- Radiant Hope

We are most thankful for: Our friends. Without them, we would forever be trapped within the darkness that is Nightmare Moon. It is nothing something we take for granted.
Having friends after a thousand years of solitude is something truly special.

What I am most thankful for (out of character): It's still my friends. Getting to know lots of people, especially through this server and the staff has changed my life. It's helped me through tough times and I'm so glad I met y'all. Damn this is cheesy, oh well lol.

im thankful for
my book and quills
otherwise i would not be able to talk <:

I am most thankful for:

what i have. i worked hard for everything i have and with everything i do. im glad i have acheived as much as i have

I am most thankful for:

How so many folk have decided to help with the colosseum build, like, what the heck guys, why the hell you helping me with this thing, it's taking so much effort and I can't thank or love you enough for it!

~Pipper ❤

Dirt
(Just a block of dirt.)

I am most thankful for:

my family and friends!

I am most thankful for:

My family mlp and a house and COMPUTERS

I am most thankful for:

My boyfriend, who puts up with all my problems, but loves me all the same. I love him too. ^^

I am most thankful for:

medicine

I am most thankful for:

Having a loving best friend and boyfriend even tho i struggle with chronic pain

I am most thankful for:

all the friends ive made in this past year, here especially. i only joined in june but im glad its THIS community, because everyone is very sweet and kind.

-Trixie Lulamoon

I am most thankful for:

Having the oppurtunity to continue this worthwhile social experience on BT. From Ponycraft - Concordia - BT, it is a wild ride and I am fotunate to have gotten into the MLP Fandom and discover all the souls I have

I am most thankful for:

All the rps and moments I have lived here. Even though I practically don't rp anymore and I don't get on as much as I'd like, I am thankful for discovering this server and being able to join in.

I am most thankful for:
The person who got me to play on this great server!

I am most thankful for:

being alive ;-;

I am most thankful for:

Shining Armor Mostly! They're the reason I'm here haha! I'm also greatful for the server in general. I hadn't been on in a while... but I appreciate being able to hop back on when I need it... Yeah, that's pretty much it haha

I am most thankful for:
discovering a wonderfull server with alot of friendly individual helpfull staff and the friend i make along the way

I am most thankful for:

-my family

I am most thankful for:
Money

I am most thankful for:

The times that I was able to have with my grandparents before they passed away.
I am thankful for my success for my job and for my college career.
I am thankful for all the friends that I have made on here.
I am thankful for my family.
I am thankful for the fact that I will be an uncle soon.
And finally, I am most thankful for the life that I am living on this beautiful mother earth.

Sincerely: Noble_Goldheart

I am most thankful for:
My Family and Friends

I am most thankful for:

the grace of pie

I am most thankful for:

Derpy made a My Little Pony minecraft server so I'm able to play on a minecraft server that has My Little Pony in it and I'm really happy he did that. I also like My Little Pony a lot.

What am I thankfull for: Im thankfull for many things, oh gosh were do I start... Well Im thankfull to be trusted back into being Smolder, I missed it so much! But
the thing That Im most thankfull for,has to undoubtably be my friends
They mean everything to me, they give me support, love, happyness, many laughts and a shoulder to cry on when I need it.

However, there is a couple few who go even beyond that.

✦Eevee✦, ★Izzy Moonbow★, ♪Pipp Petals♬, ❀Penny❀ and ❣Boo❣ come to mind.
They never gave up on me and allways stood by my side even if I keept messing up and made many mistakes. They allways belived on me and were loyal
And to that loyalty
Im thankfull for.

I am most thankful for:

The amazing people that I've met on this server and eventually made friends with.
For so much support from you all, both in art and mental health.
For this server, that I can play here and have fun.
~ScarTissue

I’m most thankful for my amazing parents, the crazy family I’m a part of, the opportunities provided for me throughout my life, for the incredible community on BT that I get to hang around with, for my amazing pupper, and the little engineering marvels that keep this little corner of the world I live in nice to live in. Brake pads. Central air heating and cooling. Indoor plumbing and potable water. Shoes and socks. Recorded music. In-home food refrigeration. Toaster ovens. Lightbulbs and reliable energy.

I can not emphasise just how appreciative I am of the fact that this community exists and that I get to be a part of it. I am extraordinarily fond of each and every person who joins in and adds their own flair and personality to it.

Also again my family, who still like to drag me on adventures and invite me over for dinner.

Oh, and stores where you can go and buy muffins at any time of the day. ^.^

I am most thankful for:

Having met and hung out with amazing people on this server who I can happily call friends ^^

Excerpt from the THEOS86 user manual

• Program (assembly program)
• Index (database file)
• Relative
• Stream (any data stream, usually a text file)
• Folder (similar to a library)
• System Program
• Library (Collection of database files)
• Member (Member file of a library)
• Deleted

No, that scratch isn't on your screen, it's on my bench monitor.
Free is a pretty good price, though - can't complain.

File Table Layout


Extended file blocks just repeat the size and position until the end, throwing out the last byte

• First, click the role you want to edit.
  
  
• Role Members (steve head)
  This will display the members in that group. Hovering over a user's head with your cursor will show you how many additional claims they contribute to you.


• Icon (king's head)
  To do this, you'll need to have an item/block in your hand. After that, simply click on the "Icon" button, and the role's icon will change to said item/block!


• Rename (nametag)
  This will allow you to change the name of a role. Please remember to follow our rules when naming your roles!


• Action Settings (green pipe)
  This will allow you to fine tune what users in that role will be able to do in your Land. There's a lot here, so we'll just name a few: block breaking, attack players, attack animals, place blocks, open containers, etc.


• Management Settings (yellow pipe)
  This menu contains powerful management settings for your roles. You can read more on each of the settings by hovering your cursor over the setting. It's recommended to only give these settings to people you completely trust! Most of these are settings you should *never* give to normal members in your claim.

As you play on the server, you'll get the ability to claim more chunks and Lands (1 hour per chunk, 48 hours per Land). You can also contribute to other user's Land capacity simply by joining their Land(s)!

Lands Commands:
/lands help This will display all of the Lands commands available for you to use, and will also provide a short description on what said command does.
/lands balance Will display the balance of your Land. Think of it as a community bank!
/lands chat <land> <message> With this command, you'll be able to send a message directly to your Land. Only Land members will see it!
/lands delete <land> If you've accidentally created a Land, or you wish to remove your Land, this command will do the trick!
/lands deny <land> This command will reject an invite to a Land, should you not wish to join it.
/lands deposit <land> <amount> This command will deposit a specific amount of money into your specified claim. Beware, if you don't have access to withdraw funds (owners always have access), you will not be able to get your money back!
/lands edit <land> This will select the Land you wish to edit.
/lands info <land> This will show you the info for the Land you provide. The current owner, members, creation time, and war stats (we don't use this feature, so don't mind this!).
/lands invites Will display all invites you've received.
/lands leave <land> Should you not want to be in another user's Land anymore, this command will provide you an out!
/lands list Will display a list of all the Lands on the server! You can also use the "hopper" icon to show public Lands. A public Land will allow you to teleport to its spawn. You can teleport to the spawn of any claim you're a member of, provided the owner hasn't denied that feature in the settings!
/lands map Displays a map of the Lands around you.
/lands rename <name> This command is an alternative to the "/land" menu's one. It will cost you a small fee to change the name! This change will cost $300, and has a cooldown of 900 seconds!
/lands selection This command is primarily used for the Areas feature, though it can also be used for claiming. To use this, run the command, then left click in one spot, and right click in another. Particles will show you the area you've selected.
/lands setowner <player> This will allow you to transfer your Land to another member. It will cost you a small fee to change the owner! Setting a new owner for your Land will cost ¤500!
/lands setrole <player> <area/land> <role> Sets a user to the specified role.
/lands setspawn Will allow you to set the spawn for your Land. This can be used later to teleport to it! Setting this for the first time is free, after that, it will cost ¤400.
/lands spawn <land> This command will teleport you to the spawn of the specified Land.
/lands taxes Shows upcoming tax payments.
/lands top Displays the top Lands, sorting by Land balance.
/lands trust <player> <area/land> Invites a player to your area/Land.
/lands unclaim Unclaims the chunk you're standing in.
/lands untrust <area/land> Untrusts a user from your Land.
/lands view Displays particles around the Land you're currently in. Will also display areas.
/lands withdraw <land> <amount> Will take money out of the selected Land's bank. Will not work without the proper permissions from the owner of the Land!

Daring Shepard / 10 Oct 2020, 00:00AM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=15 Sat, 26 Sep 2020 14:23:45 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=15

---

Chapter 3: A Technical Problem

Here’s the part where about a dozen people are going to say “I told you so!” - while the details may seem obvious in hindsight, we cannot take actions without definitive evidence. Moving on:

In my personal office, I have many screens. Regularly four, although I have a dock for two more and another laptop I keep to my right for occasional status information for extracurricular hobbies. On one of these regularly displayed screens is dedicated to housing a terminal screen that shows real-time information about the Minecraft server that BronyTales runs on. When that screen starts flashing red, there's a fire to put out. On this fateful evening as I'm doing otherwise menial tasks, I notice some alerts popping up on this screen at the same time a DDoS alert pops up on my phone. The Minecraft server terminal doesn't have anything to display DDoS, so the juxtaposition of the two is curious, especially given the recent events surrounding the source of the particular alerts I'm seeing.

Let's go back a little and fill you in on the backstory.

TechnicalRarity first joined the server in January of 2020. He complained about needing to disconnect from a VPN before joining, but nothing otherwise of note regarding when he joined. Well, aside from the little detail that he never made an attempt to continue down the spawn area to get to the main server once he had access to the chat. They came back every once in a while and would hang out in chat for a while before disconnecting.

April 10, 2020, about 2:00 AM their local time (3:12 AM my time, for those keeping track), they joined the server again. Instead of hanging out in chat, they connected and disconnected over and over. It’s not the first time they’ve done that, though, and it’s not unusual activity on its own. However, it happened to also be right at the start of a DDoS attack. Five minutes after it started. He complained in chat that he was unable to connect, and continued to disconnect and reconnect a number of times until their connection on the server timed out. They suggested that the network issues must be a DDoS attack, and for the first five minutes of being online didn’t move an inch. Not even to look around them. They left after chatting a bit about twenty minutes after the DDoS protection cleared. In fact, they talked more on the server in that hour than they had in the past four months combined. The attack ended about 3AM, right after they left.

April 10, 2020, 5:15 PM. A new DDoS attack starts. 5:18 PM, Technical joins the server and almost right away starts complaining about the super high latency. Remember, this is also about the time I start to do some network maintenance on the server, which is why I don’t notice right away that the issues aren’t connected to what I’m doing. After a while of troubleshooting the issues, I jump into a voice chat room, mostly to vent a bit of the issues I’m seeing “rubber ducky” style. See, when working out a tough logic issue that you’re stumped on, simply explaining what the issue is to someone else (or a personified object such as a rubber duck) can help you discover a solution. That, and being in a call with people in the server could also help me explain in real-time what was going on and getting that information shared with the community without needing to stop what I was doing to hang out in the text channels.

As may be recalled from our previous escapade into this time frame, you may recall I didn’t mention a certain individual who wanted to talk about DDoS and system security and how they had DDoSed their school in the past. I’m pretty sure you could gander a guess as to who this was now, especially in the context of this tale. They also showed a great interest in knowing what datacenter BronyTales was hosted out of, and when I don’t tell him he tells me it’s OVH (which is mostly true), and then goes on a tirade about how awful the tech support is. Having experience working in a datacenter, I was very skeptical of his opinions, especially given the language he was using. Skilled techs are more likely to pay attention if you treat them well. Even more so if you can competently speak their lingo.

Well, another thing they mentioned also caught my attention to the point it distracted me from what I was working on to listen in on. I don’t recall the entirety of the conversation being distracted and sleep deprived as I was, but they showed a great deal of interest in a SWAT call at a hotel. They shared images, which I immediately recognized as being from the bomb threat at HarmonyCon 2019. I was doubly suspicious when they kept talking about how they’ve been “swatted” before, but never directly mentioned that the images were from the convention or named the convention. A convention I learned later that he was in attendance at the time.


(The first image is from after the event, but that specific door I’ve never seen and can’t find, so I suspect it’s one they took. The second one was posted on a 4chan thread detailing what happened)

Warning sign number 2, the day after the incident, they posted a blurb about “last night” in general chat:


Previously they were talking about just been woken up by a text alert, so it’s fairly safe to assume that the “it was fun last night” had nothing to do with the creative map chaos that ensued afterwards. I’m not sure how hanging out in a voice call while complaining about how hard it is to join the server could be fun, but it could, so idk. But to follow that statement immediately afterwards with “It’s super easy to hit a mc server” ?? And to mention the hosting company by name, which I had not discussed at all in the call, too.

Enter more drama, stage left

April 13th, 2AM. Or Late-Late April 12th, for you night owls. During another mysterious DDoS, Technical convinces another BT player in voice chat to join him on another server, and proceeds to grief a random house with a lavacast. Following this incident, and especially since they had used the BT server to organize the attack, Technical was issued a 3-month server ban.

Things that were considered in the ban were:

- Helped organize and participate in the raid and grief of a fellow pony server.
- Continually spread fear about the attacks in server chat, despite requests to stop.
- Kept trying to blame other random people/things, generally inciting panic.
- Generally: Inciting drama.

Before and after this raid, another account had logged into BT for about 10 seconds. Which is more interesting when each time this new account connected, Technical had disconnected less than one minute earlier.

Disconnect [01:50:07] -> [01:51:02] terabyte4000
Disconnect [03:46:22] -> [03:46:59] terabyte4000

This becomes more interesting later.





Two days after promising to not use an alt, a new account joins, but doesn’t link their account in the discord. A curious one, seeing as they seem to conveniently already have been doing work to develop a DDoS protection system..





On the 16th, my home internet got hit with an attack. Nothing too notable, aside from frustrations with the ineptitude of Comcast’s level 1 technical support. Well, nothing technically notable, although a certain someone on the server somehow seemed to know that I was getting DDoSed at that moment and also knew how I was being targeted.


This “not an alt” somehow also knew that I almost never go offline.




They made a very not-subtle hint that they believed they had the ability to call a SWAT against my home address, and I spent the next hour after trying to assure everyone that messaged me in a panic asking if I was alright that yes, I was alright and no-one had tried to kill me in the past hour.

And they had a home network exactly like how Technical said theirs was set up. Even named their Xbox “Rarity.” And their talking points drifted routinely to the same ones that Technical used a lot, such as how much they like to cuddle their plushies and how much they hated quarantine.

After taking this use of an alt for ban evasion, plus the other unnecessary drama, I formally issued a ban for his Discord account. He had left the Discord server after getting the ban for the raid, so I had to ban the account by Discord ID. I did not take action against the alt, though, as I wanted to give him a chance to come clean on his own. Were he to have told the truth, I would have been more lenient towards his active sentence. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do when you think no-one can see what you’re doing that defines your character.



Technical told me a day after joining with this alt that they thought their ban was unwarranted, at which point I hinted that I knew that they had an alt and that he would not be doing himself any favors by evading the ban.



He didn’t seem to get the hint, though. A day later, this alt account used a WDL mod to download portions of our map. Not cool.



I wrote parts of that mod, for context. Fyi, downloading a public server’s map without their permission - especially for builds that you do not own the rights to - is very not cool. Theft is bad, okay? He bragged about stealing the map the next day to another player on the server:




I had a few other people bring the fact that this GlimmerShimmers / terabyte4000 character was an alt account of Technicals, too. Most pointed to the behavior similarities, but some did some sleuthing to dig up more:






Another interesting piece of information: April 18th, while doing more work scouring for evidence I noticed that I had neglected to re-enable a hacking defense script I keep on my public-facing servers. Shortly after re-enabling this script, something interesting popped up in chat..


(filtered chat to only show the alt)

It would seem that the connection that this alt was using suddenly got blocked and they had to switch connections. Weird, huh?

By the 20th, the rest of the staff team had figured out that this account was an alt of Technical’s. He wasn’t exactly being subtle about it. Timely confronted them about it, even directly naming the alt account, which Technical vehemently denied. I did have a talk with Timely a bit after this, though (sorry, Timely, need to bring this up) - see, the burden of proof should always lie with the prosecution, not the defense. You can’t prove that you have never said something or been somewhere, etc - you can only prove what you have said or where you’ve been.


Note here that he knows that this "GlimmerShimmers" is a Discord account.
We are a Minecraft server.
This alt joined after he left the server, so how would he know that this is a Discord user?



The plot thickens

Technical messaged me directly again, asking if he could appeal the permban. Still wanting to give him a chance to admit to the alt, I tell him to “include as much information” as he could to clear up any misunderstandings. I also try to make it clear that he will only have one shot, so he had better make it good. I may be a softie sometimes, but I do not appreciate being taken advantage of. Speaking of which, he messaged me back a few days later asking for help setting up his server to be like BronyTales.


Note also here he mentions a "/spell" command - his main account has never used this command.
This message was sent to me the day after terabyte4000 discovered it.

This last line he gives to defend himself struck me particularly odd. Firstly, appeal to authority is automatically an invalid argument. Holding a position of authority does not make your decisions or behavior automatically correct, even if they are related to your position. He doubles down on it here, though, stating that being a 3-day unpaid volunteer at a pony convention automatically means that you are a professional in everything you do.

I have been to many conventions. I have been to many pony conventions. I have staffed many pony conventions. I have hung out at staff dead-dog parties at conventions that I did not staff. I have many personal friends who are career pony convention staff. I know very well that people who volunteer at conventions are not “professional” or even any more trustworthy than any of the con-goers themselves. The fact that he decided to appeal to that particular authority, especially as a defense, struck me very interested. What was he trying to hide behind? I started to reach out to a few contacts, to see if anyone knew anything about him. More on that later.

We didn’t get hit by any DDoS attacks during peak hours for about a week, though. Ever since the day after Technical got banned, everything had been going very smoothly. Maybe a tad coincidental, but I was just happy that the network wasn’t being a problem anymore. At the time I just chalked it up to the DigitalOcean server that I reported.

Enter more drama, stage right

April 25, 2020. PonyFest 2.0. We had a party room planned out in the BronyTales server and started streaming in one of the video game rooms, much like we had at the first PonyFest. Well, we tried, anyway. A conveniently-timed DDoS attack kinda left us dawdling around awkwardly and I jumped off to do more information gathering to trace the source. Oh, and more foreshadowing for you, Technical started trying to join BronyTales less than seven minutes after the attack started, and tried to rejoin thirteen times in the span of ten minutes.

About an hour after the attacks started and about a half hour since last trying to join BronyTales even though he was still banned after trying so many times in a row, Technical starts sending private messages in Discord to all of the BronyTales build team that were online at the time, asking them if they wanted to help him build a pony server.



Even sending a friend request to those who he didn’t share a server with:


We report the fact that he’s trying to use the PonyFest Discord to send unsolicited advertisements to the PonyFest moderation team, and they serve him a warning, telling him to knock it off. Most Discord servers have rules against this, and PonyFest is no exception. Besides, it’s just rude to randomly message staff of a server - especially one you’ve been banned from - just to ask them to join your server instead. We found out later that he’d also messaged a few of the really active players to try to get them to build his server while BronyTales was having troubles.

At this point, I’d had enough. He had his chance, and he spent it.



But wait - there’s more!

He tried again two days later with Lego, our new developer. Granted, Lego also was working with the SEAPony con Minecraft server and the Ponyville Plaza server, so that on its own wasn’t of note. However, after Technical inevitably asks Lego to help with his server as well, Lego declines and brings up the alt on BronyTales as part of the reason. Technical again denies that this alt could possibly be his. He also knows that we’ve banned the user, although he doesn’t admit he knows who it was. His reason for it not being an alt is because “RarityIsAwesome is [the] only account I paid for” and also claims that if the IP that the account connected from isn’t from New Mexico then it can’t be his.



If you’ve been paying attention this whole time, you might recall a little tidbit I mentioned very early on. See, Technical doesn’t trust that websites he goes to or servers he plays on won’t try to attack him. From information I was able to find from his past, he has good reason to. He has a habit of making himself a target. He has posted his personal IP to 4chan at least twice. Surprise, he got DDoS’d both times. More on that later. After all of this excitement, he tries to be a little more careful with how he browses the internet. Not in the way he conducts himself, mind you; he just uses VPN services to hide his IP.

So when he declares the ultimatum of “If it’s not from New Mexico it’s not me,” knowing all that you have learned up to this point, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that he never connects when he doesn’t have a VPN proxy hooked up. On BronyTales, I use a VPN detection service to deter most VPN services to prevent troll account spamming. He knows this - he’s complained about it before. A clever techie with time and money can bypass these sometimes.

That said, you think it’s worth taking him up at his offer? I thought it was.



I’ve censored the IPs, for obvious reasons. On the left are all of the IPs that Technical’s main account, RarityIsAwesome / 706bf6cf-3579-4762-852b-30178c297576 have used to connect from which passed the VPN check. On the right are all of the IPs that this suspect alt account, terabyte4000 / 97452c18-8b7a-4b8f-b886-d44d01a7f9aa have used to connect with. The coloration comes from Notepad++ Compare. Notice the two lines that are not green or red? Those are lines that match exactly. Not only did they use the same IP once, but they did twice! Sometimes even on the same day, minutes apart!

When you add the IPs that they’ve tried to connect to but didn’t pass the VPN check, it gets even more interesting - both accounts tend to try to ping from a VPN. They even use the exact same servers. Crazy, huh?

Also, remember how the terabyte account was asking if I had ever released my home IP? Well, it also appears as though they remembered what it was, despite joining the Discord after everything was back on the main server. Both RarityIsAwesome and terabyte4000 have attempted to join my testing server multiple times, long after I took it down. And they both would try to connect from the same VPN server.

Shortly after this discussion - later on that same day, in fact - I notice him trying to join the server over and over again, at the exact moment another DDoS attack hits. Remember how I said that I found the results to be incredible?



This is a scatter plot centered around the time that I receive a notification that a DDoS attack has been detected. The points are mappings of the time difference between when the attack starts and the first time that Technical starts joining the server. I started the chart by simply counting how many times each hour he tried to join. Excepting two moments when the alt joined for a few seconds on the 24th, never in 16 activity periods over 18 days did he ever join during a time that the server was not under attack. Driven by curiosity, I narrowed the window even further to try and pinpoint the time that the attack starts and when he starts joining. See those eleven dots on the right, centered almost perfectly around zero?

Once is a coincidence. Twice is curious. Three times is a pattern. Eleven? That’s intent.

But Data!, you might say, What if he just joins at the same time every day? What if the attacks are timed and he just happens to be trying to join when the real attacker’s schedule kicks off an automated attack?



Nope. The times are all over the place. Even the gaps line up. He was banned from the server (and this was before the visitor rank was self-assignable), so there was no way for him to know an attack was happening so soon after it started without being involved. In fact, the last five dots on that scatter plot are after DDoS mitigations had been improved to the point that no-one on the server even noticed a performance drop.

You can have a look at my spreadsheet for yourselves if you would like:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s-zmyDpgIGy0oet_wrv6kKBrShcCHS2DKEHHD5c7B2U/edit?usp=sharing

With this in mind, I start reviewing my server logs again. This time, I’m looking for something very specific: I want to see every time any of his IP addresses, including his VPNs, have ever tried to connect to the server.





So not only had he been using an alt to evade his ban, not only had he used that alt to download portions of the map, not only had he tried to lure staff to help build his server, but he had also been trying to hack into the server itself. That first screenshot is his main home IP while I didn’t have the denyhosts service running (forgot to re-enable it while doing firewall maintenance). That IP tried to connect to the management SSH service 61,685 times over four days. The other two are VPNs that he had used to connect to the server with. While using a VPN to hack isn’t instantly attributable to only Technical, aside from maybe the hack was run during a time that the server was under an attack, what is noteworthy is that the last one on the list isn’t a public VPN. It’s a private server, hosted out of the same datacenter that BronyTales is hosted out of. (one that he has root access to, as confirmed by private key authentication coupled with the fact his Minecraft server is hosted there)

So that’s the end of it, right? Caught him red handed, mystery solved, everyone goes home happy?

If only things were that simple.

On May 10th, Technical joined the Ponyville Plaza Minecraft server. The Plaza is a Discord community that started a Minecraft server earlier that year and that I’ve shared some of our privately developed plugins in return for a mutual advertising agreement. They did not have the same security considerations built into their server as I had on BronyTales, so Technical was able to get a full plugin list, as well as some information about the plugins. Using this, he then sends me an email from Spigot to my developer account asking if he could pay for a copy of the plugin.



I don’t make secret that my jascotty2 Minecraft account is linked to my DataByte Discord account, and a little over an hour later he figures out that it’s me that he messaged and sends me a private message on Discord.



My turn to play.

Using the information I’d dug up on him earlier from personal contacts plus a somewhat lucky treasure trove in a rar archive, I compose him a note. To his personal, unlisted email. Using his first name. Remember how he said he works at conventions? Remember how I said I started asking around? Turns out a personal friend of mine who I play games with and joins occasionally when I host cookouts happens to be his direct supervisor at the one convention that Technical hasn’t been barred from staffing at.



What I got in response was the most bizarre email I have ever received.



Somewhere in there are four periods. “I” is capitalized exactly five times, among the 97 times it’s used. He defends that he is a “real” brony as though I had questioned that. He mentions he sometimes hangs out with the “wrong crowds” and has gotten in trouble for it a few times. He expresses that he’s envious of the community that BronyTales has and that he wants something like that. What’s particularly interesting, though, is he didn’t reply to my email - he opened a new one to type whatever was on his mind, but never once refutes or confirms anything that I mention in the original email. He tries to appeal to emotion several times, and while I do sympathise with his predicament, I also know that he has had this exact same conversation with other people, three years prior.

I mull over this for a few days, not wanting to react rashly. It certainly sounds like an attempt at an apology, but focuses on justifying his view rather than actually apologizing for anything. After some consideration, I ask for more information.



He immediately defends that he has never tried to hack into my console, then says he wanted the stuff because he was jealous of what we had and wanted it for himself. He claims that he would never DDoS anyone even though he knows how to, and that he launches attacks against his own equipment to test it (which is perfectly legal if he also owned the line or had authorization to do so at a shared host).



I press for more details, and he admits to the “lesser” crime of ban evasion and downloading the map, and promises that he deleted the map that he downloaded.
Thing is, for his implication made that he would never DDoS anyone, I have found some evidence from his past that he has done just that. Multiple times.

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Also, remember how I said I had been going down my list of contacts in the convention world? I found that not only was he known within upper circles, but also that he has been blacklisted from staffing at Harmony, Everfree, Trotcon, PonyFest, and fully banned from attending at Babs. He may have been blacklisted from staffing BronyCon, too, but that also could have been from staffing in a specific department. I never bothered trying to clarify that one. He was also suspected to have been involved in the Whinny City 2017 bomb threat, although nothing concrete had been pinned on him. In the chat log archive that I had gained access to, I found he had in fact bragged about it to some people..








And a copy of what he sent to the convention Facebook account:
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However, as far as I was able to find, some of those claims he made were outright fabrications. There was no overarching investigation into him, there was no plane ticket, there was no interview with a detective, there was no stipulation to allow him to staff again if he surrendered his phone. In fact, at the time of the messages, all upper con leadership were focused on PCF, not WCPC.



I did find some more information, but due to the sensitive nature of some of them (sexual themes, private conversations, law enforcement topics) and off topic (like general harassment, trying to frame BT on his server, and creepy trolling), I think it would be prudent to leave that much unsaid. This writeup on the attack on BronyTales was exhaustive enough. All I’ll add is that my heart goes out to a certain individual I saw on their Minecraft server. I honestly hope that Technical has learned to be a good friend if they are still hanging out with him after some of the logs I’ve seen.

So, why might he be trying to connect during a DDoS attack?

My current theory around this revolves around how some Minecraft servers are set up in relation to ban tracking. See, in order to synchronize a ban database between servers on a network, you need a database server. On many small Minecraft servers it’s too expensive to run it yourself, so people use an external server - like a cheap web server - to handle the database. Even some larger servers do this, as it makes displaying the current bans on the website easy to automatically update. If you flood a server’s network so much data that it starts dropping packets to keep up, it’s possible that a database request for a ban lookup might time out. Rather than fail-secure, game servers tend to instead fail-functional, and will allow you to join. BronyTales does not use a remote server for database synchronization, though, so any attempt to flood the server to attempt a bypass hack like that will fail.

So why would he want to play on a server while he’s attacking it?
Probably for the same reason arsonists tend to hang around to watch the building they light on fire burn down. The same reason why it’s fun to play Among Us as the imposter. There’s a real sense of accomplishment to watch the fallout from your machinations take form, especially in real time with people around you to watch their reactions. Every time someone says “wow the lag,” he gets to see that as “they noticed!” and “They don’t suspect a thing! I’m so devious!” - every complaint, every rogue idea is catharsis and reward for their actions. Going through the logs, you would also notice that they are the single most active source of ideas for who the attacker could be, even though there is no consensus that there is even an attacker. They’re trying to drive the conversation to get more of that serotonin high. (This incessant fear mongering was a major portion of extending the initial ban term, too)

Why would he attack the server in the first place?
As a disclaimer, this is pure speculation, but founded around available evidence. He states several times that he wants to be a good figure in the fandom. He is always the first to mention he notices the server is under a DDoS attack. He mentions several times that he has been working on developing a DDoS scrubbing service to mitigate server attacks.

Scenario: there’s a brand new Minecraft server that just popped up out of nowhere. The owner isn’t known for running Minecraft servers. They are hosting the server at a datacenter you know has a security flaw. You know you can do better than they can. They probably won’t want to let someone new have access to the server, though. After all, one of the easiest ways to get banned from some servers is to ask for op after joining. It’ll look too suspicious if you start a conversation with “so, I noticed you have an unlocked back door - want me to fix it for you?” (I had a similar issue at SHG when I offered to give them a fixed build of LWC when they were having issues). So you need to show them why security is important. You start small, when the server isn’t busy, test to make sure your attack actually works. Then you kick it off later at a really busy time. Right when everyone is panicking, you swoop in and offer to help. After trying and failing to fix it themselves, they’ll be sure to let you in. Make a few changes, stop the attacks, you’ll be the hero who saved the server! You’ll surely get a ranking position in the community after that!

The old “start a fire in the building so I can show everyone how useful having sprinklers can be” trick.

What makes this theory more compelling is that he’s done it twice.

SEAPony con. May 25th, 2020. They had a modded Minecraft set up for hosting a convention virtually, which had just completed the day before. They were discussing keeping the server online for a while longer so more people could get to see the work that the builders had put into the world. Mysteriously, they get hit with a DDoS attack. It doesn’t last for long. Lo and behold, Technical starts talking with some staff, and offers to generously host their server for them for free, on his server with DDoS protection. He even convinces them that he works in infosec professionally.

I get in touch with their leadership after hearing about Technical trying to obtain their server files and offer to share everything I knew about his behavior so they can be best informed if they still wanted to take him up on his offer. Once they hear about the DDoS, they mention that they also had been hit by an attack - less than 20 hours before Technical contacted them. Mercifully, it was after the con had officially ended. After some discussion among their leadership, it was decided to not move services over to his servers.

So what happens now?

Hopefully, nothing. I have not pursued any legal action at this point, and sincerely hope that it won’t need to come to that. There are so many more constructive uses of my time and his time than to go at each other, especially since after confronting Technical about the attacks and the other things I caught him doing, BronyTales has not experienced any more DDoS attacks. Technical has kept to his word and maintained his distance, although he still denies having been behind the attacks. BronyTales did recover, although it took longer than he may ever know to undo the damage he caused. My sleep cycle recovered after a few weeks, although I will never get back the time spent going over this nonsense.




For those who decided to scroll to the bottom instead of reading all the way through the twenty-some pages of text that constitutes this minor epic, I’ll summarize for your benefit. In short, TechnicalRarity has a history of causing trouble while seeking attention, and some of that trouble goes from a minor nuisance and/or general harassment all the way up to being a potential danger to people he wants the attention of - up to and including physical danger, in some contexts.

Fun stuff.


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DataByte / 28 Sep 2020, 22:45PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=14 Fri, 11 Sep 2020 11:38:56 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=14

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Chapter 2: A Wild DDoS Appears! / The Hunt

I am now in full sleuth mode. I am become, Derp, P.I. - sysadmin with a target. A folder is created to log everything surrounding this attack. I contact the datacenter for assistance with fixing the mitigation schema to better handle the attacks. During this time I also open up my email to check for notifications and find more. I find spam. Spam that is not spam. Automated notifications regarding DDoS detection and mitigation that an overzealous spam filter ever so helpfully removed from my inbox.



Things are now moving. I have a goal. I work to start documenting everything regarding the attacks. Times, patterns, methods, volume. The first series of attacks look to be fake UDP packets with a large random-length payload. I received information that SquareHorse was also attacked with a DDoS attack during the same time as we did on the 10th, as well as a basic activity dump. After processing it out, the dump has the same “fingerprint” as the attack we received.

A little background on how TCP and UDP work for the laypony: All IP packets have a sender and destination address. TCP is a stateful connection type, in that the order and integrity of the data sent and received is very important. There are multiple steps to any TCP packet transmission that involve a back-and-forth exchange between the sending and destination network interfaces to verify that data is in order and intact.. UDP doesn’t do any of this. UPD doesn’t care if you receive the packets in order, or even at all. This is handy for time-sensitive data where it’s not essential to have 100% of the packets, such as a video stream or a voice call. It also means that if you can sneak specially crafted packets past your edge router, you can spoof the return address to look like it came from anywhere you want and send bogus traffic somewhere without leaving an obvious trail.

How a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack typically works is by saturating the connection link to the target or flooding the service that handles requests with so much bogus traffic such that legitimate packets being sent to the server don’t have a spot to queue and get dropped before they can get sent to the server or times out in transit. As this is very much illegal to do to a server that you do not own or have authorization to do so, most criminals who do this will use a random set of IP addresses - but it’s usually a specific list being used.

The packets I’m finding at this point are this second type: traffic that’s being sent without regard for a legitimate return address, and always “from” the same list of IP addresses. Two of the addresses being spoofed are in fact the legitimate IP addresses of public DNS servers. Now, I can in theory block this list of addresses at the firewall, but all this does is protect the server itself from trying to respond to all of these packets to tell a nonexistent server that it’s connecting to the wrong port. It doesn’t change the fact that the router or the router behind that router is still going to try to send me that traffic. People trying to connect to the server would still have difficulty doing so. Besides, if I blocked all of those IPs, I could potentially block legitimate people and services from being able to access the server.

At this point after obtaining the attack fingerprint and a few other details, I file out an FBI report with all of the information I have. DDoS attacks against a service that you do not have authorization to test in such a manner is a Federal crime under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18.47, §1030), and I fully intend to use the full force of law that I am able to keep this server safe. Even after I have that initial case filed, I continue to keep looking for more evidence as the case is processed. As long as this attacker is a threat to the server, I am vigilant to watch and document. Every piece of unique information can potentially be used to identify the attacker, and I am not going to sit idle.

The saga continues.

April 12th. 5:50 PM. The attacker hits me at home. I call Comcast, but cannot get past the automated system due to the COVID-19 working restrictions. Apparently an Internet company can’t be bothered to get their customer support to work remotely. Someone in the Discord notices right away and suggests that maybe the attacker has my home address. I have to fend off some very panicked people that yes, I am still ok. I do contact some people I know in the local police as a precaution, though.

April 13th. 2:50 PM. While browsing tech news at work, I find a new article labeled “Cloudflare for SSH, RDP and Minecraft”. Cloudflare has decided to provide a trimmed-down version of Spectrum services for non-enterprise customers - specifically for Minecraft servers. I purchase the service soon after I clock out from work and start transferring traffic over.

April 14th. 6:35 PM. The attacker hits me at home again. I call Comcast, and manage to get to a text-messaging support system with an overseas support center. Great. Ultimately, I cannot convince the poor tech-illiterate soul on the other end that my modem was in fact not responsible for the internet drops I was getting, and he hangs up on me when he can’t schedule a technician to visit my house. At this point I’m quite frustrated and decide to use the time I’ve been kicked offline to create a homemade ethernet tap to watch the network traffic from my modem to my router.









Over the course of the month, I collect many gigabytes of TCP dumps and logs, including two more attacks on my home internet. The attacks continue daily until the 20th, after which they become a little more spread out. My sleuthing does turn up quite a bit more than I ever expected to find, though...

April 17th. 11:27 PM. Bedtime? What bedtime? Sleep is not for the sysadmin with a perpetrator on the loose! While examining this latest attack, I notice some new things in the dumps that I had not been looking for. Up until this point I’d just assumed that all of the attacks were solely with the intent to disrupt service. Someone is trying to pretend that they’re reconnecting to an SSH session. I also notice that I had forgotten to re-enable the auto-firewall that I’d disabled while testing and turn that back on. Examining the source, it looks to be a DigitalOcean server that someone is using to try to hack into the server. I fill out an abuse report and send that off to the datacenter to let them know of illegal activity originating on their servers.

April 26th. 4:21 PM. I am getting a little frustrated with the datacenter’s mitigation system and the fact that no changes have been made in two weeks despite all of the information I’ve provided them. The attacks have been slowing down, but they still kick people off of the server when they happen. I send a somewhat sour note on the ticket asking why nothing has been done. The firewall is updated less than twelve hours later.

April 27th. 9:23 PM. It is now seventeen days since the first attack. I’ve just learned three days ago that a company based out of Connecticut intends to use one of my games commercially for profit without my permission and without providing any payment for it. At this point I decide to officially apply for copyright, even though I’ve had the game online for some months now. That’s a story for another day. While I’m going through documents related to this other project, I notice something odd going on in the Minecraft server console. A player who had been banned for griefing and raiding a few days prior was trying to rejoin the server. Over and over and over. 20 times in 20 minutes.

Now in general, players trying to rejoin during a tempban is not uncommon. The ban-kick message tells you how long you have until the ban expires. But trying more than twice in a row was very peculiar for anyone. Your one-month ban is not going to suddenly expire in thirty seconds. Even more peculiar when you start trying to join on the exact second that I get an email notification that a DDoS attack just started. Even stranger still, this player had an alt account on the server. At the time, I had been allowing it to stay unbanned to give them a chance to come clean, even though they had adamantly denied having one. Why would they be trying to connect on a banned main account when they had an alt? Before this, I had not even considered that the attacker could have been someone trying to play on the server when the attacks were going on. This seemed a little too coincidental, though. This needed more investigation.

April 28th. 7:52 AM. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, the thrill of the hunt, plus a bit of trepidation at what I could find, I created a new file in the attack evidence folder. A spreadsheet. I started by plotting out every attack notification I’ve received to the hour that I received it in. That done, I then started plotting out every time this player had joined, tried to join, or pinged the server MOTD, dating back to the first of April. They had joined before this at some point, but had never walked past the entrance. What I found was frankly incredible. More on that in a bit.

5:09 PM. Only minutes after clocking out at work and the attacker is at it again. I keep an eye on it, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting any services. I also work on finding more data to plot on my spreadsheet, which is proving to be more and more irrefutable.

9:41 PM. I am still seeing malicious traffic coming from that DigitalOcean server, so I update the ticket asking for an update. The server is taken offline five hours later. I also find malicious traffic from another server on their network and report this one as well. I don’t get an update on that ticket, but I also don’t see any more traffic from this server after the takedown.

April 29th. 4:58 PM. This is the last DDoS we got hit with. The system changes are holding admirably, and absolutely no one has even noticed any disruptions since the changes were made. The attacker tried switching up attack vectors to try to impact other services, but ultimately was unable and eventually gave up.

So, who was that masked man?




DataByte / 11 Sep 2020, 11:55AM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=12 Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:48:14 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=12
A story about server administration, community management, computer forensics, and a touch of noir. These are the tales of Data, the sysadmin P.I.

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Chapter 1: Trouble

The day is April 10th, 2020. Last week’s April Fools event was great fun, everything retro and extra Minty. PonyFest is winding up to have a second event. We first opened to the public 4-15-2019, and the current thread going around is what we should do for a 1-year anniversary later that week. Cake? Too Cliche. Party? We’re doing that for PonyFest. Someone else had other plans, though. Largely unnoticed, at precisely 3:07 AM, the first attack hits. It’s short-lived and mostly written off as a server hiccup. Due to an overzealous spam filter, I don’t get any notification that there was an attack.

5:11 PM. It’s Friday, and I’m freeeeee! Now I can stop doing server stuff for other people and do server stuff for other people! Wait.

5:15 PM. Second attack hits. Again, I don’t see a notification for it due to a spam filter, and just assume that the network issues people complain about are related to a player-side ISP issue.

5:24 PM. I’m now in my home office with a freshly heated plate of frozen corn dogs and ready to finish this server setup! As part of a planned server update, additional networking configurations need to be made. I’m finding some odd differences in the provided distribution of Debian and the Debian distro it’s supposed to be, and working out a hack to get the network settings I want to apply like they should.

5:51 PM. About this time I notice something a little odd about the server activity. Mind you, I’m still trying to work out how to trick the system into doing what I want it to do with network routing since the “official” method doesn’t work on this system. I have a screen in my office dedicated to showing the server console, and about right now it starts spamming a new error: the bot got knocked offline. Now this is especially strange, since that’s hosted on the same server as the Minecraft server, and the server has a gigabit connection. I assume it’s a discord service error and continue with my current task. I’ll look into it if it’s still broken when I’m done.

6:22 PM. I finally figure out a way to get the routing settings I want to apply to the server. It’s definitely a bit of a hack, but it works! Everything I throw at it is holding with no issues. Wait. Some issues? The Discord chat is getting a lot of people asking about that server.. it seems like now no one can join the Minecraft server? I try for myself, just to be sure, and I get the same error. Oh No! What did I DO!?



6:39 PM. The issue is intermittent, and I can’t find any problems in the server. I also can’t find any issues in the timings reports, either, but not because there aren’t any; I just can’t get the timings reports. The server fails to connect to the reporting server. Something is definitely wrong. In an effort to recover from whatever mystery bug is causing the issue, I start a server restart.

6:52 PM. The issue returns. At about this point I also decide to jump into the VC with everyone else in there. Partially to talk about the issues and try to figure out if there’s some detail I missed, and also to just hang out while trying to troubleshoot this issue.

7:43 PM. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a DNS issue related to round-robin. I recently had a similar incident on another server environment, and would certainly explain why sometimes the Minecraft server would be unable to connect if there was a network issue with the datacenter’s DNS. I open up the resolv file to update the servers, but I’m already using a public DNS. Huh. Maybe the DNS record updated and the server is using a cached value?

8:03 PM. Changes made to the server and proxy host to clear the DNS cache, reboot the server again. Soon after this reboot the connections stabilize for a while, but I’m still finding odd glitches with occasional sockets timing out that shouldn’t be timing out.

11:08 PM. Connections get really bad again. This is where time breaks down for me, as I am at this point too tired to remember what I’m doing. Trying to fix a problem I thought I caused and in fact had nothing to do with while also being well past my regular bedtime is a bit stressful. Now, I don’t remember who all was in the voice chat, partially on account that my focus was elsewhere coupled with the low sleep, but I do remember two individuals. Tantabus, because he tends to stay up late anyway, and another individual I had never talked to before. Lots of questions this person had, including where the server was hosted in the world, the datacenter, programming APIs, network infrastructure, support tickets, swatting attacks, ddos attacks, XBox hacking, and VPNs, to name a few. I was personally very concerned when they mentioned that they once rented a server and launched a DDoS against their school, to which I gave a stern warning regarding that activity and subject. Attacking computer infrastructure that you do not own or have authorization to test is a federal criminal offense in the US. Don’t do it.

8:16 AM. I have been up for 27 consecutive hours, and have been working on this issue for 14 hours straight. My normal Friday bedtime was over ten hours ago. I am spent. Still thinking it to be a datacenter issue, I update the DNS for mc.bronytales.com to point to my home where I set up a temporary simple creative server that people can join and mess around on while I get some sleep. I exit the voice chat, go to my bedroom, put up my blackout curtains, put my phones on manual silent, and sleep soundly until 4 PM. Coincidentally, the DDoS attack stops right about 8:35 AM.

Meanwhile, the temp server is a weird mix of anarchy and order. Some people seem to think that a temporary server is reason to completely disregard server rules regarding lag machines and griefing. I spend the first hour or two after waking up just going through the discussions and issues I’ve missed, and also jumping on to see what everyone built. I fell in love with the rainbow dash model that someone made, and greatly enjoyed exploring the wacky builds that people filled the spawn area with. Seriously, you all are awesome - staff for helping keep order, and players for the awesome builds I got to wake up to. You are the reason I work to keep this server going.

My sleep cycle now in tatters and the main server currently offline, I figure I might as well use this downtime to finish the 1.15.1 -> 1.15.2 upgrade I had been meaning to do. When you have a few plugins to test, an upgrade is a minor nuisance that you might normally not worry about, particularly for a minor update like this. When you have over 100 plugins, though, that task becomes much more daunting. Especially if nearly half of them are either partially or fully custom-made. Lots of stuff tend to break over really small changes.

I work on getting the server updated for about ten hours. Minor blip happened at 2:43 AM when a DDoS hits the server for about 10 minutes, but no one was on the server - in fact, there wasn’t even a server running to connect to. Didn’t stop a particular someone from trying to ping it anyway. More on that later. spoilers…

I finish the upgrades and switch the server back on at 4:18 AM. I stick around for a while to make sure there weren’t any issues with the plugin upgrades that I missed. I did end up finding that there was one that got missed and got that fixed, but with no other issues found in the next ten minutes I logged off and stumbled off to bed at about 5 AM.

April 12th. Well, the daylight side of it, anyway. 7 AM. I am up much too early. I can destroy my sleep schedule and sleep when I can if I need, but Dog knows the time, and the time is time to go out. I let Dog out and the sun burns. I am a vampire now. I urge Dog to hurry up, eyes screwed shut and nursing my poor aching head. Outside done, I hastily return to my hidey cave to wait out the day.

1 PM-ish. Awake! Mostly. I take down the blackout curtains and dread the coming Monday. I am going to be sleepwalking at work at this rate, which is very much not a good thing when you have programming deadlines.

4:52 PM. Another DDoS Attack. Bot goes offline again. I start diving into the server again to try to figure out what the Minecraft server is having troubles with.

6:50 PM. People are still having problems getting logged in, and at this point I’m suspecting datacenter network issues. I jump on the server, download and install tshark (Wireshark for terminal), and grab a dump of the network traffic. Nothing too exciting at this point, except it seems that a number of ICMP packets are exceeding their TTL. From.. servers that I’m not pinging? That’s odd. I start looking at the network activity at this point, to see if there’s something unusual in the monitoring. I find something very interesting. A high spike in traffic.



Oh, it is ON

DataByte / 27 Aug 2020, 14:48PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=11 Sun, 16 Aug 2020 23:37:33 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=11
A tired 12am blog by an overworked server pony.

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A lot of ponies have asked me how they can run their own server. Seriously, a lot. Regardless of what kind of server you want to run, the question should not be how you can run the server, how you can set it up, how you can handle the players; the question you need to answer before you can even get properly started is why your server idea is different than what everyone else has out there. If you want to stand out and be noticed, you need to first understand your own motivation. If your motivation is to be recognized for running a server, then your server is not going to survive. I have seen three community Minecraft servers go down in the past six months that were only motivated to have a server because they wanted to have a server or because they were just trying to make money.

I know most of you may have clicked on this article looking for a technical guide to how to set up a Minecraft server, but there are already a number out there. Firewall guides, hosting and backup guides, plugin lists and configurations, even tutorials and classes on how to create your own Bukkit/Spigot plugins. While the technical aspect is certainly an important piece of a server - it is the central thing that everyone sees anyway - it is not what makes a server unique.

Why you want to make a server should then be the driving force of everything you do for the server. What modifications and game rules you have should reflect on your goals. Your server rules and rules of conduct must ultimately link back directly with your core goals. Your interactions with your players and staff should be motivated by and driven by your core goals. Your mission statement should not merely be hollow, flowery language but should mirror the ideals on which your platform is founded. Players may come to play to see what you have, but players stay more often than not because of the content rather than the game itself. How much care and attention you put into your game content will be noticed by the players. In our case, our community is the “content,” and is complemented by the game - not the other way around.

As an example of this, BronyTales’ slogan is “A Minecraft Server for My Little Pony Fans of all ages.”
BronyTales was created with the goal of creating a Minecraft server where everyone is free to hang out and play together in a safe environment free from toxicity; a place safe for kids but engaging enough for adults to enjoy. A place that is generally MLP-themed, but knowledge of the lore was not a requirement. Every aspect of the server stemmed from this root. Server rules were set up to try to explain the server expectations in detail. I designed unique plugins to provide interesting gameplay. I consulted with a number of players to figure out how the server could be improved, and still do. I review the suggestions chat regularly to see if there are any points in there that I can do with the resources I have that would also fit these goals.

A few times I have noticed a general drift from these ideals, and when I do I make an effort to correct this drift to get back on track. Ultimately, this means many hours and weeks spent determining the extent of the issue that led to the drift. Meetings, calls, planning and replanning. To run a community server you must be willing to make some concessions. A community is not composed of one person, but one person can have a great impact - positively or otherwise. You must be willing to accept criticism. Sometimes opinions expressed by others do not match up with your goals for the server, and sometimes you will be in the wrong and you must be able to recognize that and take responsibility to correct your error.

Staff are an integral part of any successful server. On BronyTales, staff are recognized members of the community who have volunteered to step up and assist with the day-to-day operations and moderation of the server. Even as a server owner, you can only spend so much time online and you can only see so much; you are not omniscient. I personally have even less time now to work or play than I had when I first started working on BT, and now more than ever I depend on staff and trust them with a great deal of the community and staff matters so that I can use the time I have to focus on keeping the server running.

Actually, while I’m writing this, I’d like to toss in a sappy public letter to the staff on BT:
To all of the old staff, new staff, prospective staff, and non-staff community leaders on BronyTales, I could not have gotten this server this far without you all. BronyTales would not exist without your continued help. The many hours spent every week on the server and on the Discord, working with players for everyday and for special events, the conversations and roleplays, the server shenanigans, watching for trolls, helping new players, the help I get with research and development on occasion. Staffing a server as a voluntary position is a mostly thankless job, and I am proud to have gotten to work with you.
Thank you all.


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Alright, that’s off my chest. Mostly. I’m not generally great at expressing gratitude, and I am extremely appreciative of all of the work that everyone - not just staff - puts into this community. BronyTales is not just a Minecraft server; it’s a community of people with a common interest who like to hang out, and BT is just one place they can do so. So long as the community wants to play on and support the Minecraft server, I’ll do my best to make sure it’s there for them.

Now on to a trickier topic: administration. On BT, staff positions do not make or recognize one person as ‘better’ at something than another person; rather, staff positions carry additional responsibilities and expectations. BT is a little different as far as traditional MC server staff roles go, but in general Helpers are staff-helpers, community-helpers, player-helpers. Moderators keep the peace, and Admins moderate the Mods. Bit of an oversimplification, there. The admin role is honestly the toughest position to fill on a community server. Admins are responsible for not only the day-to-day server stuff and working knowledge on all of the plugins and other software in use, but also for guiding policy as well as staff and server focus. Experience obviously weighs into consideration, but it's not everything – temperament, attitude, conscientiousness, and empathy are all important traits. An admin on BT is not just a server admin; they're a community admin, too.

Whew, I’m starting to get to the end of my 12am “Oh, I need to get a post out this week. I better write something” creative streak. A due date is a good thing for projects - life hack. Just make sure your personal due date is at least a day before. Oops.

Last topic: Drama.

Put two or more people into the same room for long enough and you’ll eventually have some conflict. Put 500 kids and teenagers into a room? Oh, boy.


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Now, from the beginning we’ve had a “no drama” policy to try to officially curb people needlessly bringing up conflict or returning to tumultuous topics that have been resolved. Having a policy doesn’t mean that it’s solved, though. Some people will get offended for things that someone did without realizing it could be interpreted poorly. Sometimes they’ll take matters into their own hands to resolve the conflict, and sometimes they’ll be civil and understanding. Sometimes they’ll come to staff and accept whatever the staff find when the matter is investigated. Other times, though, things go wrong. Sometimes, it’s a staffer who is at fault. Sometimes, it might even be you, the server owner. As a server, and especially as a community server, you need to be prepared for those cases and how to deal with them and make amends. BronyTales is not perfect in this regard, but we’re trying to improve. One of those things we’re trying now is an anonymous mailbox so you can send me a message directly in such a way that I don’t know who sent it. The link is posted in the #information-desk channel in the Discord, if you have something you’d like to report or suggest. Obviously I don’t have a way to reply, but I do still get your message.

Last-Last topic, probably, advertising. BronyTales so far has not had any real advertising campaign, and while we may look into it into the future, it’s never been a focus. BT is a community server, and as such has never been profits-motivated. Having a website and sharing that around in communities that permit that, having a Twitter or YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or any other social platform is one way you can get your name out in the world, but getting your name out is only half the battle, so to speak. If you’re providing a minigame or MMO style game server, advertising is very important as well as finding a way to distinguish yourself from every other similar game server out there. For a community server, though, the most important advertising you can get is by the players themselves. People play on community servers to play with friends. If they like their experience on a server, they’ll invite their friends to join. They might in turn invite their friends. Repeat six times and you’ve connected with the entire population of earth.

If you do try to advertise your server, though, keep in mind that messaging random people with your advert is generally considered rude on the internet. You have to have a reason they might want to talk with you, otherwise it’s no more effective than spam mail. I’ve certainly messaged a few people I knew that I thought might like hanging out in the community, and while I’m saddened that some of them didn’t want to, it’s ultimately their decision.

I’m definitely running low on energy now.. I feel like I’ve turned this information article into a rambling mess. Sorry about that. I think I’ll turn the next blog topic into a serial. That could be interesting. Would also mean I wouldn’t need to churn out a 20-page blog and you wouldn’t have to sit through the whole thing at once to read it. Would also mean you’d have to wait two weeks for the next installment. Could be fun :)

I thought I'd finish this blog off with a Derpy, but in the process of thumbing through some old images nearly scrolled past this masterpiece, figured I'd share this one instead. See ya later! Night all!




Image by freeedon


DataByte / 16 Aug 2020, 23:37PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=10 Sun, 26 Jul 2020 10:59:25 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=10
And so I am taking some steps to document for everyone some of the more recent and larger-affecting cases, starting with an issue central to one of our larger sub-communities: art base theft.

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One of the most prestigious possessions possessed and perpetuated throughout our pony party populace (that was fun) is a pony Minecraft skin for the MLP mod. Most people use skins found on Pony SkinCraft, but there are people who specialize in skincrafting and others who like to commission skins for their OCs. In the BronyTales community, there are several artists and tinkerers who craft or modify skins to make them unique. However, one aspect to keep in mind that skin crafting is an art, and making completely new skins involves a degree of skill. One which I personally lack.



In early March 2020, Koto/WallyTiger/Cadancee/Rosanella posted their author link on SkinCraft in reference to a voice chat. They linked Abella/SilverStream/xXfluffycipherXx’s page, then theirs, and it was then that Abella noticed that the skins on the site that looked awfully a lot like their skins. Down to the pixel. And the descriptions did not credit the original artist. For context, in the artist community, it’s generally very much taboo for you to trace someone else’s art and then claim it to be your own. In the MLP community, there have been vendors at pony conventions banned from returning because they traced other people’s art and then sold it at their art booth.







As the art was hosted outside of BT, wasn’t being advertised on BT as theirs, and wasn’t done expressly in spite of player request, we did not take action at the time. I let Abella know that they should ask the person to give them credit. Per our server rules, we could not intervene if the player in question had not been asked to provide credit as this was outside of BT and did not involve players on BT at the time. Abella asked them to provide attribution, they did, it was done, and that was the end of it. Everyone was happy, crisis averted.











Or so I thought. I mean, if that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, now would I?



20 days later. A new Pony SkinCraft account is submitting more skins that use the same base as before. These ones once again do not credit the original artist. In a private chat, Koto acknowledged that it was their account and that these had also been traced, but decided to delete the images from the website this time rather than add attribution.







At this point, this was becoming somewhat concerning. Here they were posting copied or traced art using a new alias under a new account, without any attributions, after being directly asked to credit the original artist, then deleted everything when asked about it. Officially, though, they had taken action to resolve the issue and hadn't caused any issues on BT. There was nothing to follow-up on. Problem solved.






Guess not.

Now, to be clear, Koto was not forbidden from making pony skins for people on BronyTales. They were asked by an artist on BT to provide attribution whenever they used the artist's assets in order to create new skins. However, it soon became apparent that no-one who had received a custom skin from Koto was aware that the skin had been a modified image that Abella had originally made. Taps was kind enough to share their chat with Koto and permit us to share it in this blog, so you can see for yourself:









The screenshot that Koto shares of their portfolio is the alt account from earlier, which if you were to visit you will notice that none of the skins on that account carry the base attribution as Abella had requested. We also found that this alt account had not actually removed all of the traced skins as Koto had said they would, nor did any of these skins provide attribution as had been requested.



http://ponyskincraft.com/catalog/150216.html


http://ponyskincraft.com/catalog/151542.html


Comparison with http://ponyskincraft.com/catalog/151628.html


Abella's Pony SkinCraft Account: http://ponyskincraft.com/author/48516.html
Koto's First Account http://ponyskincraft.com/author/54231.html
Koto's Alt Account: http://ponyskincraft.com/author/54339.html
[update 2020-07-27, one day after this posted, Koto retaliated by changing their account name to a nasty name. You have been warned]

Another skin that Koto had given to another player was for Flurry. This is the most blatant instance of base theft of all of the cases before it:


flurry-koto-upscaled.png
Original by Abella

flurry-koto-upscaled.png
HD Skin by Koto

flurry-imgdiff-upscaled.png
Image difference (highlighting >10%)

[update 2020-07-28, I have been informed that this particular instance may have been misunderstood, adding a disclaimer until more information is available. Images converted to links for posterity]

At this point, the moderation team on BT was now involved. This individual has been asked by another to respect their work and they instead started hiding what they were doing. To make matters worse, this individual held a Princess title on the server while they were doing this. Roleplay names hold a prestige and as such people who hold those names are expected to represent the character and to an extent represent the server itself. A high-ranking canon stealing art assets from other players and presenting them as their own is not an image we wish to associate with BT.



Koto at first questions why copying art is even an issue, questions Whooves to whether they are asking out of friendship, and ultimately denies that anything had been copied from Abella's work without attribution.

Third strike.

After much discussion, it was decided that the severity of the offense combined with the unapologetic and confrontational behavior when confronted warranted a one-week time out and removal from the "Cadance" role. They were informed of the reasoning for the ban, and they then demanded we prove that they had stolen any art. When provided with one of the screenshots we have, they admitted that they had done that and then instead claimed that they did now know that they needed to credit the artist, as though they hadn't been asked twice before.



Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it.









Koto ran a Discord server for Crystallic Sombers, a sub-community of players on BronyTales. On that server, they told everyone that they had been banned for something that they didn't do, and a number of people listened and believed them. (I may post about the Zylen/Fluttershy drama at a later point, but it's just about as petty, in my opinion). We fielded questions that players asked, but in an effort to prevent "he said / she said" and other retaliatory gossip, we did not reveal the artist who was disenfranchised or the actual art that was stolen. One of the reasons Abella did not want to be identified at the time was that they happened to also be a member of the CS, which Koto still was the head of at the time.



On July 7th, about a month after the initial ban and weeks after it was already resolved, Abella was suddenly banned from the CS discord. No warnings were issued, and other leadership in CS weren't even aware that it had happened. Abella was unbanned and re-added to the Discord server, but when confronted about it by the group's other leading members, Koto decided to delete the server altogether rather than to lose control of their server.

So, that pretty much sums up the incident.

Remember to be kind. We all make mistakes, and it's important to recognize and admit when we do. Artwork is the artist's copyright with very few exceptions regardless of where it's posted, and if the artist is asking you to not distribute or to provide attributions, you should do so. It is disrespectful to the artist continue to use their assets as your own, especially if they have served you notice, and in many cases can lead to disciplinary action. Not just on BronyTales, but everywhere else as well.

Well, that exhausting. Sorry this wasn't released on-schedule.. the 1.16.1 update took a lot more work than anticipated.
Have a derp:



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DataByte / 26 Jul 2020, 16:07PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=9 Wed, 01 Jul 2020 16:09:39 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=9
Skillet Apple Pie!!

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I have a habit of starting hobbies, diving head-first into them for a few months, then abandoning them to do something else. I still have three sewing machines and a small mountain of cloth and polyfill from my excursion into plushie crafting. (Spoiler, I didn’t get very far). I have had an interest in baking since my younger years, and even though I don’t do it often I do still enjoy it once in a while. This particular apple pie recipe got its start back in 2011, and I’d break it out every few years to have another go at it.

The goal of the pie was fairly simple: design an apple pie that was safe against my sister’s lengthy list of food allergies, but also be succulent and avoid the “cardboard” texture you can expect from typical allergen-free foods. Oh, and I wanted to cook it in an iron skillet. I had to get a little creative at first but the pie quickly took on its own unique qualities. I have had several people declare it to be the best apple pie they’ve ever had, with its unique flavor, texture, and just all around melt-in-your-mouth goodness. I also took this pie (the one in the picture, to be exact) to the baking competition at Ciderfest 2016 and won best in show - with a complement from John de Lancie to boot! You know, that guy that voices Discord in MLP, portrayed Q in Star Trek. That guy.

Allergens: Soy, Coconut (Optional), Gluten (You can get special flour to avoid that)
Friendly to Allergies: Corn, Milk, Eggs

Prep time: 3.5 hours
Bake time: 1 hour
Serves: about 6 or 8 people, or one Pinkie Pie.

This pie is an exercise in patience, but I promise you it’s worth it in the end. You will need a sharp knife and the wherewithal to use it in such a way to not cut your own fingers. Trust me on this one - you will have a lot of apples to cut. A dull knife is much easier to hurt yourself with while skinning, but that doesn’t mean a sharp knife is safe.

Crust:

• 2.5 cup flour with about another 1/2 cup for your working surface
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1 tsp ginger
  
• 1 Tbsp sugar (or more, I’ve done up to 2.5)
  
• 1 cup chilled shortening, cubed
  
• About 8 Tbsp ice water
  

Crust Prep:

• Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
  
• Mix in the shortening well - you should get the overall consistency of the mix to be akin to small peas.
  
• Sprinkle in water 1 Tbsp at a time while mixing until you can just form a ball without any noticeably sticky parts. Don’t try to guess this, take it as slow as you need and don’t be afraid to add more flour. Most of the time you won’t need all of the water, so don’t try to use it all.
  
• Form two patties out of the dough of about the same size, and set aside to chill.
  

Filling:

• About 5 lbs of apples. When selecting apples, try to get about 1/2 sweet apples and 1/2 tart apples. In the variation I made for Ciderfest I had equal parts Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, and Braeburn.
  
• 2/3 cup white sugar
  
• 1/3 cup white sugar
  
• about 1/8 cup brown sugar
  
• 1/4 cup coconut oil OR shortening
  
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
  (don’t go much over this. It’s much too easy to overdo it with cinnamon and you’ll never notice until it’s too late)
  
• 1/2 tsp fresh-shaved nutmeg OR 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
  (Nothing quite like freshly shaved nutmeg - if you’re careful you can save the nuts to use over and over, too)
  

Filling Prep:

• Peel and then slice all of the apples one by one into the skillet until the apples just crest the edges. You want the slices to be about 1/2 x 1/4 inch, but don’t make them all identical - some larger and some smaller is good. I’d recommend alternating sweet/tart apples to make sure you end up with an even consistency. I also recommend setting aside a bowl to keep the skins in so you can keep your workplace tidy.
  
• Sprinkle the 1/3 cup of sugar into the apples, then cover and let simmer on a stove on low heat for about ten minutes.
  
• Remove from heat, and scoop out the apples from the skillet into a separate bowl. Save this for later. Save the apple juice in the skillet!
  
• Turn the stove back on to low heat and add the 2/3 cup of sugar. You may have to add parts of the sugar as the sugar caramelizes instead of all at once. Stir constantly to keep the sugar from burning to the skillet, and remove from heat once all of the sugar is caramelized.
  
• Pour the caramel into the apples and lightly toss the apples with the cinnamon and nutmeg.
  
• Carefully rub brown sugar into the skillet to absorb any residue caramel and coat the skillet in brown sugar caramel. Set aside to cool a little (It’s ok to be warm, but ideally shouldn’t be too hot to touch for when we add the crust)
  

Now we make the crust. The bottom part goes in fairly easy once rolled out as the shortening in the crust is pretty forgiving. Roll out one of the crust halves until it is wider than the skillet plus double the wall height - you want the crust to fill all of the skillet so that the apples can’t get out of the crust while baking. Make sure to flip the crust routinely while rolling and make sure there’s always a thin dusting of flour under it. I normally also use the rolling pin to transfer the crust from the working surface to the skillet - just carefully roll the crust onto the pin, then unroll it onto the pan and gently mold and press it to the edges. If you crack the crust, gently rub the surface while pressing the edges together to get a seal - don’t press hard or you’ll make it too thin. Once the crust is in the skillet, use a knife to trim off any bits that stick over the top.

Now add the pie filling! Now is also a good time to start the oven preheat, as it should be up to temp by the time we’re done with the top crust. Preheat the oven to 380F.

The top is quite a bit harder to do if you do it with a lattice like what I have shown, but I’ll give you a little secret: Start with the middle pieces, use a rolling pin whenever possible for bending back bits to work on, and if things break, they’re fine and you can re-mold them without re-rolling them. Also, broken strips aren’t noticeable if the break is under another strip.

Sprinkle with a little bit of white sugar, and bake at 380F for an hour. The crust should change to a light golden color.

And that’s it! Make sure to let it cool for at least an hour before serving, although it’s probably best after about two hours. If you want to cook it later, the pie can be refrigerated without issue for two days or frozen for six months (although it won’t taste as good after freezing it). If you freeze it, add about 30 minutes to the bake time. After baking, the pie will keep pretty well for about a week if kept covered and refrigerated, or about ten minutes if left uncovered on my kitchen table. *poof* gone.

Seriously, transcribing my notes into a blog made me hungry for pie.

Happy baking!

DataByte / 1 Jul 2020, 16:09PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=8 Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:45:39 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=8
Hello everypony my name is Lily Stargazer (Morindil) member of the BT build team and I am here to talk to you about building (what a surprise for a builder),
or more specifically on how to build or even more specifically about the building process from an idea to a finished fully detailed build.
I've been asked to do block-by-block tutorials for builds many times but there are already tons of tutorials like that out there and in my opinion you don't really learn that much from them. So what I want to do instead is to teach you how to plan out and execute your own ideas and follow your creativity instead of simply copying something. We will do this by planing and building a rustic townhouse in a Ponyville-ish style.

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STEP ZERO - INSPIRATION/RESEARCH
First of all we need to have an idea what we want to build.
Well that's easy enough as we already decided we want a nice rustic townhouse in a Ponyville-esque esthetic.
At this point we get the creative juices flowing by researching the topic and looking up reference images of the show, real life and similar builds done by others.
Once we have done enough gazing at examples of what such a house could look like and have a basic idea of what we want we start with the actual building process (sort of).


STEP ONE - OUTLINES/SHAPES
Ever wandered in any servers' build team world and noticed those weird colourful geometric figures all over the place?
Contrary to what you might think that is not some bad attempt at pixelart or some piece of modern art those are outlines and build markers ^^


Many builders that are tasked to build sprawling cities, castles, single buildings or anything really tend to plan them out roughly with those markers in an attempt to get a rough idea about scale, layout and position of what they want to build before they even start actually building things.
This is usually done using colourful blocks like concrete or wool with different colours for different things
(eg yellow = house, orange = road, blue = river) or parts of a building (eg red = roof, yellow = foundation, blue = walls)
In our example we will use this to 1. determine the rough shapes of our build and 2. what material/colour we wanne use for different parts of the house.
After we determined the rough outline of our build...


...we start by building the very basic shapes and sections of our house. (brown = foundation/1st floor, pink = 2nd floor #1, blue 2nd floor #2, red = roof)
Note that this is just to get the very basic shapes ironed out as we will add detail and more elaborate shapes later.


With the basic shapes done its time to expand on it a bit more.
This is when we put in the floors, windows, doors and interior walls to section of large empty rooms into more manageable smaller rooms, on top of that we also start adding additional shape (white = additional detail) in the form of dormas, balconies, chimneys etc)
My advice for windows, doors etc is to do them from the inside out instead of from the outside in as otherwise they might not make a lot of sense when you later furnish the room as they might be in awkward positions.




STEP TWO - TEXTURES/COLOURS
"But lily!" I hear you cry "We have build something that looks like a bad children's drawing and not at all like a nice rustic house!"
Hold your horsies friends we are far from done ;) Next up we swap all those weird colours for the actual block palette we want.
For our little house i decided to make the foundation/ground floor out of stone, the upper stories out of light blocks and the roof of course out of "hay"




STEP THREE - DETAIL (STAGE 1)
Now that already looks ten times better but not quite right yet. time to diversify the monotony a bit and add the first layer of detail to it.
In our example i chose to break up the monotony of the cobble foundation by mixing it with mossy cobble, andesite and dead coral to give it a more rustic and worn look. For the upper floors i chose to first of all make each section out of a different light block (mushroom stems, smooth sandstone, stripped birch) and then add a framework of darker wood (stripped spruce) to give it that classic rustic tudor style look. Lastly we smoothen the edges with a few colour appropriate (spruce) stairs and slabs and replace those "additional detail markers" with some balconies and overhanging roofs. After we throw in some doors and stained glass windows this step is already done.





STEP FOUR - DETAIL (STAGE 2)
Now our house almost looks like a proper build, almost...
What it is still missing is a second layer of detail that adds stuff like window sills, shutters, balcony rails, flower beds, chimneys (sold separately), little roofs etc...
There is no "rule" for what needs to go where and how much detail is the right amount, some like myself prefer a lot of organic detail and asymmetry, others prefer clean and minimalistic details, in the end it all comes down to personal preference as there is no right and wrong so just do whatever YOU like.
For this build we will simply throw stairs, slabs, fences and trapdoors at the problem until it overflows and gives your super-ocd bff a headache from looking at it ;)


.


STEP FIVE - SURROUNDINGS / DETAIL (STAGE 3)
There is nothing as sad as a gloriously over-detailed and gorgeous build in a barren landscape.
To remedy this, some extensive purdifying of the surrounding area is in order.
This is even less structured and governed by "rules" than the above step and even more a matter of personal taste so i wont even attempt to explain it.
its a topic that deserves a tutorial of its own... suffice it to say we added some water features, made the ground (coarse dirt, brown concrete powder, podzol, path and stripped spruce) look worn and befitting of a rustic village setting and added some greenery in the form of grass and trees.





ADDENDUM/AFTERWORD
And that already concludes this little "tutorial". I hope you found it informative and helpful.
Before you ask about interiors: like landscaping that is a huge topic on its own and cant be easily squeezed into a paragraph and a handful of images...
PS: This was my first attempt of doing a tutorial in a blog formal style and i would appreciate some feedback on how you liked it and if you would enjoy more of these in the future (Discord: Morindil#5078).

As a little extra to showcase how much of a difference a few variations in choices of block palette can make: the same build in a slightly different palette and setting as a fishing house by the sea.



LilyStargazer / 20 Jun 2020, 06:19AM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=7 Wed, 27 May 2020 21:09:31 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=7
Roleplay is a large part of the Bronytales community, But it can be hard to figure out how to roleplay, especially when jumping into existing roleplays or trying to start a new one.

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Roleplay is more than just having an OC and using them as a mouthpiece. It's creating a communal story between yourself and someone else. And like all stories, it needs a starting point. That starting point is the OCs or canons behind the roleplay, which are where most of the conflict and conversations will come from. This is why it's important to remember, there is no main character in a roleplay. Instead, there are 2 people telling a story together.

With that in mind, you know what roleplay is, but. How do you start a roleplay? Well, start by typing /ch RP into the command box. Then type something in character and see who responds. Then start responding to each other in character. Alternatively, if you don't want to roleplay in a global channel. You and the other person can meet up on the server and use /ch local. Local is always helpful when establishing private roleplay.

When starting a roleplay, sometimes having a premise can help. For example, a sleepover or maybe a daring-do style adventure. The premise doesn't matter so long as you're open to it evolving with the character's actions. For example, during the sleepover, you could be showing off your magic. Then the spell goes wrong and you all wake up in an unfamiliar location. There are plenty of good ideas to start a roleplay with, they all don't have to be exciting or heart racing adventures. Sometimes just a normal night with friends or hanging out and picking apples can be fun too.

The last roleplay I was in, was between myself and Applebloom. The whole premise was that Applebloom was assigned to do a report on odd jobs around Ponyvile, and since everyone else was taken. She settled on the Clock Keeper. The premise evolved into Applebloom needing proof for Cheerile that the bat pony in question was as old as he said he was. There was no time traveling or crazy adventures, just a few conversations over a series of days. And one instance of craziness, that didn't escalate beyond a small trip to make sure Applebloom didn't get lost in a thunderstorm.

You don't always have to be that short though, some can go on for years. To provide another example, before Bronytales I spent 2 years working on the same roleplay series, between multiple people over the course of different adventures. I believe the most notable thing, was that Igny and Whooves had a pretty strange rivalry/frienemies type of relationship. There was always a new adventure, some times they were big. Sometimes small. I can remember role-playing with Applebloom back when they did a character called Potato-Battery. And the crazy antics involved with that. The list is endless, and honestly, since this was over 3 years ago. The roleplays blur together. But the key thing is that they lasted a long time.

The important thing is to have fun, and remember that even if you're not a good roleplayer out of the gate. There are plenty of ponies on the server to help you learn and better yourself. So just get out there and do some roleplay.

TimelyAlchemist / 30 May 2020, 09:09AM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=6 Thu, 07 May 2020 21:32:25 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=6

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One thing you might not know about me, I have a bad habit of joining servers, being super active in them for about 2 weeks, and then moving on to something else. I know I've been a part of countless pony Minecraft servers, or just Minecraft servers in general, but I never found one that I played on extremely consistently and frequently until BronyTales. One of the biggest names in pony Minecraft servers, known as Pony Concordia (you probably have heard about them) I played on from time to time. I remember specifically 3 different weekends where all I did was play on that server. The thing was, those weekends had at LEAST a year in between them. I did something similar with modded mlp servers, completely vanilla ones, and ones like BronyTales with tons of custom plugins. But none of them were more than just a short burst of fun.

So what's kept me around BronyTales so long? I've asked this a couple times, and every time, I think to myself, maybe it's the plugins. The races each have a fun level up system! Maybe that's it! But, I got to max level in unicorn after 5 days of playing, and now, I rarely have any reason to use any spells. Hmm, well maybe it's the stability of the server! Maybe it's because there's rarely lag, and the server almost never goes down! No, not exactly. I don't ever remember joining another server and having a ton of server issues cause me to leave. Not to mention the state of the server last month. Welp, scratch that one off. Maybe it's the player count! Bronytales has a decently large playerbase, but not so big that it's crowded! Well, actually, I've been in other servers with similar size, even servers that were much bigger or smaller, and none of them particularly stand out in my mind. Maybe it's because I'm staff, so I feel obligated. Well, I've been staff on plenty other servers, and I didn't stay on any of them for longer than a month.

Well, that's strange. I've covered just about everything that would seem like it's important for a server. Playerbase, plugins, staff, stability... those are all the things that should make up a good server, right? Wait a second. Isn't there one thing that's more important than all of that? Something that keeps people coming back, regardless of the state of things? Oh yeah, that's right, it's... COMMUNITY! One of the first things I noticed about BronyTales was how active the voice channels were, how active the text channels were, and how active the in game chat was. Every night it seemed, people would have what I called a "Voice Chat Party" where there were like 7 or 8 people in one big call on the server. The first time I joined one of those, I realized how likable the staff, the players, and even the owner were! It didn't really feel like anyone was disconnected, everyone was out and interacting with everyone else! On the actual server itself, it became apparent how friendly the community was when I realized that if you asked for any item, you would get bombarded with 3 double chests full of whatever resource you were looking for, so much so that it's a running joke to this day (looking at you, NoLife), not to mention that if one player runs the hug command, it starts a literal hug WAR. I genuinely believe that even if the Minecraft server went down, a huge portion of the community would continue talking, hanging out, playing games with each other, etc. And the reason for that? Maybe we just found a really great combination of people, who are willing to put themselves out there, or maybe it's just because everyone talks to each other, and it's as simple as that.

If you're a new player, and are kinda just keeping to yourself, well, you can do that I guess. It's something I can tend to do. As a lot of people who spend all of their time on the internet, I've got a lot of social anxiety. But just know that, everyone on the server is here to help everyone else have a great time. Sure this server's got a lot of shiny things, like fun plugins, a well moderated discord server, and a decent sized player count (not to discount those, these people work their flanks off for this server!). But the aspect that this server truly shines in is the community, the interactions between players, and the goofy antics, that lead to laughs, that lead to some friendships that I think will last much longer than could ever be imagined. Thanks for reading y'all, thanks for having me here Data, hope you all have a wonderful week, and make sure you don't let those cutie marks bite! (They'll getcha if you're not careful, I promise)

Mr_Some1 / 16 May 2020, 07:31AM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=5 Mon, 04 May 2020 20:52:11 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=5
Story Time!

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In a little town known as St Louis, Missouri, a small pony convention organized every year to generally celebrate all things pony. And lunch. They called themselves the Crystal Fair. I myself only decided to give pony conventions a real try in 2014, and found out about the Fair in 2015. Their webpage was BAD. Remember back in 1990 when everyone used tables to format layouts? Yeah, it was just like that, but with no background colors and with more images. And the “general” page was spelled “genera;”

At Trotcon 2015, I sought them out and offered to help them with their website. They agreed, and I unofficially became staff. “Unofficial” because I always was provided a badge, but was only listed as staff three years later, in their last full convention. My name was at the bottom of the ‘about’ page on the website, though, which was plenty for me.

At the convention, I eventually became one of the volunteer volunteers, doing all sorts of odd tasks to keep everything running. Panel room setup, sound check, sound and lights for events, bouncer, karaoke if they needed a panel to fill a slot. I even once drove to Chicago to pick up BNR and all of his sound equipment so we could have a concert. (If you’re reading this Blu, you’re awesome! Thanks for everything!). For the 2017 event, I ultimately had to design, rent, and beg and borrow from a very kindly Guitar Center employee in order to get the main stage set up. One of the musicians chipped in when I was unable to find gaff tape and a local DJ brought in his equipment so we could have stereo subs.

Crystal Fair is not the only convention I’ve staffed at over the years, nor have I just been staff. Of all of the years and all of the conventions I’ve been to (24 in the past 6 years), only two were just as an attendee. That’s counting non-pony conventions, too. 6 years, 10 conventions, 25 events. Panelist, Vendor, Vendor Helper, AV Staff, AV Head, Game Staff, Event Volunteer, Gamemaster, Gopher, Webmaster, Security, Chauffeur. I wear many hats and know many people. I also have a tendency to want to help if I am able, which tends to get me drafted for odd jobs I never asked for, even at conventions I’ve never staffed at. In the past few years I’ve gotten into a bad habit of not wearing my lanyard most of the time, as most people who would need to know me already know me.

Around 2017 and the solar eclipse that happened that year, I found out through some of my connections that the Crystal Fair was having financial trouble. I’ll not go into details, but suffice to say it was bad enough that they were not sure if they could keep doing conventions after the 2017 con was over. Just then as now with this Minecraft server project I’ve got going on now, I didn’t want to see a community lose their place. I had some cash set aside that I had been planning on using to install some house renovations, so I held off on that to make plans to make a proper proposal.

Running a real-life convention requires a considerable amount of planning, capital, resources, and dedicated workers. However, as a potential benefactor and/or investor, I was not comfortable with putting the resources I had into the same leaky bucket. I brought in a friend with a different set of connections to help with planning and future staff management, and we worked out an improved staffing hierarchy, responsibilities, and a roadmap to getting the convention back on track and profitable. The plan was that I would be assuming major financial and publicity-related decisions while keeping the name and keeping the original chairs on staff. I would offer to pay off either a portion or the entirety of the debt depending on how the books looked, and then use my remaining capital to jump start operations. I planned to meet with the current convention chair at their next mini social event, as they also ran the local brony meetup club.

That meeting didn’t quite happen.

My manager-to-be jumped the gun and confronted the chair about taking over the convention while I was not in the building.

At first, they seemed totally fine with us running a convention with their name. I don’t know what was said, but I know that it wasn’t right, as they had the wrong idea entirely regarding what I wanted to do with the convention. At the time, though, I thought perhaps they really meant running the convention for 2018 since the 2017 convention had already been planned out. I started scouting out potential locations and staff managers and ironed some of the details regarding operations. I also worked with an artist to revamp the website for a new and improved look to the con-to-be.

Cue September 2017. Day before the convention. I message Blu to see when they’re expecting to arrive in St Louis so I can try to synchronize and be there to help out. The reply I get back is simply they aren’t going this year. SLIGHT panic. Why didn’t anyone at the convention let me know the main events guy isn’t going this year!? I finish packing and am on the road within a half hour. They are in way over their heads, I just know it. I’m not wrong, either. When I show up I find that they had rented marginally better than the barest of basic equipment from Guitar Center. They didn’t have enough XLR, didn’t have any DMX, had four lights and a panel but nothing to connect them, no one on staff who knew how to run audio or light systems, only one sub, barely enough extension cables, and no snake.

That whole weekend I am basically tied to the main events room running the board and making sure everything runs smoothly, all the while having to guess sound levels from behind the sound cone. I still have a great time at the convention despite the sudden new staff and fiscal responsibilities. Played shuffleboard with Andrew Francis at a sponsor dinner, won a plushie at a charity raffle, and had front-row seats to watch Lee Tokar perform on stage for the first time. While I was distracted trying to keep the main panel and the concerts running, my manager-to-be again took the initiative to bring up my plan with the chair. I do not know what was said, but knowing the chair as I do and from what I heard from witnesses I also knew that negotiations were off the table at this point. He generally lacks tact when talking about things that he cares about, and very likely forgot that the thing he was talking about rebuilding was someone’s pride and joy. I pushed out the style updates for the website that I'd worked on and the images commissioned and let it be.

They’ve been doing single day events at a senior center that they rent out for free since then, and seem to be content with doing mini-cons while trying to pay off their debt. The artist I worked with to create the website assets no longer does pony stuff, but made me the Novel helpdesk image on the help page anyway. The con chair recently contacted me asking for the GoDaddy account info as they had apparently lost it. The next day, the website I had built was gone, replaced by a new system only partially built.

Oh well. Such is life. If I had taken over the Crystal Fair, BronyTales would have never existed. Life takes us for interesting twists and turns, and it’s up to you to make the best of them.

DataByte / 4 May 2020, 20:52PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=4 Sun, 03 May 2020 18:24:16 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=4
More about the history of BronyTales after the break!

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BronyTales was not always “BronyTales.” Creation of the server started as a 1.13.2 server on July 1st of 2018 under the code name “EquisOnline,” but most of the groundwork set up was mostly brainstorming for game modes, plugins, and map ideas. Pages and pages of notes and some plugin work, but not much of substance that could be considered a playable server. At this point the only people involved were myself, Tantabus, and Timely.



Original Discord Icon

The project nearly stalled out, as shortly after starting I switched over to dedicating 100% of my free time to finishing a house I was renovating. The project in large part was abandoned until April 7th 2019 when Tantabus, Igny, Nimbus, Fish, and Timely all expressed interest in getting it started. This was also the time we came up with the idea for the “Rules Train” - the train that first-time players spawn in and take to get to the tree of harmony.

Then something quite unexpected, an old server we used to play on announced on the 14th that they were going to shut down. Suddenly fifty or more players were all looking for a new server to play on, and we had barely just started just the week prior. The only thing we had was the build map and a Discord server, but we opened it up anyway. The core plugin for the server, which I had initially planned on working on for two to three weeks, got fast-tracked and I had it ready to play in under a week. I held a few polls to ask what people thought a good “official” name would be and what they thought looked best, and by the 20th we had a (really ugly) temporary website with the server rules. On the 22nd we opened up the survival map for the first time, as well as the first staff applications. In all, the main core of the survival map was completed and ready for play after only eight days of development - a far cry from the four months that we had been planning on.

One artifact of this fast-track to release still haunts the main server map: one of the terrain generation features was going to have a slightly increased diamond rate because equestria is shown in the show to be a land rich in gems. However, the amount that the diamonds were increased was mistakenly left at a debug setting nearly ten times the intended value, so diamonds went from slightly more common than vanilla to being about as abundant as coal.

The rest, as they say, is history. Griefers and trolls helped us find better ways to handle people with ill intent. Players reporting issues with plugins helped us make the server experience better for everyone. We continually look for things we can improve and like to grab stuff from the suggestions chat room in the Discord, so if you want to provide some feedback, I’d love to hear it!

I’ll be updating this blog later with more stories of the server’s history and other related stuff as I find time to do so. Thanks for sticking around!


The server mascot Novel Tale dressing up as Luna

DataByte / 3 May 2020, 18:24PM]]> https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=2 Sat, 02 May 2020 02:43:33 -0500 https://blog.bronytales.com/?j=2
DataByte / 2 May 2020, 02:43AM]]>