Sulphage

Sulphage is a building faction that was kept absolutely secret for the first five months of its existence. The Sulphage Council is comprised four members (which change over time), who make executive decisions about the faction and hold votes for the entire faction to participate in.

## Beginnings

Sulphage was conceived before its foundation date, but on December 8th, 2021 Virkyme (Virk), who had previously been inactive for five months, and before that a prominent member of griefing/farming faction Rakovan, invited three people to join an upcoming group that was looking to create. These people were:

* Kheidge, long-time friend of Virk, Rakovan/Okami member;
* Villhume, programmer/modder/redstoner/builder/schizo;
* adventuretimeguy (ATG), who disappeared almost immediately.

With four people interested, Virk made a GC, where it was decided that the faction would have to remain an absolute secret, and that the group would have covert anti-Pumpkin goals spawned from the members’ hatred of Pumpkin.

In just five days, the group had outgrown the GC and made a Discord server. In their misguided hurry to quickly gather members to create their first base, the group stupidly tried inviting Txyzzy, a lesser-known and semi-inactive Pumpkin member to their distinctly anti-Pumpkin faction. Fortunately, no harm was done. Players WokeToast, Citizen\_L and Lutzskater were added to the member list in the second half of December.

The initial plan was to build a semi-underground base inside of a big cave, that would appear in 1.18 update. However, the group realized that Purity will not update to 1.18 anytime soon, so they decided to look for a "temporary" location (which would later become a permanent location - as is usually the case with temporary locations). On December 30, Sulphage would receive its newest member, Melwin22, a redstone/building player and advancement connoisseur. This would prove to be a good decision, as Melwin would later help out with the construction of the first Sulphage base, Constantinipple.

## The Rise of Constantinipple

### Construction

The name of first Sulphage base was chosen by Virk, and the base was located on a beautiful island, divided into three zones: mushroom fields in the center, forest in the east and hills in the south. In Melwin's opinion, this is the most magnificent location on Purity he has ever seen. The first map of the island was made by Villhume on 5th January, 2022 using an incredibly inefficient method of terrain-downloading. From the start, the group ambitions were big: they wanted to terraform the mushroom part into a giant mountain right beside a ravine, which would be created in old river bed.

Villhume, Virkyme and Melwin started terraforming the island. The massive mountain shell and insides grew day by day, through Villhume's continued efforts, and the man-made ravine/waterfall (a reference to an old Rakovan base) was getting deeper and deeper. Inside of the mountain there was a lot of space to place autofarms, living quarters, storage areas and decorative builds. Melwin also built a decorative build in the hill zone, called Spiral of Elements. However, by the end of January, several members of the group started to become less active. On February 6, Villhume was mistakenly tempbanned for (ironically) tile entity ESP, which was promptly reversed. Melwin resumed the completion of minor construction projects.

### Melwin's Transition to Constantinipple

After a heavy argument with his previous basemate, Melwin fled his old base and ventured back to Constantinipple, almost sure that his old base was doomed. He then started to do serious work on the island: tens of thousands of mycelium, dirt and stone blocks were mined in order to terraform the mushroom section of the island, after which Melwin and Villhume began to construct the monumental mountain shell around the existing base, which took many months. Northernmost past of the mushroom zone was fenced out and called "National Park of Moosh Island", which was supposed to be the last place that mycelium and mooshroms exist. Villhume, Virkyme and Kheidge sporadically logged on and help. Villhume also designed a few rooms inside of the mountain, including a small stadium.

On top of the mountain, Melwin placed a small dragon, sitting on a pile of jewellery. Then, he started constructing a gold farm based on WhoIsHallux's design, using more than 30 shulker boxes of obsidian in the process.

## Expansion

### Politics

SilverStick1, a friend of Melwin and Circic, a friend of Villhume, were added to the member list on 17 February 2022. Justinius11, a random guy that never got to the base, and Taurt, a PvPer were added on March 21. DARK\_SOUL\_NINJ4 (Dark), a redstone engineer, was added on 11th of April.

The political environment in Sulphage was beginning to change. Frrost\_bite and MarkConnagan, leaders of Pumpkin and the New Seed Order respectively, the two biggest griefing factions, were permanently banned. Due to the fact that one of the only reasons the faction was a secret one was to challenge Pumpkin, Villhume and Virkyme, started to discussions about going public, and on April 12, this would become official. Preparations to change the structure of the faction were made, and two sets of custom name tags would be used to wither spawn, which was done on April 18, and the next day, the group publicly announced themselves to the server.

On the same day, a previously inactive member, AdventureTimeGuy, returned to the faction.

### Infrastructure

In the meantime, Melwin was building the gold farm (Taurt and Kheidge helped), and Virkyme was deepening the ravine. Circic also helped with terraforming. Eventually Virk would stop with the ravine and help with the gold farm: last obsidian block was placed on 4th April, and the farm was finished on 18th of April. Dark used his redstone knowledge to design a custom moss/bonemeal farm and a wood farm. Taurt, who was no longer tagged as a member of the faction, was mostly spamming the DC chat with clips of his PVP fights.

Up to this point, the main project - the Mountain - was a bit neglected. Melwin and Villhume came back to finish it, and on the beginning of May, construction on the Mountain was mostly completed.

Eventually most members became inactive again due to in-real-life happenings, so Melwin got bored playing alone and the faction was halted once again.

## Large-Scale Becomes Larger-Scale

The 1.18 update would bring Sulphage to life for the third time. In the first hour of the update, Melwin and Dark dug under the Mountain to find an enormous cave filled with a giant lava lake, right under their feet.

The mountain shape was overhauled: Melwin made it spikier and more natural looking, while Kheidge extended it with a giant ridge in the north side. ATG came to the base and eradicated the last batches of mycelium, and also made a villager breeder - **yes, up to this point Const did not have a breeder.** Sulphage members were probably focusing too much on a grand-scale things instead of small things, like an actual trading hall... anyway. Melwin also built a Menger Sponge shape out of the absurd amounts of stone they gathered during terraforming. Virk deepened the ravine even more and filled it with brown teracotta for decoration. New faction member, AlphaTesting, built a circular perimeter in the ocean and filled it with some decorative things: this build was called "Tribute". Along with AlphaTesting, N0xi3 was invited to the faction as well. Another new member, DIEHARDNINJA300 (a friend of Dark), built a beautiful house inside of the mountain, and a complex noteblock device playing Eye of the Tiger. zAlxelsz, Virk's friend, came to the base on 11th July, even though he had associated with the faction for a very long time at this point.

On July 3, after a significant grief of a Chadlets base - the Ringed City - by Pumpkin led to long-withheld coordinates to a massive Pumpkin base being leaked on a seemingly innocuous base tour video on Apersu's YouTube channel, revealing the overworld coordinates of Pumpkin's main base to be 271,700/-464,000. With Constantinipple's coordinates being 318,000/-440000, this piece of information led to the realization that Sulphage, a distinctly anti-Pumpkin faction, had been living just 52 thousand blocks from Pumpkin for half a year!

### The Unsolved Mystery of Villhume Structures

First coined by Virkyme, the term 'Villhume structure' referred to the countless small and often-times inexplicable creations built by Villhume inside the 5-kilometre zone surrounding Constantinipple. These ranged in size from small shrines to large and possibly illicit redstone machines of unknown functionality. Until the base's location was compromised, most members had no idea about the existence of these locations. The most widely-known Villhume structure was Villhume's Hallowed Hall of Heads, containing more than 100 heads of semi-known to famous players, the most notable of which had on signs denoting their personality, skills, history, etc. This specific structure was contained at sea level in the middle of a mountain range less than 500 blocks from the Constantinipple mountain, beneath Melwin's *Spiral of Elements*. Also discovered was a secret piston door in a small hill leading to a library of written books, a lava-fall that could be toggled back to reveal the entrance to a large redstone machine underfoot, and five or so others.

## The Fall of Constantinipple

The last constructions to be built at Constantinipple were Dark's raid farm and a large tower by LeadOfFlame (later discovered to be an insider), and a gunpowder farm perimeter.

On July 27, 2022, Kheidge, jokingly referred to in faction chats as an insider, made a 'mistake' that would kill the now-six-month-old megabase. An abnormal restart caused conflict between plugins on both the main and queue nodes. One result of this was that the server's tablist was heavily distorted. Being the genius that he was, Kheidge screenshotted the anomaly, along with a large section of stone from Constantinipple's mountain, and posted it to Purity's public Discord server. This immediately found its way to several people, one of which was RobertDonald, who was one of around seven people on the server publicly known to be able to use random block rotations to determine coordinates from a screenshot.

Given that the blocks in the screenshot were all stone and that Kheidge had not disabled the rotation on his client, the screenshot effectively sealed the fate of Constantinipple. Several Sulphage members immediately tried to damage-control the situation. Melwin and Virkyme began by removing valuable items from the base as well as ender-pearl stasis chambers, and Villhume verified that RobertDonald was able to find the coordinates from the screenshot through the use of his own block-rotation software.

Members packed up and scattered in all directions. Melwin returned to his old base, Dark and Diehard permanently moved to SHAI base, AlphaTesting and Taurt became completely inactive, while Virkyme, Villhume, ATG and Kheidge were waiting at the now-defunct megabase. In the coming weeks, several smaller important structures were looted and destroyed by remaining members, such as Villhume's Hallowed Hall of Heads, and stashes and remaining pearl rooms. As expected, the base was visited by RobertDonald on 18th August, who spawned 11 withers and placed like a single lava bucked on top of the Mountain, claiming that "it was already a lavacast", despite not containing a single block of cobblestone and having a much more natural shape than any lavacast.

You can see the Constantinipple base ruins in this video by Melwin (at 7:48).

Between Const and the next base, Blogils was added as a Sulphage member.

## Somnium City

### Construction

A new location for a base was chosen on 27th August. Everything was less impressive here, as nothing could compare to Const island. The main area consisted of two small mushroom islands without any big caves beneath them surrounded by a massive ocean.

Melwin arrived at SoCi on 5th September and started to terraform the area once again, however he was burned out from this task, and mostly limited himself to moss-ifying the first island. He also built few random structures and a bridge between two islands, called the "Bridge of Insomnia", inspired by this real-world bridge. A triple cave spider spawner was discovered beneath the island, which would be turned by ATG into a simple string farm.

Kheidge started construction on a house, Blogils started building a trading hall, but at the end of September they were already getting inactive. A small event that took place at SoCi on 27th September involved ATG being cornered by a Warden and asking Melwin for help. Melwin came to the area and killed his first ever Warden, and then the two looted the nearby ancient city, also Melwin's first one.

From October, only ATG was really doing anything at Somnium City. Being a bit too overconfident, he stashed much of his valuables in chests in the base. Also, SpaceBreakdown was invited to the faction on 5th of November.

### The Sack of Somnium City

On 17th of December, Melwin was working on a Fight Club event, wearing his backup diamond set with Curse of Vanishing - because he was scared someone is going to kill him at that event. Suddenly, he got teleported and crystalled in a matter of seconds. After few minutes of confusion, he thought this could be a pearl in a Zetania base, but he then realized it was actually a pearl at Somnium City.

It turned out that LeadOfFlame was an alt of Neergwey, a known paedophile from the RNSNS faction. Neergwey gave the coords to Awfulfern, who came to SoCi, pearl-trapped Melwin and destroyed the base. There wasn't even much to grief due to the group's previous inactivity, but ATG's valuables were stolen by Awfulfern, who then proceeded to brag in chat how he "ez-d" Sulphage.

However, with many members in deep inactivity, the faction's second grief wasn't nearly as shocking as its first. Villhume had effectively severed public ties with both Purity and Sulphage to spend time completing non-Minecraft projects, Melwin largely spent time on other ventures, such as his Mob Zoo, Virkyme and Kheidge were gaining fascinating chemistry knowledge in real life, and most other members were living at other bases if active at all. While most Sulphage members don't consider the faction completely dead, Purity activity has long-since slowed.

## Gallery

### Random images from Const and SoCi

Early construction of Const's mountain shellThe framework of the gold farm constructed by MelwinThe National Park of Moosh IslandThe wall of no-name heads at the bottom of Const (not Villhume's Hall)Early screenshot of the inside of the mountainDieHardNinja's cottage in ConstEarly screenshot of the main SoCi islandA triple spawner located under SoCi by ATG
### People

Villhume AFK in a hole while Melwin maps the Const waterfall/ravineMelwin spies on DarkSoulNinja while AFKATG's initial villager breeder at ConstMinecraft mirroring real life as Virkyme works for money while surrounded by chicksATG and Melwin explore the ancient city below SoCi