Speedrunning My College’s Minecraft Server

The other day somebody at my college opened a Minecraft server and I immediately saw an opportunity now I may be a film major but that doesn’t mean that I can’t speedrun with the best of them well I mean I used to speedrun with the best of them these days I’m not

Quite as good but I used to be a top Runner okay that’s kind of my point so let me set the scene for you I was working on editing a video as a YouTuber in film Major Art often found doing when I got a text from my partner one of the

College Discord servers they were in announced that they were going to open an official unofficial server for the University and I immediately knew what I had to do oh my God I got a text within 15 minutes of the server being opened for the very first time I hopped on and

Began my speedrun everything on this server was pretty much vanilla so they saw every chat message for all of my achievements which caused them to take notice of what I was doing pretty quickly because it was a server instead of a single player world I ended up encountering a lot of differences and

Challenges compared to a normal speedrun and so let’s go ahead and dive into the story of how how I speedran my College’s Minecraft server I knew right away that this was going to be a different speedrunning experience than I was used to because this server was on the latest version of Minecraft

1.2.2 the most popular category for speedrunning is actually 1.16 and that’s the one that I have pretty much all of my experience in the first major difference in this newer version that affected my run was the world generation the world height was massively increased in version 1.17 and now all the way in

1.20 there’s completely different cave generations and everything this can make the early game a little bit different and it will take longer to dig down to the stronghold later but realistically it doesn’t make a huge difference I gathered my usual wood and tools and stuff and then I started to look for

Iron I kind of sort of forgot to get food before I started heading underground so I had some close calls but you know nothing I couldn’t bounce back from just a side note I did make it a goal to not dieet all because it would be pretty embarrassing if everyone else

On the server saw a death message from me in chat when I was trying to do a speedrun I managed to find some bread in a m shaft and I also got some rotten flesh from killing some zombies so that was enough to hold me over for now I got

The iron I was looking for and I smelted it and crafted a pickaxe but now I need to find lava which was actually made a lot more rare underground in the newer versions of Minecraft due to the cave generation luckily the caves are still pretty open so it was just a matter of

Doing a little spelunking I ended up finding a crazy amount of diamonds along the way like enough to make a full set of diamond tools and then some crazy amount of diamonds usually in speedruns finding diamonds for tools is just a small time save or a convenience boost

But something that I didn’t realize at this point in the run is that the durability of these tools would be a literal Lifesaver after wandering around in the caverns for what felt like forever I finally found a real life actual lava pool so I got to work

Building my nether portal I made sure to mine 10 obsidian so that I could exit the nether anywhere that I wanted to rather than having to find my way back to my my original portal it only takes about a minute and a half to mine 10 obsidian and I will almost definitely

Save a minute and a half later so this is totally worth it yeah I’m not going to lie to you entering the nether at 14 minutes is pretty bad in that amount of time I can finish pretty much the whole game in 1.6 but considering the whole

1.20 thing and the fact that this was my one and only try eh I’ll take it hopping into the portal I saw every Minecraft speedrunners wet dream Supple rugged Nether Bricks towering right over you you not having a nether fortress near you off spawn is probably the biggest

Killer of any run whether it’s competitive or not so it was actually a massive relief to see this right away if you watch my recent video where I speedrun Minecraft with a half-size character I lost an attempt to not being able to find a nether fortress at all so

Having one right here means that I should be able to finish this run which definitely boosted my spirits after that pretty mediocre early game I wanted to just tackle The Fortress and get it out of the way but I didn’t have any food or a shield or fire resistance potions so

Take on blazes without any of that was pretty much a guaranteed loss for 99.99 maybe throw in a third n% of Minecraft players luckily there was a Crimson Forest nearby so I was able to use my flint and steel to light hoglands on fire and then kill them for some

Pre-cooked pork chops this can be kind of risky since hoglands are pretty strong but I have a lot of practice doing this in regular runs so it was overall pretty safe I would say and speaking of safe now I made my way up into the Fortress and into the blaze

Spawner area taking on blazes with no armor or Shield is not the most comforting thing in the world but with some clever block placement you can actually bait out their attacks and tuck back away to safety I still took some big juicy Fireballs straight to the dome

But that’s what the food’s for I plugged away at these guys until I got seven blaze rods which basically guarantees that I can find the stronghold if I can get a matching set of pearls and speaking of pearls it’s time for one of the worst parts of speedrunning

Minecraft on 1.20 and especially on a 1.20 server as I’m sure a lot of you know in in 1.16 runs people trade gold to piglins to get ender pearls you can either mine nether gold ore or find gold blocks and bastions to trade to the pigs and bastions are definitely the

Preferred method because it’s faster and gives you a lot of piglins to trade with unfortunately Mojang heavily heavily nerfed piglin trades after 1.16.1 ender pearls went from roughly a 1 in 20 chance to drop four to eight pearls all the way down to a roughly 1 in 40 chance

To drop two to four pearls getting drops half as often and getting half as many pearls in each of those drops means that you essentially get one quar the amount of pearls in this version compared to 1.16 top speed runs for versions past 1.16 still do use bastions but they

Reset far more often due to not getting enough pearls most of the time mining gold to trade with piglins would take even longer in this version so I had absolutely no interest in doing either of these things for a server run where I only had one try the most consistent way

To get the Ender Pearls you need in these versions is to find a warped Forest which spawns tons of Endermen that you can kill for all the pearls that you could ever want so I set off away from the Fortress to look for a warped Forest not being too worried

About getting lost since I had that extra obsidian to build a new portal wherever I wanted this ended up being a very very long journey because there’s really no trick to finding warped forests all I could do is just pick the most traversible Direction and go that

Way and cross my fingers it doesn’t help that the default render distance for Minecraft servers is just seven chunks which this server was left on by whatever horrible negligent person configured it I was basically wandering around with a blindfold on and the only redeeming thing about this Quest was

That I found a four-pack of Enderman along the way and got my first pearls from them this would definitely save some Enderman killing later but obviously it wasn’t enough to save the trip to the Warped Forest to begin with this whole section right here is exactly

What I was talking about when it comes to diamond tools earlier without the durability of those tools I would have not been able to make it this far at all so thumbs up for that I guess eventually at about 34 minutes on the timer I finally got lucky enough to stumble upon

The promised holy lands the Warped Forest I killed some more Enderman but then remembered that I desperately needed more food I quickly backtracked to a nearby Crimson Forest and killed what I thought should be enough hoglins to sustain me for the rest of the ride what I didn’t realize is that I was

Basically destined to spend the rest of my life in this stupid warped Forest another default setting that’s kind of weird and hard to explain on Minecraft servers has to do with mob spawning behaviors and MOB spawning limits and what this basically boils down to is

That only two to five mobs or so exist around me at any given point and usually those are just random Striders or piglins that are around me so this warped Forest is pretty much a ghost town I turned on hit boxes so I could see Enderman from a distance better and

Spent the next 20 minutes running back and forth waiting for single Enderman to spawn one at a time luckily for you you can just watch it like this trust me as the guy that had to sit there for 20 minutes going back and forth doing this over and over it’s a

Lot better the way that you just watched it after dealing with all that I opened up the good old stronghold calculator to figure out where to build my portal and then to help me find the stronghold in the Overworld the bot says that these coordinates give me a solid chance at

Being really close to the stronghold yes I realize that 7.5% is really not impressive sounding but look it says the word excellent and the word is green it’s got to mean that it’s good and and this is where I ran into probably the weirdest complication of speedrunning on This Server I’m not sure if this is a new default setting for Minecraft servers or if the person who set the server up chose to change only this one setting but the world border was set to be within a 5,000 block radius of Spawn for some reason my nether coordinates

Overshot 5,000 by 5,000 in the Overworld so my portal was placed right on the corner corner of the world border I decided to throw an ie ofender to check and sure enough the nearest stronghold was outside the world border this threw me off really hard because up to this

Point everything was totally vanilla all of the settings were default so why would I expect them to change this one thing I don’t know I hopped back into my nether portal which put me in a totally different place since my Overworld coordinates were much lower than they

Were before and then I mined 10 obsidian back up from the portal so I could pack it all up and move closer to spawn along the way I made sure to gather some brown and red mushrooms since I could mix these with some dandelion that I grabbed

At the very beginning of the run to make suspicious stew when made with dandelion suspicious stew actually fills up your hunger meter a ton and gives you a ton of saturation that makes your regen last longer I went to these coordinates instead which have a decent chance of

Being closer to a stronghold that is actually reachable within the confines of the world this time I did in fact spawn within the Mortal plane of existence right next to the Shipwreck that I just ignored and then I threw a couple Eyes of Ender to calculate my

Angles for where the stronghold is it came back with 500 86 blocks away and a set of coordinates which honestly isn’t too far so I started making the Trek now if you’re an extra Mega Minecraft speedrun nerd you probably realize that I’m missing something pretty important

Up to this point I don’t have a single bed to my name and beds are the primary method of killing the ender dragon in speeduns the reason for this is that using beds on servers is actually really inconsistent especially if it’s running on a lower tier machine the delay

Between the server entities updating and you right clicking the bed is just too inconsistent to really get a good kill on the dragon and given the whole I only have one try to do this thing that I established earlier my plan was just to

Gather some arrows and a bow so I had a safe and consistent method to take down the dragon fortunately there was a Costco siiz pack of chickens right here which let me get some feathers and I already knew that I could grind Flint out of all the gravel I had from a few

Piglin trades I did along the way I didn’t have any string for a bow at this point either but I knew that I could find some in a library room in the stronghold so I wasn’t really stressing about that I strolled on over to the coordinates that the calculator told me

Farmed my flint and then headed down into the stronghold I started looking around for a library since I needed that string to make my bow but I decided to check this random dungeon chest since it generated in the stronghold and holy there was actually enough string to

Craft a bow in there so I didn’t need to find the library after all I got all my stuff crafted and so my load out was a bow and 24 normal arrows plus 18 spectral arrows that I got from piglins earlier I like to think that my aim is

Pretty damn good with a Minecraft bow so this should be more than enough to get the job done I hopped in into the end Dimension bridg my way up to the island and started taking shots that’s both shots not other shots the super low render distance did make this part a

Little challenging but a professional tip from a semi-professional is to turn on hitboxes so you can see where the crystals are easier from a distance I did have to Tower up to be able to get some shots on the taller crystals but I had a water bucket and an extra ender

Pearl to catch myself if I got knocked down so it really wasn’t that dangerous after taking out every crystal I used up the rest of my arrows by shooting the dragon herself and then I just had to wait for a perch you can only deal 25% of the dragon’s Health before it flies

Away from the perch so after a couple more of those I dealt the final blow and beat my College’s Minecraft server just over an hour after it Launched all right now this is where I level with you this was a terrible terrible speedrun I mean I can beat this game literally an hour faster on 1.16 my PB is actually more than 1 hour faster than this but to be fair a lot of those

Reasons were totally out of my control this seed was pretty bad for a 1.20 run since there weren’t any bastions along the way and I had to travel 750 blocks on each axis just to make it to a warped Forest the low render distance of the server made spotting things far away

Pretty much impossible and those Enderman spawn rates probably cost me 15 minutes all on their own overall though complaining aside I think that I played pretty decently and the people on the server were pretty impressed with my time so I chocked that up to a win

Overall and and so after a brief but intellectual discussion in the chat I hit them with a good old well all right see you and then logged off the server never to log in again anyways I hope you guys enjoyed this video like I said in the beginning I literally just got the

Notification hopped on hit record and started speedrunning I wasn’t even sure that it’d be entertaining enough for a video so let me know how I did if you had a good time make sure you like And subscribe and comment because all those things tell YouTube that you enjoyed the

Video and other than that GG see you Oh