The cities strength, wealth, organization, size and values were unrivaled during the era that it reigned. Two of the cities biggest goals were to promote PVP as well as provide safe and reliable homes for newcomers to help themselves become dedicated to the server and our city. We even had the potential to almost completely take over the whole map, which i'll explain at the end. Sadly, a few obstacles got in the way. Nonetheless, the people of Soular were proud of what it was and what it stood for and what it was capable of. Here's the story of how it all came to be through bold leadership and the collective efforts of many citizens.
BACKSTORY OF MYSELF AS THE CREATOR OF SOULAR
Whenever I first joined citywars, I knew NOTHING involving PVP or anything of the sort. I was a hermit for awhile and had a bunker filled with chests and kept to myself and would constantly try assassinating other people in the renewable eternal world by going elven and falling from platforms in the sky that I used to make lol. Then later on, I joined Bobcattennis (I may misspell some usernames) city called Elite. I learned a decent bit on how to run a city by being there. More importantly though, The enemies that I made during my early stages on citywars were what drove me to make a name of myself within the server. I wanted to prove myself. I pushed my nooby luck by challenging some of the high end players at the time. I picked a lot of fights with the people from empire known as Templar and a few others as well. A few people targeted me and would even start ambushing me in my own home. From that point on, it became personal and I strived to be the absolute best Pvper I could be.
In time, I developed strategies and various ways to win in pvp battles through any means. I taught myself what worked, what didn't, what angle to come and start swinging at, when to jump, how to master a bow (using a bow was my specialty) and what potion line up was the best for each situation and even how to escape if I needed to. Every detail mattered. Every fight that I went into, I had a plan. I loved to strategize my fights. Never would I charge in mindlessly and hope for the best. Something as small as terrain advantage could determine a fight. Back in the day I would take on whole cities by myself and never exactly feared getting killed by anyone except by a select few people (Demon174 being the hardest to fight in my opinion). People recognized me as one of the best Pvper's on the server and I seemed to have became respected as the best pvper by some. My goal to make a name for myself was achieved.
CREATION OF SOULAR
Whenever the map reset happened, I felt confident enough to make my own city. Lucylu225 (aka Jammydodger225) and I were good friends when we played and we had a lot to offer when it came to starting up a city. She loved to build and help new players and I loved to manage the city and PvP. A 3rd player named Patrick? (I forget his username, he wasn't on much) helped us start Soular off. At first, The city wasn't anything special with only a few citizens. I was the only pvper of the city during that time and fought uphill battles vs the big oppressive cities like Solitude when it was at its peak, which had a lot of people from the old templar. As I recall, solitudes leader Pizzamanray stopped playing and the people of the city seemed to have scattered. One in particular was Jcameron. Him and I used to be enemies and weren't too fond to each other so I was VERY reluctant on having him join at first. However, he seemed to really want a place to call home on the server so he earned his stay. He was a great pvper and builder and pretty much built whatever I asked him to build without question. Now, I had two very dedicated builders to help within the city. Little did I know the impact he would have. He probably built a 3rd of Soular all by himself.
SOULARS OPERATION AND UPRISING
When the city got bigger, Lucylu225 was great at giving plots, helping newcomers and helping guide new sub leaders in the city. She was great at what she did. Soular was gaining a few key members slowly to become the best that it could be. For each player that joined, I gave them all goals to achieve so that they could have more things to do on the server and to encourage them to dedicate themselves to the city in order to gain ranks. Each and every citizen had a future in Soular, but ONLY IF they dedicated themselves to it and behaved right. Although I'm aware that some acted out of line at times, I did what I absolutely could to set them straight.
There wasn't much lore involving soular, other than the idea of "shining souls". What that meant was, we wanted everyone within the city to not only be the best that they could be, but we also wanted everyone to stay true to Soulars values while doing so. We were very strict on people cheating, treating each other poorly and even treating players outside of our city poorly. I didn't matter if you had a rank in the city or not. I wouldn't hesitate to boot you to make an example out of you. I always made sure to keep people in check to prevent anyone from ruining Soulars image.
I'll use someone as an example on how ranks would work. Mogeo always asked me how to earn a rank and I would tell her "I want you to help new players in general, but especially players in Soular and answer any questions they may have". Soular was designed to help newer players start off. We had signs at the spawn area that gave money making tips and other general tips that only veteran players would know. Mogeo would guide them to it and answer any other questions that they may have. If there were any questions that Mogeo couldn't answer, I'd have her refer to me.
Eventually, Mogeo gained her first rank. She then asked me how she could get yet another rank above her current one. I told her the same thing, but this time with more responsabilities. This time, she had to give plots to citizens. She earned the highest rank in time and as a personal reward for helping Soular out so much, I gave her how own seperate piece of land that she could build on as she pleased. I always made sure that all my high ranks felt happy with earning their rank. That, and I wanted other citizens to recognize that it was WORTH dedicating themselves to Soular.
Soular managed to gain LOTS of players when the server started booming again. We would have around 15-30 players on at any given time throughout the day. We had quite a few leaders (too many to mention) such as Mogeo to help give plots and to attend to citizens needs. A lot of them had their own special characteristics that made them essential to Soulars uprising.
- U2QU Was the most interesting one. He spent most of his days chunk warring, keeping to himself and simply seeing how much land he could posses. By all means, he had the biggest amount of chunks out of ANYONE on the server. He was a lonewolf and I saw potential in us joining forces. I paid him a large sum of money and instantly gave him a rank and he surrendered all of his land to me. This very huge amount of land eventually became part of my plan for world domination. This land would eventually be used as our secondary spawn. Back in the day it was refered to as "/aspawn"
- Dablackbear was our redstone guy. Although he mainly made complicated redstone stuff for himself, it was all part of Soular nonetheless and he was always there if anyone needed help involving redstone.
- Gary221 Absolutely worthless. He did nothing but break and place the same block of dirt for hours at a time. I used to ask if he was okay and he'd aggressively say "IM FINE" and would start hissing at me. (if you're reading this, I hope that we're still close enough for you to take this joke lol)
- Jcoder Even though we HATED each other at first, we settled our differences and you proved your worth by creating Soulars spawn and sharing your knowledge about various things with me
- A lot of others. If i didnt included you, Dont worry. I appreciated you all in your own way!
THE WEALTH OF SOULAR
Many of you may have wondered how I had so much money and got to 1# in wealth when Soular became big. I'll explain the two money making methods that I discovered that far exceeded the rest. Both of which have always existed in the game but no one seemed to have thought of them before.
Platform mining by binding a compass to paste at layer 6-12
For quite awhile I never knew that you could use the command "set 0" to get rid of all the blocks that you were trying to world edit. So it had me thinking....what if I world edited an entire cube of a chunk at layer 6 where diamonds are to see the maximum amount of surface area possible and mine all the ores? Turned out, it was quite good. I'll explain how it worked. With BVIP world edit, you were able to copy an entire cube of a chunk, and then bind the command "paste" to a compass. Whenever you right clicked on the compass, you would then issue out that command. So, by binding the command "paste" the blank cube of empty space would be pasted in front of me with a simple right click of the compass essentially. While I was mining, I would have my class set as a prominer. When I was done mining, I would then sell all of my ores with whatever class it was that sold ores (I think it was prominer as well but I don't quite remember). I advanced this money making method by adding platforms of glass to stand on to mine the ores that I couldn't reach since afterall, it was a whole cube of a chunk. Glass was perfect because I could see through it. That, along with some glowstone made it even more perfect. It was bright as day within the tunnels and easy to move around. I'm sure quite a few of you may have stumbled upon these tunnels.
Netherrack mining with prominer
When the ability to world edit outside of your own city got removed (I don't believe it was even because of my tunnel mines, but instead people were griefing with it, I don't quite recall) I was on the search for another making method. This one didn't make as much as my first one, but it was still about double or triple of farming, which was commonly known to be the best money maker. These details are a bit sketchy due to memory but I'll try my best to recall it. Although it didn't make much per block, I discovered netherrack INSTANTLY mined at a efficiency level 3 pick I believe. With that knowledge, I tested to see how much I could make an hour in the nether vs other money making methods. It turned out to be highly profitable, but I needed a good way to sustain levels to repair my diamond pickaxe. What I did was, I would bring iron with me to create anvils on the spot and diamonds to repair. As for levels, I mined the nether quartz and repaired at a specific level to maintain maximum efficiency. I guess you could say Soular got all of it's money through unique ways of mining.
SOULARS PLAN FOR WORLD DOMINATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Soular had wealth, power and lots of people. Overall it was a prosperous city in every way possible. (Although, it could have used some nicer walls and buildings but it was made with a glass roof and walls so no one could get in and the land was used to hold lots of people). So, as its leader what do you do? How would you feel? One starts to get bored after they achieve all that. So, I essentially made a plan to attempt to take over the majority, if not all, the cities on citywars. My goal was to promote a lot of pvp on the server. That, and take it over lol. Essentially I was trying to persuade people to surrender their city to me and if they didn't, they would have to feel the wrath of Soular. Not even all the other cities combined could rival us. Here was the plan in detail. Again, some details are sketchy due to memory but I'll do my best. I created a book within the game that I copied and distributed amongst everyone. It read something along the lines of
"If you surrender your city to me, I will give you full rights to your city and you will gain an automatic rank within Soular. You will be able to build on your land as you please and do whatever you want with it as normal. Soular will provide a portal from our secondary spawn that goes to your city. I'll pay ? amount for your city as well and you will have all of soulars protection and benefits. I'm handing this out to all the city's on citywars. If you refuse to surrender your city to me, you'll be declared an enemy of Soular and WE WILL make an outpost next to your city and WE WILL chunkwar you and take it by force"
I tried to make it seem like it benifieted the both of us. Honestly, it kind of did. All of that land that U2QU gave me was essential to this plan. It was going to be used as the "hub" for the portals to get to all the other cities. That, and for collective projects for building that any of the city leaders wanted to do. I was going to wait a few weeks to see who would actually surrender to me. I had ways to create outpost next to all the other active cities on citywars to make them fearful of me going to war with them. I forget how I planned on doing this part exactly, but I believe that I was going to use my money to have my city leaders and their alts create cities as outpost and have those cities surrender to me so that I had an outpost next to every city possible essentially. I was also going to have the cities that willingly surrendered to me create an outpost before they surrendered as well. Sadly, before I could execute this plan surrender got removed from the game and the plan fell apart entirely. Still though, something came out of it. During this time, people didn't want to go down without a fight. So an alliance of almost all the other cities on the server was formed by the leader of Carthage, the 2nd biggest city. Carthage told them NOT to surrender to me. This whole ordeal led to a world war on the server
World War: Soular VS Carthage and allies
With my plan for world domination being ruined, I decided to do something else to try and promote pvp within the server. At the time, PCH (leader of Carthage) was building a very nice looking building. Him and I had small grudges against each other due to competing for the "best city" title. Although I admit his looked nicer, I felt like mine had more to offer to new and old players alike. I decided to go to war at the spot where he was working on his big project. I knew that would probably spark something. I was hoping that he would get his allies to come fight during the war, and that's exactly what happened. For a lot of people, they say it was the best thing that ever happened on citywars. For me personally, I felt that way too. If you were there, You remembered it and how hectic it was. Nothing really compared to it. When the war happened almost everyone who had a set of diamond armor and knew about it participated in the war. There were so many people fighting against each other and I was very happy to see so much PvP to be going on. It was like nothing I've ever seen before. Soular managed to win the war, mainly due to us having such great pvper's and being fully prepared. After this war, not much really happened because not long after the map got reset. So, this is the end of the story of Soular.
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this! I hope this story was just as nostalgic to you as it was to me. I typed all of this out to show my appreciation towards the server owners and to all of the people of Soular who helped make it as great as it was. Thank you all for helping create such a wonderful memory and story!
