Avalysium

Note: The contents of the article below are taken from CirocDrip's imgur post "The Story of Avalysium," link https://imgur.com/gallery/Wx0k84J

History
The name "Avalysium" originated with the merging of the names Avalonia and Elysium: - Avalonia, being a builder group, with their large principle base, “Avalonia.” - Elysium, also a builder group, with several bases known as “Elysium.”

Founding
The leaders of both groups, Noah3j and Carlll met when Carlll caught Noah stealing one of the stashes for Elysium 2. Despite the fairly awkward and tense initial interactions, they grew to be friends and Noah became a member of Elysium. Upon seeing Elysium and talking with the members, Noah noted similar ambitions to that of Avalonia. Despite both groups still operating bases, Noah started discussing the possibility of a joint base with Carlll, with the prospect of a later full merger of the two groups. Carlll agreed; unfortunately, Avalonia and Elysium 3 were both griefed shortly after. Although conceived in the midst of a downward spiral of events, it turned out to be the perfect opportunity to carry out the group merger, which would lead to a project grander than anything either group could dream of: Avalysium.

Starting on 8/16/2020, the Avalysium group was formed out of the majority of the members from Avalonia and Elysium. A voting system similar to Avalonia was established. It was headed up by a co-leadership agreement by Carlll and Noah3j, respectively. A base location was voted on and travel started in earnest to the faraway location. The base banner was created as a combination of the designs of the Avalonian and Elysian banners, with the base colors being white and pink. The merger had problems, initially. While many base members were still traveling to the location, ElytraFlight got patched. Two members, DrBeardStash and Ionar, secretly disliked Elysium but hid their feelings from the rest of the group in hopes of gaining a dupe that the Elysium members had. Ionar later reverse-engineered the dupe, with the intent to put it into his hacked client, Pyro Client. After Ionar and DrBeardStash found the dupe, they left the group. It was later discovered that they planned on griefing Avalysium regardless of finding the dupe. These plans were discovered without their knowledge. The base and all supplies were relocated before Ionar or DrBeardStash could act. With the supplies and new location, building started on 10/22/20 as Marcus4761 (the founder of the Monastery), was the first to reach the new location which was jungle galore. The first project at the new location was a large-scale terraforming operation. Marcus, Blocker, and CirocDrip were tasked with flattening a large portion of the central island and turning huge jungle mountains into a blank canvas where the Avalysians had planned to put a city. Elijah spent many weeks designing a storage hall that would be both practical and beautiful, recalling the effectiveness of the hall at his old base, Avalonia. The new Avalysian hall came with many complex Redstone additions that made it one of the most efficient and largest item sorter/stash ever built on 2b2t, holding approximately 2400 double chests of items. Having a (now patched) private dupe made every item in the game available and well-stocked in the storage hall. The hall included many Redstone mechanisms to make life easier for its users, including automatic anvil replacers, exp dispensers, custom shulker box creators, an autosorter for empty shulker boxes, and a shopping cart system for queuing large amounts of shulkers that couldn’t fit in one inventory. It also contained pearl suspenders for quick trips back to spawn. All of this was conceived and built in less than a month. The hall was to be surrounded by circular roads lined with custom foliage designed by Xapamaa. The city was planned around the central hall and its roads. It was around this time planning for the overall central island started to achieve substance: A district on the south side of the central island was started to the theme of 'Amsterdam', the north side had a grand central train station, the east was to have a road of shops and end with docks and a harbor, although these were unfortunately never realized, and the north was Marcus’s Italian mountainside town. The west remained empty, and although there were many builds conceptualized for it, mainly skyscrapers and a university, the area was indefinitely barren.

Building
As the weeks went by, the number of accounts arriving at the base grew seemingly exponentially. Shared base accounts were set up so users could play at the base without having to buy priority queue. Between the seemingly infinite materials, and the large amount of members, the construction of Avalysium was happening fast. All 12 cardinal and diagonal roads were expanded to the ends of the central islands. A boardwalk and ocean wall for the upcoming station was built by Noah3j. Both Xapamaa’s Amsterdam district and Marcus’s Italian district continued to grow. An entire underground system with a large mausoleum at its core was built as well. It was a larger and more impressive version of Avalonia’s, with many more pillars and a more diverse color scheme as well. Also around this time, Carlll started his Mediterranean district right outside the central island, past the northeast diagonal road. It had a white and blue theme and used the natural beaches to make a quaint beach town. Everything was going smoothly, until the base had a surprise visitor, Univercius. He had triangulated the coordinates after seeing a stream Carlll did that revealed distant waypoints and yaw measurements, allowing Avalysium's location to be determined through trigonometry. Ironically, it was Carlll that taught him how to do the math to triangulate coordinates in the first place. To the relief of everyone involved, Univercius chose to stay and not leak the base, thus becoming a base member. Also, IronException joined the group at this time. Expanding the base's nether section was determined to be the next goal, so that a more effective pearling system could be utilized. The nether was also used as a rough road to transport duped items. This would lead to the group's first major interaction with 2b2t’s mysterious admin: Hausemaster. One night, while most accounts were at the dupe stash, Hausemaster removed priority queue from every single account online at the base. After inspecting the area where all the priority queue removals happened and attempting to communicate with Hausemaster, Blocker's priority queue was also removed. Members concluded that the items moving throughout the storage system sorter was the cause of the lag, prompting him to pay the base a “visit”. The base accounts would get priority back (despite the heavy price tag). Nexo was tasked with designing a nether hub castle while Noah cleared a large area in the nether and constructed a large castle to serve as the nether hub. IronException created a mod that auto cleared lava source blocks to assist in this. Building the castle largely by himself, Noah was about to take a break from the project until Connor came. Being recently invited, the two were able to grind and finish in less than 48 hours with some help from Ciroc. The infrastructure then started underneath the castle to include a nether road system. Tunnels designed by Noah, Iron, and Sky4 were created that extended 1k blocks in each cardinal direction. Connor dug the majority of the tunnels singlehandedly. With the main focus shifting back to the overworld, Marcus and Connor built a town south of the pyramid with a plaza, obelisks, and a large Greek temple. It was decorated with lots of flowers and the Avalysium colors; all set to a nice backdrop in the form of Marcus' pyramid. As was tradition, Marcus made the same iron pyramid that can also be found at Avalonia or the Monastery, which used over 80 shulker boxes of iron blocks. The scale of these builds are nearly inconceivable. Although the nether pearling system was not yet started, another break was needed from Nether projects. Noah3j, Ciroc, and Connor decided to finish the cherry blossoms and trees around the storage hall at this time. Marcus added a bridge to begin expansion north past the Italian district and Italian district. Joey_Coconut was invited to the base and started construction of his medieval area along the northern road, alongside Lifeisgood72's planned Venice district location. Lifeisgood also started building a town along the eastern road. Carlll began a huge project of a volcano on an island southwest of the base after designing 9 different iterations in worldpainter. This build by itself was planned to be over 200,000 blocks. It took significant terraforming of burning jungle terrain, much of it was eventually built by SpicyBigDaddy on the island as well. It was slightly over halfway done before the base fell. Another unfinished build was the Grand Central Station, which after a huge amount of terraforming by Noah3j (and the addition of surrounding builds to complement the station) could begin construction. With major help from Sky, Connor, Xapamaa, Ciroc, and Blocker, the station was nearly complete, save for a few layers of the roof, before the base was griefed. Had the base lasted another month, it’s likely the volcano and central station would have been completed. From there, the next order of business would have been further developing the central island and surrounding districts, but that, unfortunately, was halted right as it started.

Grief
On April 16th, 6 months after its founding, Avalysium was griefed by the group “The Backstreet Boys.” The story of how its coords were leaked can be described as nothing less than astonishing. Bard, a base member, had an irl friend who was an avid 2b2t player after being introduced to the server by him. Bard would regularly discuss the server and the Avalysium base with him, describing the grandiosity of the base. Bard’s friend, intrigued, saw an opportunity for attention and infamy. During a visit to Bard’s house, he secretly ratted his computer by plugging a USB stick into his PC to obtain all of Bard’s information: His discord tokens, his Minecraft account information, etc. He even used Bard’s account to spend money on discord. Having sold out his real-life friend for block game clout, he was promptly kicked from BSB, seen as a backstabbing friend. The community saw him as going too far beyond the limits of decency, even for a 2b2t player. With that, the base would get griefed.