Civcraft

Civcraft
Basic Info
Start Date	March 24, 2012 (1.0) May 19, 2013 (2.0) July 30, 2016 (3.0)
End Date	April 26, 2013 (1.0) January 26, 2016 (2.0) October 1, 2016 (3.0)
Owner	ttk2
Subreddit	/r/Civcraft/
Minecraft Version	1.2 - 1.16
Server address	mc.civcraft.vg mc.civcraft.co
Franchise Info
Preceded by	AncapMinecraft
Succeeded by	Devoted CivClassic

Introduction video

Advertising poster

This article is about Civcraft. For Civcraft related pages, try using CivcraftImport: or Civcraft2Import: before the title.

Civcraft was a mainline Civ server run by ttk2. It was the first mainline server and is widely considered the pioneer of the Civ genre. Civcraft ran from March 24, 2012 to October 1, 2016 over three iterations. Its mainline successor was Devoted 3.0.

Civcraft was the first server to use mechanics and plugins that have since become core to Civ, including Citadel, Factories, Bastions, Prison Pearl, Snitches, Realistic Biomes, and NameLayer. Many of its design decisions and ideas remain present in mainline servers to this day.

As of August 2023, many of the released map backups for CivCraft 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 have been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Civcraft is an experiment for communities, political ideologies, debate and discussion. Our backstory is based on history, not fiction. We’re forming a new direction for game-play, not just about surviving the elements, but about surviving each other, where players can work together to create and shape civilization or to watch it crumble. A world open to any idea, manifesto or philosophy, created by the players. We hope to push minecraft to its fullest potential in order to foster discussion, experimentation and community building. This is the great pastime and challenge of mankind: Civilization.

— r/Civcraft description

Server Rules

Civcraft had the goal of minimizing admin intervention wherever possible, letting the players moderate themselves about any conflicts arising in-game. Admins only intervened when players took a conflict outside the game and into real life, resulting in this minimal rule set.

1. Remember, its just a game, strictly speaking.
2. No cheating.
3. No doxxing or harassment.
4. No knowingly helping banned players.

Iterations

Even though Civcraft tried to never reset its world save to allow long-term civilization development, a few events were so far reaching that they forced the admins to do a map reset and start a new iteration.

Civcraft 1.0

Terrain map of Civcraft 1.0

The first iteration of Civcraft. Also known as 1.0, it launched on 2012-03-24 and ran for 398 days until 2013-04-26.

WIP

A DDOS around March 26 2013 caused the admin team to struggle to set up a new, appropriate backup server. A redditor offered a server that was well suited, and the admin team took to this opportunity. On April 26, ttk2 announced that the backup server owner, who turned out to be the player Hamster238, had abused his access to the server backups, which contained everything from the map saves down to uncensored server logs, including the locations of all hidden wealth, player activities and associations, and so on. As a result, the admins made the difficult decision to reset the map.

Civcraft 2.0

The Hexagon, an important trading hub during 2.0

Map of nations during Civcraft 2.0

See also: A brief account of significant events that have helped form CivClassic

The most famous iteration of Civcraft. Also known as 2.0, it launched on 2013-05-19 and ran for 982 days until 2016-01-26. Interactive world map. As of 26 Feburary 2020, it is the second-longest iteration of a Civ server. At some point they added Bastions as a measure to prevent reinforced grief.

WIP and there is so much that needs to go here

TODO map reset

CivTemp

CivTemp shards

Map of Civcraft 3.0 shards (dimensions)

Intended to be a testing ground for new mechanics such as shards. It launched on 2016-02-27 and ran for 106 days until 2016-06-12.

A temporary server between 2.0 and 3.0, CivTemp was meant to host and test the plugins designed for 3.0. After a buggy start, Civtemp eventually became stable. While some players became "Murder Hobos", going around the server killing and stealing from people, most players played legitimately, building settlements in this new but temporary world.

It had five shards, all named after letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

There were many towns, events and conflicts in Civtemp, but eventually people got bored of a temporary map, which had been up for months, far longer than anyone had previously expected. Civtemp's population dropped drastically, with only ~20 people on at a time. Civtemp was taken down on the 16th of June, 2016, in preparation for 3.0.

Civcraft: Worlds

It launched on 2016-07-30 and ran for just 63 days until 2016-10-01. Interactive world map

The third iteration of Civcraft, commonly referred to as Civcraft 3.0 or just 3.0. It ran on Minecraft 1.10.

Civcraft: Worlds introduced a number of mechanics that significantly deviated from the already developed Civcraft formula in the previous servers, tending to head towards a more grindy and RPG nature. One mechanic were called shards, essentially breaking up the map into different servers to reduce server load as well as have more space for the server (which ultimately ended up to have significantly less space than prior maps.) There were 13 "shards":

Four shards were initially designated as 'spawning' shards.

• Drakontas, a swamp shard that housed a landmass shaped like the famous animation character Shrek, along with a mushroom island. Libra held most of the land within the shard.
• Eilon, a forest shard with large, expansive, cloud-covering trees. Primarily, four nations occupied the shard, being Gensokyo, Mount Augusta, Volterra (a predecessor to Varkonia), and Alpoko.
• Tjikko, a taiga shard with snow plains and mountains in its south. Concordia, a predecessor to the The Commonwealth and Iria occupied the most land in this shard.
• Tigrillo, the jungle shard with a windy river running through with large mountain ranges to its south. Occupants included the likes of Yoahtl, Etherium and Laconia.

The other nine shards were:

• Abydos, a desert shard housing a mesa in its south. Places like Astanna held territory in this part of the map, but very few did.
• Isolde, a fully winter shard with ice and treacherous mountains. The largest occupant was the USR, a communist state.
• Naunet, an ocean shard with a singular, small island. Nations like Aurora built inside the ocean, while others like Aquila took territory on the island.
• Ovid, the end shard where prison pearled players went.
• Padzhar, the roofed forest shard with heavy forest cover and a large river. Falstadt, a predecessor to Hjaltland, held all of the territory in the shard at the end of the map.
• Sheol, the nether shard that was never explored expansively.
• Rokko Steppe, a large expansive plain and savanna with a long river running roughly in the middle. This shard tended to be the most popular since it had much of the arable farming land, and subsequently had many nations, with nobody taking a majority.
• Ulca Felya, a cave shard that also housed ridiculously large caverns in some areas. This acted as the central area for the map, and was maintained by an international road project that connected each of the cardinal directions. There was also a marketplace at the center.
• Volans, a unique 'skylands' shard that was snowy and covered in holes dropping to void. Crops would not grow on the shard but nonetheless was heavily populated by the threepers.

Each were small worlds varying in size and biome/resource distribution, connected together via wide portals at each world border.

Shards were a good idea to reduce server load. However with previous maps, biomes were locked to have only a few certain kinds of plants growing in each shard. This meant that while some shards had only a few nations, like the Roofed Forest shard; others like the plains shard, Rokko Steppe, had tens of nations vying for a slot of land to be able to grow valuable crops to feed their citizens.

In addition, pylons were introduced which was intended to let citizens in the shard make their own experience, subverting the vanilla experience system. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie, and unfortunately, when too many pylons are introduced and running within the shard, all pylons' outputs are lessened as a result. Because the limit was very harsh, this caused conflict for many nations within the community who were trying to create experience for themselves.

A plugin called SkilUp was also announced to bring the Civcraft brand into a more RPG nature, but this plugin never came into fruition.

While conflict was ripe early map, much of the configuration in FactoryMod and other plugins were changed in favor of a long, arduous tech tree that slowed progression down for many nations. This grindy nature was opposed by many and soon after its onset, people complained to the admins. As Devoted 3.0 began to open in the complaints' wake, many flocked to the new server for a refreshing take on Civ.

Finally, after only a few weeks of the server being live, ttk2 announced his retirement from Redacted Games. While the server stayed live for a couple more days, his departure brought a downturn in attendance on the server and was closed soon after.

While many players attempted to resurrect the Civcraft brand back, none were successful. This coincided with the Great Blackout, where four of the five major Civ servers at the time closed, including Sovereignty Ascending, CivEx 2.0, and RealmsMC: Spera. With this, Devoted 3.0 became the major and only Civ server, and was widely known as its successor, despite deviating from Civcraft's formula.