Independent Interstate Society



The Independent Interstate Society, shortened IIS, is a highly active nether highway repair group that has the stated goal of steadily expanding all highways in a uniform, functional obsidian design, while also performing regular repairs on them to ensure the best possible highway experience. Their work includes repairing and expanding the existing highways, as well as constructing ring-roads that connect them and building milestones.

The founding members of The North East Highway Group (precursor to what would become the IIS) were TheFifthAge and Adam8067; the IIS was founded by TheFifthAge, Adam8067, CoziePanda, Eddie123 and Maxed/5K5K shortly after. IIS is not associated with SIG, the highway building sub-group of The Vortex Coalition. It was, however, founded after failed attempts to work with SIG, when the leaders of IIS found SIG to be poorly organized and basically inactive (see History for more details).

After a few weeks of steady repairs and advertising their cause through signs, chat and discord, the IIS grew exponentially, and its discord now has over a thousand members (although not all of them are actively participating in the building effort).

Activities
In its first weeks of existence, the IIS sent out repair and building crews to rework/restyle the existing disheveled highways into their specific template, and simultaneously have people extend them further. Members are encouraged to share screenshots of their work, and also their server statistics, to track their obsidian building. The group's official policy is to destroy all portals and other obstructions blocking the highway, to better accommodate elytra flight (the group therefore encourages exit portals to be built a ways next to the road, and not directly on it).

The group builds roads in all the 8 regular directions, 4 blocks wide with 1-block-high walls, entirely out of obsidian. Another part of their construction effort is focused on ring roads, which are horizontal highways that connect all the 8 highways at specific intersections. The planned ring roads are 500; 1,000; 5,000; 10,000; 25,000; and 50,000; out of those, only the first three have been fully completed.

On August 30th 2019, the group finished their first main milestone goal: to extend all highways to at least 20k. Their next group event was a contest for its members to build 25k milestones.

Since its founding, IIS has already built over 250k of highway, and its members collectively have placed at least half a million obsidian. TheFifthAge has been quoted as saying that the group repairs highway griefs faster than any griefer can inflict them, and the group generally has a "sure, grief all you want" attitude. Many of its active members have expressed that without highway griefers, "IIS would be out of a job".

History
The first real activity of IIS's repair effort was just its leader building the +X -Z highway solo from near spawn to 35k, where Adam8067 then joined the effort and together (with some help) built the highway all the way to 80k.

The group's leaders initially joined SIG and tried to claim credit for work they had already completed on said highway, but since they had already completed more repairs than the SIG credit system was designed to deal with, they ran into obstacles like rankup bureaucracy and a need for recorded screenshots every 100 blocks, that seemed counterproductive. Furthermore, SIG's policies on repairs did not specify whether one had to use obsidian, which led to roads looking like patchwork netherrack-cobble bridges without walls, easily destroyed by withers and even people with tnt and/or pickaxes. All of these things led to the IIS being founded as a much more loosely-managed, independent highway group.

During late August and the month of September 2019, the group saw a massive influx of players that necessitated large-scale reworks of the role system and a more invested obsidian delivery system.

Relations
IIS is a neutral organisation and does not care for faction drama. The group does not want to take part in any ongoing wars, beefs or conflicts, but are willing to work with anyone and everyone, as long as they want to help build roads. This means they interact with a lot of the spawnfags and also groups like Conquest, The Emperium and VoCo ; however, IIS does not want any official "allied" or "enemy" status with any of these groups, specifically so that they can work with whomever chooses.

The group also does not see highway maintenance as inherently pro-newfag, and does not in any way restrain its members from killing new players, raiding stashes, being active in war/raiding groups, or anything else. In fact, IIS may be one of the only groups around where hardcore spawncampers work side-by-side with fresh newfags on a project of this scope.

In October 2019, Rageland Renovation (also known as the Anti-IIS) was founded by Steve3 with several members from The Backstreet Boys and Point Zenith to ruin IIS highways. The group became known for using slave labor to block large sections of the -Z highway with obsidian. The IIS has since removed 100,000+ obsidian placed by Rageland.

Other highways have also been blocked using obsidian and marked with "road closed" map arts. More recently as of November 2019, chunk-banning is being utilized to block the highways more effectively than obsidian.