NerdieBirdieYT

## NerdieBirdie

Virtual Lego Anarchist

Mayors

Spawn Infrastructure Project

NerdieBirdie is a Minecraft content creator primarily focusing on vanilla-esque raiding servers and Let's Plays.

## The Road to Purity

### JustSurvival

Nerdie created his channel under the username RadiantSkies on April 28, 2015. In March of 2016, after a year of experimenting with different types of content, he would join his first vanilla raiding server - JustSurvival - which has since become a land-claim server. After only a month of playing and recording there, Nerdie would leave JustSurvival to focus on other content. However, this introduction to vanilla Minecraft raiding left a lasting impression which would lead to further experiments with the game mode. At the end of 2016, Nerdie rebranded from RadiantSkies to NerdieBirdie, resulting in an IGN change on December 23.

### MineTexas/Constantium

In April of 2017, Nerdie joined the full-anarchy server MineTexas. After making a small amount of content and interacting with the community, he moved to the anarchy server Constantium and joined the group Hybrid. Due to complications within the group as well as various interactions with the community, Nerdie decided to move away from the potentially dangerous and highly toxic full-anarchy community, vowing never to play true anarchy servers again.

### CraftyMynes

Shortly after his departure from pure anarchy servers, Nerdie joined CraftyMynes, an entirely vanilla raiding server with rules against using hacks. On May 22, 2017, Nerdie released the first video of a 50-episode series on the server. On CraftyMynes, Nerdie and his growing faction, NerdNation, would host several events and make allies and enemies alike. Notable enemies included the Oblivion faction and the notorious Team Eye, which put moles into NerdNation and created discord between its members. As time went on, Team Eye would harass NerdNation in a variety of ways, leading to Discord banning the account of its leader. Eventually, distrust among NerdNation members, in addition to declining activity levels after a year on the server, led the group to depart from CraftyMynes with a spawnparty on May 31, 2018.

### Loka

NerdNation, looking for a server where raiding could take place without the drama and frustrations of having to distrust fellow group members, arrived at Loka, a non-vanilla conquest-type server with raiding, on August 1, 2018. NerdNation flourished on Loka, hosting many more events as well as an Alternate Reality Game created by NerdNation member Gminidog. This was a golden era for NerdNation, and Nerdie created 53 episodes on the server. However, dwindling activity and the desire for a more peaceful experience led the group to a Towny server in January of 2020.

### Aztec/VKNG

After a few short months on a Towny server, Nerdie would begin losing interest in continuing the group he had founded. He began playing a vanilla raiding server called Aztec in April of 2020. As school finished and Nerdie got engaged, he did not play Minecraft for a few months. He returned to vanilla raiding on December 1, 2020, with the server VKNG, where he would play until March 8, 2021. During this time, Nerdie would officially disband NerdNation due to his increased business with college and planning for his upcoming wedding. VKNG eventually became inactive, which led Nerdie to move on once again.

### Purity Vanilla

Nerdie logged into Purity for the first time on March 25, 2021 and released his first Purity video on April 10.

## Groups & Bases

### Nuketown

After a discussion with fellow content creator Apersu, Nerdie decided to branch out from his regular Let's Play episodes, resulting in the History of the Nether Highways video. Thesto, another creator, taught Nerdie how to use pie-ray, a technique used to scan nearby chunks for certain block entities and specify their location. Using this method, Nerdie began base-hunting regularly. He found an Aotus member's spawnbase in September. Around this time, Nerdie joined the group Nos Titanite, a small daughter faction of Rakovan. In efforts to trade in-game items for an upgrade from Ultimate to Prestige, Nerdie met and became fast friends with Bujiboy96, who offered to buy him the upgrade for his head and some suggestions for YouTube advice. This friendship would lead Nerdie to seek approval for Bujiboy's membership in Nos Titanite, which was granted. Unfortunately, the group would quickly fall to inactivity, and the base - called Nuketown - would be raided.

### Meridian

Nerdie would ask around for weeks in hopes of finding a group to join, eventually being invited to a small, tight-knit group called Atlas on November 4, 2021. He travelled to Atlas' new recruit base and quickly grew fond of the little group's friendly and active environment. Nerdie gained trust within the group and began to travel to the planned location of Atlas' member base - Meridian. Not wanting to leave tracks via Nether portals, Nerdie would fly over 500,000 blocks in the Overworld alone in order to reach the location; during this trip, he did many rounds of AFK flying and used the time to search for bases with pie-ray. Upon arriving at the base, Nerdie was greeted by a giant sign celebrating hitting 5,000 subscribers, built in secret by Atlas members. would construct his first true build on the server - an amethyst tower. The base quickly grew, adding many technical builds such as an automatic bamboo farm, piglin farm, villager trading halls, and more. On December 5th, less than three weeks after Nerdie's first video featuring Atlas, Meridian was griefed by Pumpkin via terrain exploits.

Massive sign celebrating 5,000 suscribersAmethyst tower at Altas' member base
### Rhino Point

After the grief of Meridian, Nerdie retreated to a base he had previously co-founded with Thesto. This base, named after the rhino-shaped mountain at its center, had begun 2 months prior, but had not been utilized very extensively. Now, forced out of Meridian, Nerdie would take up residence there. Nerdie worked on various spawn projects during the month of December, including a cinematic spawn escape in VR.

### Nova

Although Atlas was still alive, it was not very active shortly after the Meridian grief, and Nerdie began looking for factions to join once again. In late December of 2021, he was invited to a group known as Mayors by Pachie. Before he could arrive at one of the Mayors' bases - Sky Dimension - it was griefied by the Chadlets. Due to this, Mayors would search for and find a new base location during Nerdie's first few weeks in the faction. He arrived at this new base on January 12, 2022, and made a villager zombifier as well as several small crop farms. He also began work on a large tree.

Later, Nerdie would return to spawn to collect the stash of Condanast, a base squatter who he'd befriended after finding his current squat base. Condanast decided to step away from Minecraft on January 15th, 2021. He gave Nerdie coordinates to his stash, and upon arrival, Nerdie realized he did not have a direct teleportation method back to the base, dubbed "Nova," due to a recent patch removing bed stasis. Nerdie merged as much as he could into his existing ender chest contents, but decided to carry almost an inventory's worth of shulker boxes filled with items all the way back to Nova. During the long trek back, the server's chunks were loading very slowly, making the trip very dangerous as Nerdie flew through the Nether. Luckily, he made it with all items intact.

Nerdie started constructing a giant tree, but split time between Nova and World of Atlas. In addition, working on Project Marco kept him away from the base. Nova was inadvertently leaked by another member of Mayors via a screenshot of the base. Working with RobertD, who had a grudge against Nerdie due to Project Marco, Chadlets used the tall grass in the image to locate Nova and grief it. In the confusion after the grief, Pachie banned Nerdie from Mayors to avoid further tensions.

### World of Atlas

Shortly after he first arrived at Nova, Nerdie travelled to the new Atlas base location, where the group had terraformed flat ground, making it easier to record there without fear of terrain exploits being utilized. Unknown to the group, however, a player named Hypnobyte stumbled across the base early in its creation. Hypno decided to save the coordinates for later, and the base expanded rapidly. It eventually featured a giant tree, a gold farm, a raid farm, a small iron farm, and several other builds. Nerdie did not have a chance to build much at this base due to being busy IRL and working on Project Marco. Shortly after Frrost\_Bite - a prominent member of the griefing group Pumpkin - was banned, Hypno gave World of Atlas coordinates to Pumpkin. It is unclear whether this was done in response to Atlas making fun of Frrost's ban, but was in part due to the leader of Atlas "being rude to [Hypno] in the trade hub," according to Hypno. The base was destroyed on April 6, 2022.

### Anagen

After the griefing of World of Atlas, Atlas quickly began construction on another base, dubbed Anagen. Nerdie constructed a large tower with lava flowing from the top, which would serve as his "house" at the base. Additionally, he drained and mined out an ocean monument before constructing a guardian grinder there, using a design by Hallux.

## Projects & Events

### Fight Club IX

The first event that Nerdie attended was Fight Club IX, where he teamed up with Yoavik to finish as the 3rd place team.

### Project Massive Farm

On December 12, 2021, Thesto organized an event called Project Massive Farm and invited Nerdie to help. The aim was to build a farm near spawn that was larger than 2b2t's Valley of Wheat, which spanned approximately 500x500 blocks. While Nerdie himself was not able to help as much as he would have liked due to holiday travelling, many members of the Spawn Infastructure Project (SIP), a famous group responsible for a variety of large-scale projects including the construction of the highways, assisted with the farm over the course of three weeks. Before the farm was griefed, it streched over 2000x2000 blocks, quadrupling the size of the Valley.

### Operation Trees: Regrowth

Nerdie took part in Operation Trees: Regrowth in December of 2021. Along with his wife and Thesto, Nerdie helped to plant 2.3k huge fungi around spawn.

### SIP & Operation Box Drop

After discussions with Thesto and various other players, Nerdie created a Discord server titled Spawn Event Club (SEC), which he planned to use for future operations akin to Operation Trees: Regrowth. However, members of SIP contacted Nerdie regarding the similarities between the Spawn Event Club and SIP. After talking with the leader of SIP, Jamool, SEC was dissolved and both Nerdie and Thesto were made coordinators in SIP, allowing them to create official SIP events.

The first event Nerdie led was Operation Box Drop. This project was done on Dec. 28th, 2021 as a Christmas / New Year's celebration. Around 30 boxes full of goodies for new players were placed in barrels around spawn. These boxes included items such as cooked cod, wool, wood, totems of undying, golden apples, enchanted diamond gear, an SIP event shield, and welcoming books.

### Project Marco (Polo)

*For more informtion on Project Marco, see the article here.*

Inspired by the short list of End Portal coordinates by Melwin22 found on the Purity Tech Archive, Nerdie decided to work towards publicly documenting coordinates of all strongholds across Purity's map. On Februrary 28th, 2022, Project Marco was completed. It was discovered that at least 132 portals exist on Purity, more than a regular world would have. During the project, Nerdie himself publicly documented 65 portals, approximately half of all existing portals known at the time.

Behind the scenes, Nerdie and the participants of Project Marco secretly planned a sub-project called Project Marco: Polo. During Project Marco, all unopened portals had been documented. On March 15, a group of players including NerdieBirdieYT, Thestodabesto, Majorsopa, Fakeblockgame, Melwin, Swag, Coolcash10, MonsieurrrViking, Yurkis, Crsh0vryde, and 123MiningMaster, opened all 16 unopened portals consecutively, causing server-wide sounds with each opened portal. Afterwards, the group entered the End together, respawned the dragon, and killed it before being inevitably ambushed by JoeyC9. The group had planned on ambush, and the project was considered a massive success.

In January 2023, while Nerdie was on a hiatus from the server, the third seed was shared publicly, resulting in a seed reset. In late August, Nerdie would learn about the seed leak and return to Purity to attempt to discover any portals generated with the third seed. Most of these portals would theoretically be generated beneath y=0; the chunks within the area End Portals spawn in were unlikely to have been generated in the third seed, but because the third seed was being used during the 1.18 update, it was possible portals would spawn in the deepslate layers deep underground. Checking both the 1.18 and 1.19 potential portal locations, Nerdie was able to find and document 9 additional portals, bringing his personal total to 71. Combined with the seed 3 portal documented by another player, the total number of portals documented was 142.