Bob

Introduction
The following is a transcription of the events which took place while attempting to troubleshoot a failing Minecraft server. It is being uploaded to this website because the content is relevant to the site's intended purpose--however, I must note that this story differs from the bulk of what you might find here in creepypastas in that, as I stated, it is a faithful transcription of real-life events. This is not a fabricated work of fiction. With that noted, I'll begin...

Transcription
Some time ago, a friend convinced me to try out Minecraft on the PC. After a little research, I decided to give the game a shot, and I bought the PC version. Always the leader and never the follower, I immediately went about setting up my own server for the two of us using an old Windows XP tower I'd found lying around the house. I don't recall where the tower came from, but it served its purpose effectively, and after going through the many pains involved in getting a Minecraft server up and running, I was successfully able to set up a private server. I knew that no one would be able to access the server without my giving them the external IP address of my network, but I'm a rather precautionary fellow, and decided to use a whitelist for the server. My name and that of my friend's were, of course, the only two entries.

I spent a little time playing by myself, making all sorts of rookie mistakes such as losing my house umpteen times and building a locating tower I couldn't get down from, and gradually got accustomed enough with the game to start constructing things in earnest. I upgraded from a little stone hovel to a floating citadel of doom (quite a leap), which was made all the more magnificent once I swallowed my pride and partook in Creative Mode. I also built a house for my friend to coax him onto the new server--it worked, and for a while, the two of us spent all our free time building anything and everything we could imagine.

All sorts of creations came about from this alliance, but a project which we continuously worked on was a glass tour path running all over our world. It started in a cave system underneath his house, weaving and crawling all throughout, then went up to the surface, around and over all our creations. One day, he told me to come online and check out his latest additions. He had built a mob zoo far out in the desert with an extension of the glass tour path running all the way out to it. In the middle of the path, hovering just above the center of the desert, was a glass enclosure in which he had placed a Villager. Surrounding the enclosure were signs that read, "Say hello to Bob. Bob tried to steal from us. Now he can suffocate forever. DO NOT FEED THE BOB. DO NOT PITY THE BOB." We both found it amusing, so Bob remained there, suspended in his sun-parched glass enclosure as a prelude to the zoo displays.

Twisted as we (admittedly) are, this became a running gag for us. We added signs to the rest of our tour referencing Bob, and started adding his family members elsewhere in our world, all suffering for his "crimes." Most of his siblings were in the zoo, drowning (or already drowned). His uncle was in a monster enclosure, his aunt trapped below a hungry wolf. His mother locked up in the darkest part of the sewers, his father suspended over molten lava, and Grandpa Bob was brought back as a Zombie Villager in a completely brain-free enclosure to starve to undeath. We kept it going as long as we could, drawing our own sadist little amusement from it all. It was just a game, of course. Any logical person knows that.

...Then things started happening.

Some time after our most recent addition to Bob's family line, I logged onto the server and noted some peculiarities. I wasn't online for long before I realized that my character's hand looked off-tint. Upon entering third-person view, I found that, surprisingly, my player skin had somehow changed to that of a Villager. It was shortly after I took note of this that I was inexplicably booted from the server. When I logged back in, I appeared to be in the same place as I was when I was removed, but I was unable to interact with any blocks, and I disconnected again after only a few seconds. I continued trying to log back in, convinced that it was just a temporary glitch in the server program--but now I couldn't log in at all. I was removed from the game immediately, every time.

I checked the server computer's monitor and found an endless string of "bad spawn" errors. Upon doing a little research, I learned that this error occurs when monsters and other mobs wander into sectors of the map that the game doesn't believe exist. The only area I had been in when last I was on was the one in which we always played, though, so this confused me. I managed to resolve the problem long enough to log in once by using an external program to delete all monster spawns in that area of the world.

When I now logged in, I noticed something else peculiar. My citadel was intact, but several of our other creations were missing or half-finished. The one I had been currently working on now existed only as a cross-section--as if it had been sliced in half. Not only that, but the land that I had cleared out to make room for it had returned, so it looked as if the other half had been ruined and buried. I've since reconstructed the thing, so you'll forgive the lack of a screenshot here. I did some mental backtracking and realized that only my oldest creations had survived--it was as if the entire area surrounding our "village" had been thrust back in time, and most of our work had now been undone. I didn't want to believe that this was the case, given the immense amount of time and effort that had gone into all these creations.

I decided that our world had definitely been affected by something, and was determined to find the root of the problem and restore the world to its prior state. Of course, I wasn't sure exactly how to start that--I knew I'd have to research it, but since I had gone through so much effort just to log into the faulty server this one time, I decided to assess the damage before logging out and risking being unable to access it again. As expected, my assumption was correct--everything within a certain radius of the center of our village had been formatted to a previous state in time, while everything outside this radius was unaffected. There was this "cut-off" point, and my current project lay right on the border.

What really struck me, though, was something I found during my exploration of the now-relapsed area... it was an odd structure that neither myself nor my friend had built. Up on a sheer cliff in an Extreme Hills biome, isolated from everything around it, was a cobblestone construct. It was a small, unfinished wall covering an 8x5 or so area that looked like some kind of ruined structure, and mounted beside it was a cross on the peak of the hill, also made of cobblestone.

I questioned my friend about it, and I'm certain from his countenance that he did not build the structure, and was just as confused about it as I. No one else could have accessed our server because of the whitelist, so where did this thing come from? As I expanded my assessment of our losses, I eventually came to the glass tour path leading out to the zoo. Most of the tube was intact, as the desert and zoo were outside the affected region. However, there was something missing: Bob. His enclosure was now empty.

Unsettled, but not deterred, I began to research the cause of all this. I discovered that it was a documented problem in Minecraft: Region corruption, wherein a particular region in the world is no longer able to load properly, and can cause a menagerie of chaotic errors. The game doesn't recognize that the region still exists, monsters wander into this "ghost sector" and cause further corruptions, strings of errors appear in the console and crash the server... In this case, the effect seemed to be the world being thrust back in time.

Normally, however, this sort of corruption has to be triggered by something... like an update to the game conflicting with some mods or extensions running on the server, or some hacker playing a prank. Our server was completely vanilla, using only the supported server console downloadable on the Minecraft website, had no mods at all, and had never been updated. To this day, I'm still clueless as to what actually caused it to go berserk.

Whatever the cause had been, from then on, every time I tried to log into the world, I was immediately removed. It was clear that I wasn't wanted in it. I had to use the previously-mentioned external program to erase all the monster spawns in the area each time I logged in, which became increasingly difficult each time as the corruptions became ever more frequent. I cleared out the mountain of sand and rebuilt the structure I was working on that had been cut in half... twice. Both times, my progress was erased and buried once more.

Up until that point, I had been under the assumption that I would eventually be able to find the source of the problems and recover the world... but as the days went on, that hope grew dimmer and dimmer. Finally, I was forced to come to a decision. I asked for my friend's opinion as the co-founder of our world, and we reluctantly decided: There was no option left for us but to start a new world from scratch, abandoning all of our prior work.

It was a solemn act, removing all the old world's files and placing them in a separate folder to be quarantined. We had sunk untold hours into the creations of that world, and to start it all over from the very beginning was a heavy blow. I still have the folder containing the old world's files on the server computer, set aside, perhaps just for nostalgia's sake. I no longer entertain any hopes of recovering it. Perhaps it was this nostalgia, then, that inspired me to sift through some of the old world's files as I was quarantining them... and while doing so, I found something rather haunting.

There was now a third username listed in the whitelist.txt file: "bob."