Civcraft

Civcraft was the Civ Server at the core of the Civ genre, introducing the now well-known Civ plugins such as Citadel, FactoryMod, Bastions, PrisonPearl, JukeAlert, RealisticBiomes, and NameLayer. The server address was mc.civcraft.vg and later mc.civcraft.co.

Introduction video

Advertising poster

Its first iteration launched on 24 March 2012, making it the second typical Civ server after Ancap Minecraft.

Its goal was to be "an experiment for communities, political ideologies, debate and discussion. The backstory [was] based on history, not fiction. Civcraft [was] 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." Civcraft hoped "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." - 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

The first iteration of Civcraft. 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

The Titan Vault played a key role during the HCF invasion

Map of nations during Civcraft 2.0

The most famous iteration of Civcraft. It launched on 2013-05-19 and ran for 982 days until 2016-01-26. Interactive world map

WIP and there is so much that needs to go here

TODO map reset

CivTemp

CivTemp shards

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.

WIP

Civcraft: Worlds

Map of Civcraft 3.0 shards (dimensions)

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. There were 13 "shards":

Four shards were initially designated as 'spawning' shards.

• Drakontas, a swamp shard that housed a landmass shaped like Shrek, along with a mushroom island.
• Eilon, a forest shard with large, expansive, cloud-covering trees.
• Rokko Steppe, a large expansive plain and savanna with a long river running roughly in the middle.
• Tjikko, a taiga shard with snow plains and mountains in its south.

The other nine shards were:

• Abydos, a desert shard housing a mesa in its south.
• Isolde, a fully winter shard with ice and treacherous mountains.
• Naunet, an ocean shard with a singular, small island.
• Ovid, the end shard where prison pearled players went.
• Padzhar, the roofed forest shard with heavy forest cover and a large river.
• Sheol, the nether shard that was never explored expansively.
• Tigrillo, the jungle shard with a windy river running through with large mountain ranges to its south.
• Ulca, a cave shard that also housed ridiculously large caverns in some areas.
• Volans, a unique 'skylands' shard that was primarily snowy in along its edges.

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

While shards were a good idea to reduce server load, like 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. This caused conflict for many nations within the community who were trying to create more.

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 months live, ttk2 announced his retirement from Redacted Games. While the server stayed live for a couple days, his departure brought a downturn in attendance on the server and was eventually closed.

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. Devoted 3.0 became the major and only Civ server following this.