Hello people of StrictlyVanilla,

I am here today to tell my story of starting on StrictlyVanilla and how it all came to a swift ending because of a wack admin giving me a bogus ban.

My journey begins with me traveling the main road out of spawn. I traveled far enough out to find myself some wood and get some very basic stone tools together. I managed to find about 5 iron in a cave and quickly smelted 3 pieces to get myself a nice new iron pickaxe in the hopes I someday find some diamonds, little did I know the only diamonds I find were in reality liemonds.

After getting out to about 2k on the main road, a player had said in chat they're promising to give newer players iron starter gear at spawn. I told him to wait there and that I'd be there as soon as I could. I then trekked back to spawn and this older player had given me and another fellow noob enough iron each to make a set of iron armor, tools, with still some iron leftover. This was awesome.

I then left spawn for the second time and traveled by portal this time, x8 the speed of the overworld is nice despite it being pretty dangerous out there. After traveling a fairly short distance I found a portal and went through it which led into an extremely crammed room with a ladder that led up to a bungalo of a house. I decided to make this my temporary base of operations until I managed to get some more equiptment for myself. I started by expanding the room directly out of the portal by two blocks on either side and throwing down some furnaces and a crafting table. The area in red in the image below was the original size of the room:

Here is the expanded area from another angle, in this image the areas in red are the newly mined areas by me:

After expanding that upper room I thought yanno what'd be cool? A mineshaft that goes through the nether portal, so I began expanding the opposite side of the portal and quickly discovered a small chest just in the floor. Now this seemed odd to me, it was completely encased in stone so whoever hid it must've put in the effort of using stone rather than something more easily obtainable like cobblestone or dirt to cover it. I opened it and discovered a single diamond. Now being a man of da craft I immediately noticed this wasn't any old diamond, it had some NBT tags. This wasn't any normal diamond we had back home, but of course my immedate reaction was to grab it in hopes I found a second later. After grabbing it, it instantly disappeared and I was left sad and diamondless. So I powered on and decided in I wanted diamonds I'd need to go down, and down I went. 

I dug down and after a few dozen blocks down I landed into a mineshaft full of mobs. But lucky me there was coal and iron around in here. I didn't stick around too long, I needed to get a shield because skeletons were being pests. After coming back up to the surface and getting my iron smelting up I began to expand the back side of the portal to have the walls of the room become flush with the main room, my goal was to get little fence gates on either side. I started by making the right side flush as seen in the image below:

After getting the right side flush I began digging into the left side of the wall around the portal, and badda bing badda boom, there's three chests all packed into the wall next to each other. I peak inside them and see the liemonds, now this time I know better than to just yoink them. So for the first two chests I break them instead of just snagging the diamonds. Something in my monkey-brain hoped breaking the chests would maybe make it so I could get the diamonds. I announced in chat "I think this is a bad idea" "But I'm gonna go for it" before picking up two of the diamonds and them swiftly disappearing from my inventory. I then knew better than to pick up the last diamond so I got a hopper to preserve it incase I could think of a way to wipe the NBT data off this diamond so I could hopefully actually use it.

After this I quickly asked in chat if staff were on to maybe help me use this last diamond of mine. I was met with an instant ban. I then joined onto my friends account to fight for my right to diamonds, after trying to argue to the admin online that it's not my fault these chests are just randomly thrown into the walls of this room I was told it's not up for discussion if I was xraying or not and that if I want to have any chance at being unbanned I must file an appeal on the website. I argued this was unfair and that if he just *looked* he could see that I wasn't xraying or cheating in anyway but he threatened to ban me on that account as well. He did say he was the one who placed the chests there so I'm sure he can back up the locations of the chests. 

So here I am, after having to jump through god knows how many loopholes of making a forums account, gathering evidence of why this ban is bogus, having my first post wiped since the site doesn't auto-save posts or warn you you're about to lose your post-so-far if you reload the page, all to just write an appeal for people who didn't even deal the punishment dealt, just for the chance to be unbanned. This is a royal pain.

I'm aware since this is vanilla there are likely no form of block-logging so everything I say here is pure heresay. All I have is my word vs whatever the admin online says. So I easily could've just done all of this for literally nothing.

That's it for my story of my experience on StrictlyVanilla.

Thank you and goodnight,

- Hallucinates

Your appeal and the evidence has been reviewed by our admin team and we have decided to overturn your ban.
Welcome back to Strictly Vanilla

This post has been removed by its owner.

Thank you, I hope you enjoyed my encapsulating story.

Wow, that was genuinly well written and clear, nice :)

Welcome to SV, look forward to seeing you around

Congratulations. It's rare to get a ban appealed.

yea its a miracle this server has any players left standing 

Redacted by Admin

-Faring