Hello Everyone!
I wanted to take a few minutes and give you a community update. TL;DR, don’t panic, the server ain’t going anywhere!
We’re into February now and activity on the Minecraft server has been low. This I think is expected when you consider people coming out of Holidays, having less time for games, dealing with school, work home etc. There’s also an eb and flow when it comes to Minecraft, especially with our niche of survival gameplay.
I wanted to just let the community know that even though the server may be quiet right now, that doesn’t mean that I am giving up on it, or that the server will close down.
When I made this server, one of my core objectives was to have a place that was fun for me and my wife to play, and hopefully bring in some others to play with us. I also wanted to be able to do that at little to no additional cost.
How can we do this? Don’t servers cost money to run? Well, normally yes. However I’ve been lucky enough to have hardware that I’ve built into a home server over the last couple years. It started out as a place to store my personal media and files, and over time I added more applications like home assistant and yes, even Minecraft!
Because of my homelab hobby that already invested the core costs of building out this server, it allows me to spin up the Minecraft Server at no additional cost.
Lucky for us, I already invested in most of those plugins years ago, and with the server being hosted in my homelab, there’s no additional costs above and beyond what I was already paying (I.E. internet).
This allows me to work on the server at my own pace without the stress of having to do constant updates in order to get donations and make users happy enough to give me money. It’s also why our model is a zero monetization one. I do this server completely as a passion project, for fun. Hoping to bring other players into the fold to come along for the journey.
So what does that mean for the future of the Minecraft Server?
Well it’s no secret that the server activity has been low the last few weeks for the reasons listed above. Change in season, players lose interest, players get busy. It happens.
My commitment is this, I plan to keep the server up indefinitely for whoever wants to join us. Whether it’s just a few of us playing, or a bustling server with 10-20 online. I want this to be a forever world so that players can keep coming back to it, even if you you (yes you!) decide to take a break too (which is totally ok btw!)
Honestly I’m not interested in hosting a mega server (nor can my lil server handle it haha) but rather I think having a good quality community is the way to go.
So we keep moving forward. I will continue to make updates that I think are fun, and do events and activities that I think are fun (keeping in mind that these activities can be completed solo as to not rely on a large player base to complete).
So if you were concerned about playing because you weren’t sure if it was worth your time to play, or were worried the server would get shut down, I hope this puts your mind at ease. There’s no financial burden, and this server always has been and always will be a passion project for me and the community.
Honestly I hope that I can keep building cool stuff and in 10 years when I have kids (Lord willing), I can bring them onto the server to show how far we’ve come. I think that’d be pretty neat.
As for Discord, today they rolled out an announcement about verified ID checking in order to access some features, channels and servers.
All in all I don’t think this affects us too much because I have positioned this server as a Family Friendly one, however I can’t guarantee that it won’t affect users in the future if we start losing features and access if users decide not to verify their ID’s.
I’m all for promoting child health and safety and making sure the internet is a safe place for kids, however these age restriction / verifying tools that are coming from Discord and other companies are concerning and make me (and I’m sure you), think twice about using them.
For now the Discord will stay as is as the situation evolves but I am considering what it means for the future if we need to shut it down and move to a different platform like the new TeamSpeak 6 or something other than Discord. Open to feedback on this!
Thats all for me Crafters. See you in game.