Renderman

Disclaimer - ''The following story was originally posted by user Khorde onto the Blockland Forums on February 1st, 2012. I am not the original author of this story, I have only edited it to meet quality standards on the Wiki. ''

I remember back when I used to play Blockland for days on end. I would always play the game-mode "Zombies" or spend time building elaborate castles filled with dungeons and armories. Man, those were the days. I remember trying about several hundred times trying to host a server. The mind of a 13 year-old's were pools of infinite creativity.

Many years later, I came back to Blockland in hopes of rekindling old memories. I saw that many of my old friends had default saves built right into the game! Jetpuff's Towers, Sampapa's fort, Mr. Block's slides and even Vertical Horizon had one. I watched as the Master Server flooded my screen with new servers left and right. Many were role-playing servers and others were miscellaneous free-builds.

One caught my eye though: Pvt. simon's Renderman Hunt. ''Renderman? What's that, A new gamemode or some sort of bot?'', I thought. Curiously, I joined the server. And low and behold being as stupid as I could be, I forgot to look at the player count and realized I'd joined an empty dedicated server. Go figure. I was about to hit escape when all of a sudden I heard building. You know that old glitch, where you can hear players building while you're loading? That was what I thought was happening to me. I won't lie, it freaked me out a bit, but shit like this is always expected in Blockland.

I was expecting to see a bunch of random red blocks strewn throughout the server with items and vehicles, but the server was clean, except for a few buildings here and there. People were probably making small bases and whatnot; The usual sights you get in Blockland servers.

Then I saw that sign. Now, with the implication of events, signs are rarely used on Blockland. As seen in the Screen-cap, the sign said, "GO NOW". The letters weren't all the same color and weren't organized in a line, but I didn't think too much of it. This game is mostly played by 10 year-olds nowadays anyhow. I thought that maybe this sign had to do with the Renderman mini-game. I mean, that was the server name after all. Perhaps this could actually be a cool mini-game to play after all!

So I was just jetting around alone, inspecting builds and searching for other players when I saw VH's "Festung der Schwarzung" build from the Save List. I figured maybe the admin of the server was just too lazy to make a map and had just decided to load it in place.

My gosh, how I always loved this building. As a matter of fact, I remember being on the server when the creator made it! Nostalgia quickly rushed over me, enveloping my heart and stirring up a carefree attitude. Man, oh man. The map's dark sky-box made it easy to see the room with the shimmering, blocky treasures. I crawled right into it and looked around; Same as it used to be: A small room with golden yellow blocks resembling shiny gold complete with a glow effect.

But then I noticed a brick out of place. The creator of the save could be an odd fellow sometimes, but I'm completely sure that this red rounded stud wasn't here before. I stared at it for about half a second before clicking on it. The game suddenly played that "orchhith.wav" sound, (It sounds like the weird achievement-get sound you hear constantly in the tutorial.) except that it played backwards.

After that, I was startled. The sound made me feel uneasy, as if something in the game was going to suddenly lash out at me when it ended. Trying to shake off my sensation of fear, I clicked it over and over and over again for fun. Suddenly out of nowhere, the block just broke. It was destroyed right in front of me, and I didn't even delete it or anything. The only time that this normally happens is if someone uses Control+Z to undo their block. but there was not a single person to be seen elsewhere in the game. I tried to check the Player-List to make sure of this. All I saw was my Username, my Blockland ID, and my score. (Khorde BL_ID 1463 Score 0)

Just after I closed the leaderboard, random blocks on the tower began to glow as if somebody applied the glow effect to random parts. By now, I knew for a fact that bricks didn't just fall apart automatically and make the building light up like the goddamned 4th of July. No, there was definitely something or someone else in the game. I decided to take a few more screen-caps of the server before continuing my search to figure out what the literal hell was going on.

I began to ascended the oddly-built structure in hopes of finding the source of this entire thing. I was feeling very creeped out and unnerved at this point. I attempted to pull myself together. I'm getting scared of a sandbox game for crying out loud, I assured myself.

As I mentioned earlier, I haven't played Blockland in a long time. I didn't know about Trapdoors, and I had to find out the hard way on the server. I walked into one of those dark hallways to find myself somehow transported back to the start of the map. I kept walking around, nothing else in the game but the dark building and I. I began to get this eerie feeling. It's that feeling you get late at night when the lights are off, and when you know that you're surrounded by nothing but thick, black darkness leaving you vulnerable.

I tried climbing up the steps of the tower, which I shortly discovered was a stupid idea. Whoever else was in the game had made them fake-kill bricks that emitted sounds that were similar to the Endless Staircase from Super Mario 64. I didn't feel alone anymore after that. I knew there was someone else in the game. There had to be. Whoever this guy is, he's probably laughing at my attempts to climb the stairs without my jets. What kind of damned fool am I? I typed in the chat: "Hello there :)" After waiting a few seconds, I got a response. The message read: "h e l  l o K hor  de." My screen suddenly froze in place. The chat began to flood with that same message over and over again. My mouse froze up, my keyboard became unresponsive. I couldn't suicide, quit the game, or look around, I could only chat. I replied: "wtf how come I can't move???" Just after I took this screen-cap, that's when my game froze. I'm pretty sure that's the guy. Renderman, huh? Is he what was stalking me through the empty game? I guess he comes to your server and makes a mess of things, constructively. He's a virus. He's been especially a problem for me, really. I've tried installing Blockland again, over and over, but it just doesn't seem to work anymore. I posted a topic in the help section of the Blockland forums, and nobody replied. Is there any way to fix this? Or will my startup screen always look like this?