Vintage Civ

Vintage Civ is a Civ server on Vintage Story that is currently in beta 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 plan to run for 4-6 months or longer.

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 was lured into a room by another player from Chan Town and was trapped there. Xorberax broke down 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 anymore 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 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 went to Bastion to shackled Xorberax. Some of the members from Bastion took notice and aided Xorberax against the attackers and got them shackled. A discord user by the name of MULTIPOLAR said he later secured the release to those shackled members of Green Spice and returned some of the stolen goods from Green Spice. In March 12, Chan Town, according to Xorberax, doxxed him into bombing the town of Bastion so they'd stop doing it to him After those events, Xorberax was banished from Bastion. 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 Green Spice, being abandoned after their aforementioned conflicts.
 * Stragglers from Green Spice raiding and griefing other towns like Kindread Clan and Ember Valley, causing their residents to quit.
 * A shallow tech tree.
 * Discrepencies in moderation; Some mods/admins, like SouthernBloc and Pkoed, 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.