Vintage Civ

Vintage Civ is a Civ server on Vintage Story that had its first beta 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 the Shackle Gear. Previously used on AbjectPovertyCraft, the Shackle Gear works similarly to Prison Pearl as a means for players to self-police themselves, a notable "rule" of the Civ genre, an “anarchistic gaming experiments”. Other features include Citadel built into the VS base game as plumb-and-square Reinforcement, to make up for absence of vanilla Vintage Story land claiming which prevents players from interacting, placing, or destroying blocks inside the land claim (at no cost whatsoever, unlike Reinforcement).

Another notable difference to vanilla VS is the lack of other player icons in the map, including your own. This makes the addition of the client-side mod VSHUD a necessity to many Vciv players for waypointing and navigation purposes. A certain feature coming from Vanilla VS allows players to be able to see other ingame player nametags within a certain distance, making underground or secluded living difficult. While people have been a bit resenting of the feature ever since VCiv launched ,  the devs have been thinking away at a rework of the ingame nametag system. Another VS counterpart to Minecraft Civ is the inclusion of the Snitches mod, which comes from, well, Snitches.

More info pertaining to the unique features in Vintage Story compared to Minecraft can be found at the official Vintage Story wiki For other miscellaneous details and the mods included can be found at the Vintage Civ website

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 was lured into a room by another player from Chan Town and was trapped there for an undisclosed amount of time. Xorberax hit the door, trying to leave where he was stuck. What Xorberax did apparently made the Channer upset enough to shackle Xorberax for what he did, sparking a much larger series of events. After the mechanics of shacklegear were updated in the server, Xorberax was then released from the shackle due to the Channers not being familiar with the mechanics of refueling a shacklegear after the update.

After his unintended release, he decided to threaten the town of Green Spice claiming he's going to level the entire town, or threats of a similar nature. After the usual bickering back and forth between Chan Town, Bastion, and Xorberax, he decided to go and bomb Chan Town himself. This was in retaliation against what they did to him before and due to other more personal reasons Xorberax has against what Chan Town is known for. The bombing resulted in a huge amount of gear and loot lost. Once most of the Chan Town members logged a while after the raid, they set off to find Xorberax in his home city of Bastion.

The members from the city of Bastion took notice of the impending attack and aided Xorberax against the attackers and got the Channers that came shackled. Immediately after Bastion understood 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.

After being threatened to be doxxed and in hopes of the blame being put on Green Spice, sometime between March 11-13 Xorberax was basically forced to detonate ore bombs around the city of Bastion causing much damage to structures, some more than others. It has been said by a player named Jaysus273 that there was another attacker a day or two before Xorberax committed his treason on Bastion. That player being Spicy Boy (on Discord), who attacked Bastion utilizing the power of ore bombs against the city. Many players who eventually noticed this whole thing then lost motivation in living in Bastion, and for some, lost the interest in the entire server. The city of Bastion was widely considered to have ceased to exist from then on.

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 servers listed in this subsection were publicy released with the intention of finding bugs and balancing issues 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, combat tag, 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
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 (Which did not last 2 weeks). The beta 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 was supposed to 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. As of April 24 2022 this server still stays in the regular IP that was used for the beta, while the test server below is now in the main servers usual IP.

Test
On April 23 2022 SouthernBloc launched yet another completely new server which, instead of the previous two 2.0 test iterations, is connected to from the default server IP being play.vintageciv.com and has dirt gravity, changing the way players build and traverse. With the terrain generation being done for the most part and the world map much bigger than the previous two 2.0 iterations, Southern states this server will last til the 2.0 launch day. The servers name being known as the test server is not an official name but more so a placeholder name given by SouthernBloc in the aforementioned discord message reference. It was noticed the day after the server launched that naturally grown wild crops are unusually rare, along with the fact that the equator is also unusually large, makes finding and growing crops much harder. The history of the test server as of April 24 is short but eventful. Starting off with a small dirt hut Nessie made on a mid sized tropical island, it quickly gained a handful total of residents due to the tropical location and that the server owner was a resident there. The settlement was comprised of Fey, Miloski, SouthernBloc, Cratin, and Nessie. After maybe a real life day the civilization started was fruitful, with a small farm being built to the side of the now-wooden and stone brick house. The island was distinctly shaped like an elephants head, making it known as Elephant Island or Republic of Elephants, names like that  But there was a inherent problem with the location, there were not many trees on the island and crops could barely grow in that climate. Going back to the aforementioned statement about the equator being too large and wild crops being too rare, makes this location especially hard to get food not from hunting as well as flax used in many common necessities in Vintage Story. This contributed to the reason the settlement there decided to leave the island for good.

The 5 piece group set sail to a land more suitable for crops as well as a more forested area. Along the way for the search of an appropriate area for this group there was a couple mishaps and deaths that temporarily set the group back a bit. It took a while for all the group members to eventually meet up and start building, but in the end basically all valuables and loot stored in the elephant islands chests were moved to the newer but more cold and forested settlement several hundred blocks north.

In April 25 a small update was released pertaining to the well known problem of wild crops being extremely rare in generation. The update on wild crop finding is confirmed by SouthernBloc to be a temporary fix to the aforementioned problem. The actual change to crop finding is to allow for a variety of crops to be found by cutting naturally growing grass.

Compared to the other 2.0 test servers like the beta and alpha, the current 2.0 test server had seen relatively large active player activity for being just a test server and at one point having 9 online players on April 27 2022. The addition of new and different features to Vciv as well as the constant speak and promotion about it in Discord attracted some old Vintage Civ players such as Makometer, Forks, and Fey. As of May 2 2022 the server has seen almost a year ingame aswell as reaching a high of 9 concurrent players late in April shows the popularity that is to come in the release of 2.0 at May 27 2022.