Bizarre Anomalies

## Overview

The Armies server has plugins and mechanics that do not follow vanilla minecraft and the server is on 1.12.2, which leads to strange occurrences happening in the world. The server gamerule randomtickspeed is 20, which is 7 times faster than vanilla Minecraft. This causes mob spawning to occur quicker, faster crop growth, faster pigmen spawning from nether portals and more frequent lightning. Plugins such as mobstacking and duels are not fool proof, and they have produced strange mobs and allowed for illegal items to be produced. Moreover, the traps and trolls plugins is poorly coded which led to multiple exploits associated with it being found and its later removal from the server.

## Lightning

### **Skeleton Horses**

Lightning has a 1/100,000 chance of striking per tick, and Minecraft ticks at 20 TPS. This chance of striking is governed by gamerule randomtickspeed, which on Legacy Armies is 20, or 7 times faster than vanilla Minecraft which has a default of 3. Lightning will strike by selecting an entity to strike and will strike within a 3x3 area of that entity during a thunderstorm in a randomly loaded chunk. Because tickspeed is increased on armies, lightning strikes were more frequent and this lead to the creation of an abnormally high number of skeleton horses throughout the map.

### **Lightning Triangulation**

Lightning is a very common occurrence on Armies due to the server being set in the Plains biome and the increased randomtickspeed. Lightning has a range of 100,000 radius from the source of the strike, and the server itself is 100k x 100k, which means that all bases on the map can be triangulated with lightning if entities are at the surface of the base there is no block above them. Lightning triangulation involves positioning three alt accounts across different corners of the map to gauge the relative direction of a base from the direction of the sound. Hacked clients can be used to calculate exact coordinates using this method, but it can also be done manually by simply using the relative direction as a starting point for base hunting. Moreover, due to the Bloodmoon plugin, lightning strikes at the position of a player when they die, destroying their items. This also increased the total number of lightning strikes that occurred on the server due to player death. This meant individuals could tactically use the Bloodmoon as an opportunity to triangulate the bases of desired players if an individual had the technical prowess to do so.

This method was used by n0body to find TheIrishMongol's base and ComradeGlitter and Hitmonkey's mega base and other Legacy bases, which led to outcry to patch the exploit. Seraphim was initially uninclined to patch the issue as he perceived the exploit as a feature, and that individuals could easily spoof lightning coordinates by using alt accounts. Later Anptz, a high ranking admin convinced Seraphim that the method would be overpowered, and it would be challenging to confirm whether someone was triangulating legitimately or hacking. Lightning was disabled using worldguard commands thereafter. At the admin team's request, n0body agreed not to leak the coordinates or raid bases derived by using the method.

## Mob Stacking

### **Renamed Mobs**

During the first month of the server, the admins used a mob stacking plugin to limit the resource strain that mob farms were placing on the server and to offer convenience to players. Initially the server used a legacy version of StackMob, which had worked well on Armiesnet. However, there were unanticipated issues that made it so that stacked mobs could not breed with themselves and villagers would also stack, making it impossible to trade with specific villagers. After the plugin was removed, stacked mobs were instead replaced with a single mob that was renamed with a long entity value. This meant that mobs from that period of time in the server, even hostile mobs, would not despawn since they had been renamed. Most players disregarded these mobs and killed them, but the few that did survive were later found. On one occasion, Raigekii found a renamed creeper whilst escaping spawn to base, and a screenshot of it was taken and put in the Legacy Armies discord (TO BE INCLUDED).

### **The Immortal Iron Golem**

After the StackMob plugin was discontinued, the server instead opted to use the premium plugin WildStacker, which worked much better and was very lightweight. It fixed most of the aforementioned issues and was otherwise bug free. However, one day PlutoThe along with TheIrishMongol noticed that, while separating a stack of iron golems, the last iron golem could not be killed. Subsequent testing revealed the iron golem was immortal, and the use of sharpness 1000 swords, command block commands and essentials commands failed to kill it. In singleplayer, if a player keeps themselves alive whilst falling in the void by using commands, they will fall indefinitely until the client crash. Due to confusion over what would happen if the iron golem were to hypothetically fall in the void on the server, the admins agreed to lock away the iron golem to prevent a potential exploit that could kill the server. The iron golem was moved to the world border and locked up in a bedrock and world-guard protected region. During the closing of the server in March, 2021, Antpz and those attending revisited the golem and managed to kill it, further adding a level of mystery to the cause of the golem's immortality.

## Trap and Trolls Exploits

### **Background**

The Trap and Trolls plugin is a simple plugin designed for 1.12.2 that adds a Trap Shop that can be accessed using /trapshop. It was added in the second week of the server to add more resource sinks and complexify PVP by adding simple traps that are triggered when an individual walks over placed string. Due to the way this plugin was coded, numerous exploits were possible such as infinite experience, deleting bedrock, infinite money and reverting mob spawners to pig spawners as well as overpowered TNT. Certain traps such as the Fire trap did not work at all, and did no tangible damage. Overall, many traps were removed and eventually the plugin was as well.

### **Infinite Experience Exploit**

When placed traps were disarmed by breaking the placed string, they dropped string and some experience. However, the dropped string could be placed and broken again to drop more experience. This exploit was discovered by DeathDraco during his testing, and he could easily place break a single piece of string very quickly and used it to gain 30 levels in a short period of time. To remedy the issue, FalseCode, the volunteer developer at the time, was asked to remove the experience drop from the plugin as the config file did not allow the admins to do so.

### **Infinite Money Exploit**

The diamond troll trap when triggered will spawn a fake diamond that you cannot pick up. However, Vesta6000 later discovered it was possible to place a hopper underneath the fake diamond, and a continuous flow of diamonds would be transferred to the chest by the hopper. Vesta used this exploit to make a million dollars in a few minutes by selling the diamonds and, after getting a screenshot, reported the exploit to the admins and had his illicit gains "wiped".

### **Bedrock Deletion Exploit**

The cage trap when triggered will spawn a obsidian cage that lasts for about 30 seconds. However, due to the nature of the plugin spawning in blocks it would later delete, this allowed for individuals to use the trap to destroy blocks the blocks of the cage overlapped with. This led to some dumb incidents where basemates of Antpz' compound accidentally griefed parts of the base when fooling around with traps. Moreover, it also had the potential to permanently delete bedrock, which DeathDraco later discovered and reported to the admins. Seraphim\_Here was unconcerned with the power of this exploit and allowed the cage trap to remain in the shop. DeathDraco would later use the exploit as part of his "gamer shack" void trap and experimented with potentially deleting the bedrock platform in the End. When Antpz took ownership of the server, he later decided to remove the trap due to the overpowered nature of void kill traps.

### **Spawner Reversion Exploit**

n0body also experimented with the cage trap and discovered it was possible to use it to revert blaze spawners in the nether to pig spawners.

### **Overpowered TNT Exploit**

The TNT trap spawns an ignited TNT entity when triggered, and the trap was only $750 in the shop, making it far cheaper than normal TNT which requires one to purchase 16 sand from the shop for $1000 and farm for gunpowder. This was later used by DeathDraco during the Thirty-Minute War to rapidly grief John\_Wicke's farming compound, as he would purchase them for far cheaper than the cost of TNT and run while placing the traps in front of him. This would allow him to continuously set off TNT without there being a chance to stop the ignition and carnage unless the player was killed.

### **Duels Exploit**

The Duels Exploit was discovered by the Legacy group and allies from Imperials, in late August to early September but ultimately was abused by TheIrishMongol the most. This exploit was first found out about when Seraphim\_Here added a sitting plugin which allowed people to sit on other people's head and duel others to not be teleported but still be on the person head with the gear and weapons from duels. This plugin was removed after a couple of days but would be added a second time.

## Boatfly exploit

This exploit was used by pepe\_god to destroy item frames in item shop to get items from them. This exploit worked becouse server anticheat wouldn't work for the first 5 second that you joined the server wich allowed boatfly to be use and later to destroy item frames in in iteam shop. Pepe\_god was later banned from the server for this becouse his "friend" snitched on him to antpz.