By the time this server was popular you would have to travel about 5 thousand block just to find a area uptouched
Actually, you have to do a little investigating, but you can actually find good ores close to the safe zone still with a little looking around. A good secret, is a lot of people travel far thinking they can't find stuff close, leaving all the good close stuff untouched.
On Smp 6 I wish it was like that cause I am trying to rebuild the top layer of the area around the spawn but people continue to tear it down : (
Technically, the current wastelands is a revamp of the old one. Gather around kids, it's story time. Once upon a time, sometime around 640 days ago, the wastelands were really cool. For once, the wilderness looked a lot better than it does currently. But then they went away just like the utopia world, which is now a separate server. Now, the wastelands is still really cool, but now we have the nether wastelands, more outposts, and a cooler spawn area. So the wastelands is not as new as most members think. Ah, those were the days.