All About Our Minecraft Server
Hey all! Gunny here! That’s right, we have a Minecraft server now, set to launch Saturday, June 18th. I’ll announce its launch on our Discord server, so stay tuned for that! For full details, please visit our Minecraft webpage. It highlights everything you need to know as a player, and then some. This news post, meanwhile, is dedicated to those who wish to know more about the server and its development. Buckle up because this is a long rambly rant full of my opinions and takes on Minecraft as both a game and community pillar. Let the words begin!
I used to run a gaming clan in my teen years, leading into early adulthood. We hosted a few dozen game servers consisting of Gmod, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike, Minecraft, and more. Unfortunately I had to disband the group due to IRL issues taking priority at the time, but my love of games as a way to foster community never left.
Fast forward several years and I find myself volunteering as a community manager once more, this time for webcomics. Since my career of community management began as a game server admin, it felt natural to consider resuming that work for the webcomic communities I’ve helped to establish. Three years ago, in the summer of 2019 and long before Foxglove Comics was even a concept, I decided to invest my attention in Minecraft, due to its focus on creativity, community, long-form gameplay, and its sandbox nature. Though it wasn't until 7 months ago, winter of 2021, that I committed to it fully, this server was three whole years in the making.
Why Minecraft?
As far as building a community of webcomics readers goes, a Minecraft server isn’t exactly top priority, so why make one? What drove me to spend 3 long years periodically working on this? Honestly, the answer is quite simple: I wanted to! I want to spend more time with our community and share my passion for Minecraft with everyone. There are incredible benefits to having a shared space of creativity where everyone can collaborate and play together.
It is my hope that this Minecraft server will become a pillar of our community, much like our Discord server. Minecraft may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but neither is being social on Discord or attending our streams! Everyone is unique in where they choose to invest their time and energy, so why not offer some variety for people to sink their teeth into? So okay, yes, I simply wanted to play Minecraft with everyone and got a bit carried away. Honestly, the benefits it brings to our community just motivated me further.
Vanilla with Sprinkles
Of course, with all that time, I didn’t simply spin up a server and call it done. That would have taken no more than 10 minutes, tops! Most of that time was spent exploring every possible format, technology, and platform available to us before settling on what would work best given our limited time, resources, and desire for simplicity. We considered vanilla, mod packs, survival, creative, adventure, plots, minigames, factions, instances, economy, Paper, Spigot, Fabric, Sponge, Java, Bedrock, and so, so much more. The world of Minecraft server hosting is vast (to a fault, really).
After much consideration, I settled on a vanilla survival world in Java edition using Fabric, with minimal aesthetic and quality-of-life additions that have zero impact on vanilla gameplay. Vanilla was chosen to reduce gatekeeping, as well as to keep things simple and consistent. Survival was chosen to facilitate long-form gameplay, foster collaboration, and bring out the most the game has to offer. Java was a simple choice really, all things considered, with Fabric allowing us to maintain vanilla mechanics while also providing a healthy ecosystem of essential mods.
That said, the presence of Fabric might be confusing, since I said we're hosting a vanilla world. Think of it this way: not all mods change the game. In fact, with the way we're using our mods, none of them change the gameplay one bit. Server side, we use mods to vastly improve server performance, provide moderation and utility tools, perform automated backups, and allow scripting. It may not be a true vanilla server, but it's true vanilla gameplay and content -- just with sprinkles! It's the same kind of benefits as we get from having our Discord bots.
Though we have a section of recommended mods on our Minecraft webpage, they're all optional. You’ll be able to play with an unmodded client just fine, which I consider vital. That said, we do highly encourage you to use Simple Voice Chat, which adds proximity voice chat to the game! It adds so much to survival multiplayer.
I mentioned scripting support, which we use to complement vanilla gameplay and provide quality of life utilities. I’ve programmed many things for us, including a functional post office, AFK detection, and the ability to mute mobs using nametags. It also enables us to perform repairs and investigate issues wherever they may crop up. Scripting support is our tool box and it makes running the server so much easier! Maybe the coolest and most extensive tool I developed is a fully featured bridge connecting the Minecraft server chat to the #minecraft channel in our Discord server. Huge thanks to the developer of Discarpet, replaceitem, for their continued support in making this a reality. I consider this bridge to be vital and can’t wait to see it in action!
But wait, there’s more! We also have a healthy selection of datapacks to further bolster your survival gameplay. The goal here is to provide more tools for creativity and utilities to help you play. None of these offer an inherent advantage nor alter vanilla mechanics, and we very carefully curated these with that in mind. The philosophy behind our server is to make it as simple and broadly appealing as possible. I guarantee that we won't drastically alter any of the game's mechanics without significant reason.
All that said, we have elected to make some minor tweaks to the game’s mechanics. To reduce unintentional griefing, we have disabled fire spread and enderman block interaction. This means you can build without the fear of losing your work to a fire or endermen dissolving the landscape around you. We consider these to have no benefit and are comfortable with disabling them. We’ve also set the sleeping requirement to just one person. Let’s be honest, it is far easier to ask people to not sleep than to ask everyone to sleep the night away. Funnily enough, these modifications were made using Minecraft’s own utilities, and no mods were used.
I skimmed over many things here, especially in covering everything we’ve added to the server. There is just so much to talk about! Don’t worry, everything is laid out and documented on our Minecraft webpage, so give that page a read to learn all about our setup and what is made available to you. This news post will age poorly over the years, but that webpage will be kept up to date.
Building Spawn Island
Everything outlined so far has been building the foundation with administrative and programming work: things I’ve done mostly on my own, with generous assistance from YotaXP and feedback from my fellow Foxglove creators. You could take everything I’ve done and spin up countless server instances with it. Technically, I could have stopped there and launched the server months ago with a fresh new world. Instead, I wanted to invest time into mitigating some common problems with novel creative solutions. I wouldn’t be concerned if this were a small private server amongst close friends, but our server is a public one, albeit one that requires being a member of our Discord.
This is where we get into the technical side of Minecraft and how it affects a server and its playerbase over time. These are issues that arise from the entropy of a shared public space in combination with how Minecraft’s core gameplay and world loading mechanics work. It’s a perfect storm that can harm or even kill off a survival multiplayer world if not mitigated early on.
It all boils down to the spawn chunks: the permanently loaded 23x23 chunk (368x368 block) center region of the world where players spawn in when they first join. It’s also where players end up if they lack a respawn point when they die or leave the End dimension. The game naturally funnels players to this location, making it prime real estate for setting up base. If left unmanaged, this results in cramped spaces where resources run dry amongst mostly abandoned bases since not everyone sticks around long term. Couple this with the fact that this area never unloads and now every single player whose base is in the spawn chunks is responsible for server performance, even if they're not online! Player distribution is necessary to keep the server performant and to prevent a ghost town effect where spawn is filled with abandoned crowded bases. To put it bluntly, the spawn chunks need to be kept off-limits!
This doesn’t apply to just players, but also naturally spawning mobs. If the spawn chunks are left unconditioned, then mob spawn rates plummet elsewhere, making the game more difficult to play. This is due to mob caps, the mechanic by which the game maintains a balanced amount of mobs at all times. Thankfully there is an easy fix for the mob cap issue: mob spawns can be disabled by modifying the biome of the spawn chunks to Mushroom Fields and/or Deep Dark. The real problem is handling players.
A simple solution is to bar off the spawn chunks using Minecraft’s built-in spawn protection mechanism. This prevents players from modifying or interacting with the world around spawn, which sounds perfect, but in reality is quite troublesome. It turns spawn into a lifeless frozen region of time and space, which is rather dull and off-putting. Furthermore, players would be unable to transport entities from the End dimension to the overworld. A large forbidden landscape feels oppressive, especially for an area you frequently travel through. This solution introduces more problems than it solves -- problems that only novel creative solutions can fix. This is where most of the work took place for the past 7 months.
It all started with finding the perfect seed, the number that drives world generation. We used ChunkBase in tandem with a custom script written by YotaXP to scan literally tens of thousands of seeds for the perfect spawn. My goal was to find an island at the world’s origin (also known as 0,0) that was near enough to land to not be cumbersome for traveling. A natural moat for spawn would make it easy for players to identify the perimeter. Yota, Scott, and I had our CPUs pegged to 100% for nearly a week before finding the perfect seed. Naturally we made it a competition. I won. :)
With seed in tow, I prepped the server for building and enlisted the help of not only my fellow Foxglove creators, but also our wonderful community affiliates. Together we formed a build team 11 strong and spent half a year crafting Spawn Island, our gift to you. The goal was to populate spawn with humble builds that bring it to life and act as inspiration. Something that players could look forward to exploring and studying from. Something to showcase how far we can take this world if we work together and collaborate. Despite that aim, I was not ready for the overwhelming results and everyone's work blew me away! Just look at the before and after shot!
There is simply far too much to discuss here. Everyone went so far above and beyond that it would be a shame to spoil their hard work here. So come visit Spawn Island once the server launches and see its beauty for yourself!
I was so inspired by their hard work that I programmed a unique solution to the spawn protection problem. Instead of denying all forms of world interaction, I've set the spawn chunks to put you into adventure mode. This allows you to interact with doors, levers, buttons, everything, all while protecting spawn from being modified and lived in! This allowed our build team to create freely while also achieving the goal of making spawn uninhabitable. Don’t worry, you can still tunnel beneath spawn, but this is an experimental privilege and we will revoke it if it's abused. The issue of entities traveling to the overworld from the End dimension was also solved with scripting. They are moved outside of spawn to 216 -216 instead of appearing at 0 0, allowing players to transport entities from the End to anywhere they desire.
I wish to thank our wonderful build team for their stellar work. As creative director, I could not be more proud of their accomplishments. It was a joy to help each and every one of them do their best and bring out what can only be described as ours. Thank you Apsis, Ariya Eretsee, Caytlin Vilbrandt, Izzy Squeakzy, Metajoker, Scott Fraser, Stick Lordy, T.Applesmith, YotaXP, and Zach Seligson (weaklettuce).
In Conclusion…
That was a lot to read. Thank you so much for making it to the end! It’s hard to summarize 3 years of work, especially with so many people involved. Just think -- I still had to restrain myself from writing more! So much has gone into making this server. After all the hard work and voxelated sweat and tears, I can’t wait to play with you all!
See you in Minecraft!
~ Gunny Waffle