Lotus City

Lotus City is a 'franchise' of 2b2t builds, which was originally founded by elijah204 and Pat_The_wizard as "The White Lotus Society". Together, they created bases in the greater spawn region that they would name 'Lotus City I', 'Lotus City II', etc. Once a base was 'complete', they would release the coordinates to Reddit, receiving usually over a thousand upvotes within the first couple hours.

Lotus City I
Though the very first Lotus City had the most active player base of any Lotus City, with 8 players all building at least one thing at the base, it was not the most outstanding of all the Lotus Cities made so far. It was not organized in any way and there were a lot of ambitious projects that were only partially realized before being abandoned.

One of the 3 people who streamed themselves building at the base on twitch, HandyCorgi, began making the underwater city of Rapture from Bioshock in this base where there wasn't much space to do so. It ended up being small and derpy looking, but people still liked it because it was sort of a fresh breath of air to the 2b2t community. Elijah204 made a small castle and expanded it more and more until the base was found by a player named 18pac. 18pac would blow up their storage, but he left the rest of the base alone as he admired the quality of the builds, in spite of their proximity to spawn (-21,868, -4,184 in the nether), forcing the group to release coordinates prematurely and move on to the next base.

Lotus City II
Due to the first city being raided, about half of the players who were there lost motivation to play 2b2t anymore since everyone in the White Lotus Society was a new player, who wasn't accustomed to the cycle of destruction on 2b2t. The few that stayed kept themselves motivated and played 2b2t through each Lotus City afterward.

Luckily, elijah204 had made a backup dupe stash at around -35k in the nether the day before Lotus City I's storage was blown up, knowing that the inevitable would happen soon. Elijah204 brought the group to that backup stash and they started off strong once again in the general vicinity of the stash after finding nice terrain to settle down in. There was a full ocean at the chosen location and HandyCorgi made his second attempt at creating the magnificent underwater city. With help from elijah204, they made Rapture once again, but more than 5x larger than the one at Lotus City I.

Due to most of the focus being on the new Rapture, the base didn't end up being too expansive past the underwater attraction that elijah204 and HandyCorgi had made. The White Lotus Society once again set out to find more members and created an application form, which was filled out by over 30 players. Of those 30 people, they accepted 10 into the group since about 10 of the applicants were older players who the White Lotus Society knew were not completely trustworthy simply due to having past experience on 2b2t and being in other groups. The remaining 10 applicants who weren't accepted were, although new to 2b2t (meaning they could pretty much be trusted), were just too young to have developed the skills required to successfully play on 2b2t and would never have been able to make it to the base. This has become survival of the fittest, or as some might say, survival of the fattest since people who are actually fit would realistically spend less time on the server than those who are morbidly obese. As of October 1st the coordinates of Lotus City II have been made public and the base is abandoned/partially griefed

Lotus City III
Having access to a new dupe, elijah204 sought to create 8 stashes before it got patched. Pat_The_Wizard and elijah204 began the search for a new, perfect base location to make the greatest Lotus City that will ever be created, Lotus City III. Though only the above-ground section of Lotus City II was griefed at this time (leaving the underwater Rapture build untouched), the group decided to abandon it anyway and build a new base. Lotus City II was used as a stop for new players as they made their way to Lotus City III. This base was originally planned to be a full fantasy-style area with wizard towers and spells all over the place, but elijah204 began to diversify the base and make different districts. The fantasy district was pushed out to the South-West where a flower forest was and began building fantasy-style structures in that area. As a technical mine crafter, elijah204 made a storage system that can sort shulkers rather than individual items since it would take too long to automatically sort individual items. He would dupe donkeys of shulkers, throw them all into the hoppers he made in the ground, which would then be quickly sorted into the system as long at the TPS was high enough. He slowed the system down to be operational at as low as 11 TPS, as the only time the server would usually go under 11 is when there was a lag machine in operation.

Although the 10 applicants that the White Lotus Society accepted did all make it to Lotus City II and some to Lotus City III, all 10 of them stopped playing once their priority queue ran out. Yet again, only a few persisted, HandyCorgi, elijah204, and Pat_The_wizard. Only these 3 players had a name on the board of ministries in Lotus City III, barring the later additions of _abattoir_ and ozzy. Elijah204 kept persistently working on the city, even during vacation through his laptop and mobile hotspot. The city quickly expanded vastly, and he would design everything in creative and make a schematic of the build before he would build it in survival just to make sure that everything looks perfect.

On October 6th, 2019 the base was griefed after a former White Lotus member leaked the coordinates to The Backstreet Boys.

Lotus City IV
A week after Lotus City III was founded by elijah204 and Pat_The_Wizard, elijah204 went to spawn (between 10k and 20k in the overworld) and created a floating landmass with a castle on top, chained to the ground with 4 wizard towers surrounding it, all casting a spell over the castle to keep whatever is inside of it imprisoned. He created a small town surrounding the eye-catching creation and officially named it Lotus City IV. This was a small project that took only 4 days, and he afterward returned to Lotus City III, having kept his bed set at that city. Elijah204 did not release the coordinates of Lotus City IV so that new players could stumble upon it every so often and to let it be worn down and eventually leaked, naturally.

During the time elijah204 had been building this city, the White Lotus Society was about to be insided by Highland. Although the leader of the group, The_Grand_Lotus, was looking to become allies with the White Lotus Society since they shared an interest in Avatar: The Last Airbender (They both got their name from the game Paicho, which was a part of the story in the television series), the rest of Highland had separate intentions. Highland's members were trying to act like newfags to get into the White Lotus Society and find coords to all their dupe stashes and bases that they haven't yet released; Highland's members were trying to social engineer the White Lotus Society. Highland failed to inside the White Lotus Society due to lack of communication, and elijah204 was able to pinpoint every single alt account that Highland used to try to inside White Lotus. The_Grand_Lotus was unaware of his own members attempting to inside the group he was trying to ally with, and thus he left once his members were discovered, assuming that The White Lotus Society could not trust him.

Lotus City V
On December 10, 2019, the White Lotus Society disbanded due to the owner of its discord server, Emil187, deleting the server and unfriending everyone he knew from 2b2t after deciding that he's had enough of it and should move on to more real-life oriented hobbies. Elijah204 had created a secondary group he called the 'Reuse and Exchange Collective" also known as 'R.E.C' about a week before Emil187 detached himself from 2b2t, just in case White Lotus Society went South at some point, which happened a bit sooner than he expected. In honor of the beginning of the Reuse and Exchange Collective as well as a sort of memorial for everyone who had joined the group and left, elijah204 went to create a 5th Lotus City that was religion-based (although Elijah is not religious), consisting of churches, cathedrals, and towers representing various members of the White Lotus Society. The center of the new city, a Minecraft recreation of the Notre Dame, represented the beginning of a new era, the Reuse and Exchange Collective.

After many failed attempts at duping with llamas, eiljah204, pat_the_wizard and Ozzy began to lose interest in the server. A few weeks later eiljah204 brought up just buying resources from shops and using the pearl exploit to do it, so _abattoir_ set 4 pearls and /killed back to spawn.