Verport

Background

I very rarely play vanilla Minecraft, I've always found myself getting bored with it much too quickly. That being said, there is one exception to this: I can sit and play really old Minecraft versions for hours on end, and that was the origin of Verport.

I originally built Verport on another server entirely, one called BetaLands. This server ran Minecraft Beta 1.7.3, and was pretty popular among players of older Minecraft versions. Originally, my home was not named: it was simply my house, and it was built extending over the water. It had a central spire that went all the way down to a strip mine I had built. It stayed like this for over a year, until I invited others over to my area in mid-2020. They built some houses nearby to mine, and we established a small town. It was unnamed at the time.

BetaLands announced later that year that they would be shutting down, and they released their map files publicly. I took a world download of the area immediately around my house, so I had a copy of it that I could continue to play on if I wished. BetaLands later changed course, staying open for two more years, but I never played on it for more than a couple minutes at a time. Eventually, it did close down.

I decided to bring the city to the Nosiphus server, and I found an area that looked like it would work. After some light terrain modification, I used WorldEdit to schematic in the town, and then used WorldEdit's smoothing tools to make the terrain look more natural.

After a few months, I decided to give the town a French-sounding name: Verport, which is what it is known as today.

Construction

I'd spent several days gathering the needed resources to build the house over the water. It was a fairly difficult process, especially the process of removing the water from the spiral staircase, but I eventually figured that out. Not having access to creative mode, WorldEdit, or ProjectE meant that everything was done by hand, meaning it took me some time to build.

Later on, when more people joined me in extending the area into a town, excavating the area where the bridge that gives access to the sea from the in-town lake was a difficult process as well. We got it done, though, with a little teamwork.

The easiest portion was the port. I took a schematic, rotated it, as the location I'd found had an east coast, whereas the original spot was a west coast, and copied it in. After fixing the doors and making the terrain look like it flowed naturally, I named it Betatowne. A few months later, it gained its current name of Verport.

Verport