Players Compress Minecraft’s Oldest Anarchy Server to 15 TB: A Custom .zvcr Format Used by 28 Bots to Map More Than 1 Million Chunks
Saving 80 TB of Digital Chaos as 15 TB of Compressed Data
Despite the current shortage of storage devices, a brave team of Minecraft players has successfully completed a full survey of 2b2t—widely recognized as one of the oldest and most notorious Minecraft servers—and released the results as 15 TB of highly compressed data. Once decompressed, the data can reconstruct a complete world save exceeding 80 TB in size. To achieve this, the team even developed a custom compression format specifically for the project.
The 2b2tplace preservation project began in 2024 and was completed in April 2026 after 22 months of intensive work. The project team used 28 bot accounts, having them continuously fly across the vast 2b2t world while accurately recording every chunk. The scale of 2b2t is truly staggering: it spans more than 1 million chunks and includes Minecraft’s three main dimensions—the Overworld, the Nether, and the End.
The 2b2t server’s data exceeds 80 TB in size. Even if the team had begun its efforts before the recent storage shortage, an enormous amount of storage would still have been required. Preserving the complete 2b2t server would require at least eight 8 TB M.2 solid-state drives (M.2 SSDs), or five 16 TB SATA solid-state drives (SATA SSDs). Using traditional storage solutions would still require three mechanical hard drives with capacities as high as 36 TB each. We estimate that the team likely spent several thousand dollars on storage devices alone; priority queue purchases and server rental fees were also significant expenses. According to the project’s GitHub page, those latter two costs alone exceeded $3,000.
If you are not a dedicated Minecraft player, it may be helpful to first understand what 2b2t is. The name is short for “2builders2tools,” and it refers to a Minecraft server launched in 2010 that is known for its anarchy. Unlike ordinary servers, 2b2t has no rules, no administrators overseeing player activity, and no world resets, allowing players to act almost entirely as they please. Over the years, continuous game-version updates have dramatically transformed the server’s landscape. For this reason, many players and enthusiasts—including crayne, Fuch, mahan, and Steve3—began attempting to preserve 2b2t as it originally looked, so that it would not eventually lose its distinctive character entirely.
Preserving or sharing 80 TB of data is already an insane undertaking, especially at a time when storage devices are in limited supply and prices remain high. A world as large as 2b2t can easily cause file sizes to balloon to levels that are difficult to handle in practice. The archival team promised as early as April that it would provide the world save in a compressed format; however, efficiently compressing such a massive amount of data soon became a new challenge. To address this, the team designed a custom file-compression format specifically for the project and named it .zvcr, or “Zstd-compressed Version Controlled Regions.”
Minecraft servers commonly use the .mca file format, also known as Minecraft Anvil. This format works well for single-player worlds and small servers. However, unlike .mca, which typically uses Zlib or Gzip compression, .zvcr uses the Zstd algorithm, also known as Zstandard. According to the project team, Zstd outperforms Zlib and Gzip in compression speed, decompression speed, and final file size. As a result, the team was able to compress the entire project to 15 TB, saving up to 81.25% of the required storage space. In other words, the compressed archive can now be stored on just two or one of the M.2 SSDs or SATA SSDs that would previously have required eight 8 TB M.2 SSDs or five 16 TB SATA SSDs, respectively. Actually decompressing the archive, however, is another matter.
The 2b2t server is still online, and Minecraft players can continue to join it and experience its daily chaos and disorder. However, many long-time players believe that the server has gradually drifted away from its original anarchist foundations. This ongoing transformation is precisely what motivated the creation of the 2b2tplace preservation project.
