Vintage Civ

Vintage Civ is a Civ server on Vintage Story that released on the 2nd of January 2022. Along with the intense hyper-realism of vanilla Vintage Story, Vintage Civ uses a variety of new plugins, most notably Shackle Gear. Previously used on AbjectPovertyCraft, Shackle Gear works similarly to Prison Pearl. Other features include Citadel built into the base game as Reinforcement, traits and skills, and player-written lore books.

History
For the first two days of its existence, Vintage Civ ran a test server as the admins added more plugins to the server and tested their stability in-game. Happy with their modlist, the official beta was launched on January 4, 2022, which the admins planned to run for 4-6 months or longer.

On April 17th, 2022, the trailer officially announcing Vintage Civ 2.0, including a new map, was released to the public. The formal release date is May 27th, 2022.

1.0 Beta World History
The first days of the server were marked by exploration and the foundation of the server's largest town so far: Pond Scum. Named after the ponds that attracted the founders to it for farming purposes, the town boasts an unofficial population of 10-15 residents (most of the server's early playerbase). Other early but smaller villages founded in the first week of the server include Veii (founded by the owner of the server himself) and the Shitshack Commune.

As players explored more of the map (which has a radius of at least 22k blocks), some chunks were discovered to generate large out-of-place pillars of rock and dirt. Dubbed "Cliffs of Insanity," the community as a whole voted to keep them until the end of the beta.

After updating to 1.16, a bug was discovered which completely deleted entire chunks and crashed the game when trying to open some chests or clay vessels. A vote took place where players voted to either restart the map and start 1.0, or to continue the beta with all the bugs, which the admin team could not fix or did not have the time to ; the vote ended with a vast majority of players voting for a server restart, kickstarting the official launch of the server to 1.0.

1.0 World History
Launching on January 13th, 2022, the 1.0 Version of Vintage Civ began.

Little events of importance happened during the first week as player groups were only beginning to establish themselves.

Channers-Bastion conflicts
A large amount of controversy and internal feuding occurred in the first couple weeks of March 2022. The main subjects of these feuds was the town of Bastion, and the town of Green Spice (or Chan Town).

It started when Bastion resident Xorberax claims he was lured into a room by another player from Chan Town and was trapped there. Xorberax dented the door which made the Channer decide to shackle Xorberax for it, sparking a much larger series of events. After the shacklegear was updated, Xorberax was not shackled any more due to the Channers not being familiar with the mechanics of refueling a shacklegear, and he escaped. Xorberax decided to threaten the town of Green Spice saying he will level the entire town, or threats of a similar nature. A little while after escaping Green Spice, Xorberax decided to go and bomb Chan Town in retaliation against what they did to him. After the bombing, some of Chan Towns' members logged on and followed Xorberax back to Bastion to shackle him. Some of the members from Bastion took notice of an impending attack and aided Xorberax against the attackers and got them shackled. Immediately once understanding what had happened, Xorberax was banished from Bastion to fend for himself. Green Spice was outraged that no further punishment was taken toward Xorberax, however, Bastion members were overwhelmed and tired and had had enough of all of it. A discord user by the name of MULTIPOLAR said he later secured the release to those shackled members of Green Spice and retrieved some of the stolen goods from Green Spice. Much back-and-forth ensued between Green Spice and Bastion over what to do with Xorberax. Then on March 12, Chan Town, according to Xorberax, doxxed him into bombing the town of Bastion so they'd stop doing it to him. There are still a number of disagreements and arguments in the official Vciv Discord after all of this happened.

Decline
Throughout late March and early April 2022, the active population of Vintage Civ began to decline and reached the point where the peak player count reached only the single digits. Players have contributed this decline to a number of factors, including:


 * General hype for CivMC after its Q&A on March 25, 2022 leading players to focus their attention towards it.
 * A rumour that admins had been working on Vintage Civ 2.0, leaving players not wanting to give attention to the 1.0 server that might be going away soon.
 * The plugins xSkills and QPtech- which allowed players to upgrade certain abilities (eg. increased health, faster block breaking, etc.) after reaching certain goals- breaking after being updated, causing those who were working towards those goals getting burned out.
 * The most populous towns, Bastion and Ember Valley, which both were near spawn and very welcoming to newcomers, being abandoned after the aforementioned conflicts. Multiple small communities had sprouted up near them and began to feel unsafe without them around.  Also, too, the Kingdom of Savaguard, a strong and highly militant city, had once claimed alliance with Bastion, yet failed completely to respond to Bastion under siege and fire.
 * Stragglers from Green Spice raiding and griefing other towns like Kindread Clan and Ember Valley, causing their residents to quit.
 * A shallow tech tree.
 * Discrepancies in moderation; Some mods/admins, like SouthernBloc and Pkeod, have been generally tolerant of neo-nazi and right-wing views and users in the discord, but rules against harassment and hate speech have been implemented and enforced by other mods/admins, like SimpleBastard and KingOfTheMochas. This lead to the server being populated by far right-wing users who scared away a number of regular players and the right-wingers getting subsequently banned.

Nevertheless, the admin team continues to work on a new website and a new in-house version of xSkills.

2.0 Test Servers' World History
It was announced on April 9, 2022 by SouthernBloc that an early version of the 2.0 server has been launched publicly, to last for 24 hours, later said to be on for about 2 weeks. The server was released in the intention of finding bugs that can be found in the early release of new content being added. These test servers contains highly anticipated features not seen before in the Vintage Civ server such as bastions, pack animals, more enemies, new land generation, and a variety of new building blocks and other smaller mechanics.

On April 17 2022 SouthernBloc held a Discord call discussing the details surrounding 2.0 of Vintage Civ and the future of the server(s) with a handful of other important members such as developers and contributors. In the same call he showcased the trailer for 2.0, planning for release on May 27 2022 (Reference contains Youtube link for trailer). In the call SouthernBloc stated that moving towns or structures from the 1.0 map to the 2.0 map will not be done, as he says it gives an unfair starting advantage to some players and that in the release of 2.0 the blocks and materials used in the old 1.0 structures would be deleted as they are from mods that wont be in 2.0.

Beta
The test server as of April 17th has players spawn at 0,0 in the very north-western corner of the world in the water. The closest landmass to the spawn point is a small island which contained a single homestead with a small overgrown farm to the south of it. The beta world has a small size of exactly 5000 blocks north to south and has every quadrant being absent except the +,+ quadrant, which the entire map is in. There has been a few small camps set up by players that have crossed the oceans and landmasses far from spawn though the server has not had as much popularity as the 1.0 beta three months earlier.

Alpha
After existing for 9 days, the 2.0 beta world was wiped for a new one that will last til launch day of the actual 2.0 world. This new world has randomspawn on, similiar to other civ servers in the genre, especially in Minecraft. According to SouthernBloc this will apply for the actual 2.0 server that will launch in May. The server runs on version 1.16.5 and the size dimensions for the world are -2500 to 2500 east to west and -2500 to 2500 north to south making the world 5000 x 5000 blocks.

Though having the same IP for the server as the beta, the popularity compared to the beta server has been relatively the same, with the highest number of online players being four. Unlike the main server, there is not a discord join log that players can look at to see who joins and who leaves the server, and how many players are online after someone leaves or joins so it is hard seeing the exact number of people online at a certain time or who exactly joins or leaves.

After a few hours from the launch of the alpha server the player Miloski stumbled upon SouthernBloc's homestead on a medium sized island. With other two future residents McBain and Fey being in a discord call together, they were informed on where the island is to join the settlement. As of April 21 this unnamed settlement has a total of 4 players currently in the mid-late bronze age with a number of other higher tier items and gear.