History of the Helmia Rebuilt Project

Hi, this is Alpha. This page here is a little something different. I am deliberately making this an article written in **first-person**, since I am telling a (very very) personal story of how this all came to be. I hope you enjoy reading.

## History

### Before Helmia Rebuilt

#### Ragnarok

In my head, this idea has been brewing up for YEARS. It wasn't directly connected to Helmia, since I didn't know Stoneworks at the time, but I was always aiming to make a playable realistic medieval RPG world in Minecraft, because in Minecraft you have the options to do whatever you want and some slight limitations that are fun to work with or work around. A friend and I started work on such a project we called "Ragnarok" in December 2018. I made a (from my now more experienced viewpoint pretty shitty) WorldPainter map, uploaded it on Aternos and we started building in 1.12.2. The whole project's lore was basically 99% The Witcher 3. My friend worked on "The Northern Realms" while I did random stuff in the world like hamlets, castles, and smaller towns, and later on Nilfgaard. I guess this is the definition of "cringy things I did as a child" but I look back fondly upon those years. My main motivation was creating an amazing landscape and a cool atmosphere. Later on, the project started dying out, obviously. Our ambitions were way too high, the map was like 2% covered in stuff we built after a year of active building, and we were losing motivation. During that time the idea of a quest system and trading came up. I attempted making something from my honestly limited arensal of development options - commands. It was a mess. I gave up on that idea and the whole project sort of died out, also because Aternos bugged out and wouldn't let us join the server anymore.

I later revisited that project in March 2021, making an overhauled map, since I had a lot more knowledge now. It was pretty much a solo thing though so I realised how futile any attmept of finishing this was. I ended up making a nice looking city center and learned a lot on city planning.

But the will to make a working project like this was still there. Quests, trading, landscape; the ideas were all there, but I was lacking the environment and the people to pull it off. I was yearning for any environment like this in general. That's when I joined Stoneworks in July 2021.

#### Stoneworks Era

I spent two years building myself and Daelyria up (and falling plenty of times - istg this server...) and absolutely falling in love with the concept and lore of it. Originally, I tried to bring this aesthetic heaven and atmosphere to Helmia. That could be in the form of events, amazing builds, unique lore, or just improving the country in various ways. However I came to notice, along with others, that that wasn't going to be achievable. Constant political turmoil kept us from relaxing, and if we relaxed too much, the entire workforce would go into sleepy mode. Nobody wanted to help work on things, there was no will (no offense to the Daelyrians, I love you all very much and always will). PLUS WE WERE IN SURVIVAL MODE WHICH MADE IT EVEN MORE PAINFUL. However, I managed to bring small things I have dreamt of to Stoneworks. Mainly in the form of the *Helmia Custom Textures* resourcepack I made. Started with custom weapons, over foods and armour, to a whole fucking card game. This badboy really taught me a lot about graphic design and vanilla "modding". Not gonna lie, seeing so many people happy and as much in love with the environment I created as I was... it made me feel fulfilled and a little proud. I had created a small heaven we all felt happy in. This was the peak of Daelyrian community.

This is pretty much the last relevant bit from my time on Stoneworks, anyone who knows how my time on Rathnir was in late 2022 / early 2023 knows exactly why :,)

### The Rebirth

On March 1st 2023 (during a little emotional low) me and Unburnt were chatting about some of the cool lore things we came up with when he dropped a line that would cause a renaissance in my mind, as if you would reopen a dusty vault full of golden ideas:

*"lets just make a Daelyria custom server lmfao [...] with Spoken's lore" -Unburnt*

*"Imagine Frostarch but larger" -Unburnt*

We started dreaming of things and ideas we had somehow thought of in another context already, and smashed em all together, and it started to resemble exactly what I wanted from all those projects years ago, but it didn't cross my mind yet. Unburnt started work on a vague map of Helmia (10k x 10k) on WorldPainter the same evening, and finished the next day, which is when I took over and made all the terrain for it, while he started building Daelerya city. The tempo we were working with was INSANE. Just two weeks later we finished and went on a small journey through the continent by horse in survival - just for the feeling. At the time, the goal was to just make a cool looking replica of Helmia on a larger scale so towns would look nicer (Looking at Duskopion and Frostarch being 25 blocks apart).

Spoken was working on a separate project on his own for a while at that time called the Daelyria Project. Basically, an extremely well thought-out lore expansion of a realistic Helmian society across our history. From wars of conquest, small rebellions that historically never happened to hundreds of small noble houses and the Blackfyre lineage never being broken. (Honestly, thank you Spoken for being you and being the best lore writer I have come across <3) We sort of teamed up our projects and we started to use DP lore for Helmia Rebuilt which was fitting perfectly.

By the way, if you're in game, the first place we (who am I kidding, I was alone) built was Myrstone, Duskyon and the adjacent fields. This is where I fell in love with Mud blocks.

### The Expansion

Over time, we got lots of people interested in the project. Though we still had issues with building things. I always was the sole builder of Daelyria. Plain attempted to help once but always got bored, and Minky wasn't creative enough to build on his own and basically just followed orders. None of this is bad mind you, it just means you guys aren't builders lmao. Unburnt was busy with Daelerya, and often when Spoken logged on he just flew around the place I was building in for an hour and logged off. Lmfao. Great. All jokes aside though - they all do their own things. Spoken took care of lore matters and is my reference book when it comes to lore, and Minky has helped with setting up literally ALL the plugins. I was sceptic of plugins anyway, I always played vanilla. Shade also joined later, he also builds, but just like Unburnt mostly on his own secluded area.

In August 2023 "we" finished the Arrya of Frostarch, and I was extremely proud because it looked just what I wanted it to look like - like an actual town. After a short break for Uni, where we actually switched server hosts from me to Minky since I wasn't home (everyone had shit ping thanks to glorious Arab connection), I finally got the support I have been waiting for - O\_Alentejano, JustAtlas and Froggyflippers joined the project. They joined to build their own city, BUUUUT I'M HAPPY FOR EVERY BIT OF HELP OKAY? Froggy by the way was someone whose builds I admired when I joined Stoneworks. The sight of Bern Vralas was the reason I joined Daelyria. Funny now that I look back to it.