Welcome to MineCribs, a new weekly series featuring online Minecraft communities and their worlds.
The first community that was put forward for me to look at was Minetown, a community of over 33,000 players. As soon as I visited the website, I immediately knew that this was going to be an exciting adventure. Minetown is a developed community which has been around since September 2010, and was originally founded by Cody Holloway.
My experience
After passing a simple application process, which gave the moderators the opportunity to get to know potential members of the community, I went to the website once again but just did not know where to begin! The first thing that caught my eye was their World Map (check it out, I could look at it for hours) which was impressive. When I saw what their world was like, I knew that I couldn’t just go straight in. I had to read the rules, and at least a beginner’s guide in the wiki so I know what is going on.
After doing enough preparation to make sure I didn’t make a fool of myself, I joined the server. I tried to prepare myself for the area ! was visiting by looking at the world map, but it doesn’t compare to actually “being there”. Asides from impressive towers, bridges and cathedrals, there were also useful buildings, including the Minetown Bank, an essential part of the simple yet extensive Minetown economy, an area to access the Nether World and an area to access the new PVP server, among others. The world is huge, and it’s rules and complexity can be overwhelming, but I just set out with no particular direction or goal, only referring to the world map now and then as a point of reference.
I walked straight ahead, seeing a fountain with a huge cathedral in the background. I took a right and went straight until I came upon a huge stone gate, probably representing the border. Outside these gates was the remnants of someone’s town or construction. I could help myself to resources if I wanted to, as it belonged to to no one – Minetown has a strong regional protection system meaning that “griefing”/messing with someone’s creations is going to get you into trouble. I soon realized that the Minetown world is huge, and I can’t even begin to show my readers all of it, so I went back to the Wiki.
Thankfully, there were teleportation and warp commands as well as a “warp lounge”; a building full of portals to areas and cities all around Minetown, which gave me a chance to look around and take some screenshots.
Laketown was a place that I liked because it had a lot of empty space which I could explore, and maybe find a place to make a home for myself. At one point I was low on health (clumsiness, falling and being attacked by monsters) and I asked if anyone sold food. It was pleasant to see that people responded, were friendly, and offered to help.
I wasn’t there for long, but I enjoyed my travels and my experience of the Minetown community was a good one. I may be coming back to establish myself one day, who knows?
Talking to the community
I took some time to post in the forum and ask what the members of Minetown did in their free time. They were very friendly and welcoming, and best of all eager to share their experiences. A community as big as this will of course have a diverse set of answers and that is certainly what I got. Here are some quotes from the users.
Bladebrawl – “When I log onto Minetown, the first thing I do is check to make sure nobody has been snooping in my house.
Then I usually go to World Edge’s mine to gather materials for the town, which I co-own. And I also work on my work in progress mansion thingy.”
Exiriti – “I like to pvp and destroy bases all around the pvp world.
I have destroyed some big stuff in the past, and I’m aiming to surpass my older exploits.
I also like to build stuff. Houses, Boats, Castles, Fortresses, you name it.
Most of my designs, when it comes to castles/fortresses/city walls, are designed to withstand x number of TNT shots but give the attacker a chance to actualy breach the walls.”
Pwnmaster_dx34 – “I seem to like exploring and mining the areas of the world that are newly rendered, as well as taking part in faction affairs.”
PokemonGardevoir – “I love to spend time exploring/mining and then, trading with other users.”
I also had the opportunity to interview Steve O’Bomsawin/Sawine, owner and administrator of Minetown:
Q 1. Tell me the story of Minetown. How did it begin?
It all started few days after the release of Minecraft Alpha SMP (survival multiplayer), the first update that made it possible to play multiplayer. A few days after, in the middle of September 2010, Minetown was founded by Cody Hollaway. The game was quickly growing in popularity; new servers were starting everyday, but not many of them had websites, they consisted most of the time as a thread on the minecraft forums. Since Minetown was registered with Enjin, it was in the first server to have a complete forum and website that was well indexed on Google. This is what also led me to its discovery in October 2010. I joined the community and started to get involved. A few weeks later I was made an admin, the server was growing pretty quickly, we had already upgraded our VPS plan twice to cope with our increasing userbase.
In December 2010, the biggest VPS plan our host could offer us wasn’t enough anymore to support our community. Our server was peaking at 80 online players and the perfomances of the game at this time was far from being what it is today.
At the same time, Cody moved on with his life and didn’t have much time to spend on Minetown. I became owner at this time. I had previous experiences with servers and hosting which Cody didn’t have, so we changed host and rented our first dedicated server. Back then, there weren’t as many plugins as there are nowadays, keeping control over griefers was a real pain, so we took the decision to whitelist our server. We established an application system that people had to submit to join our community to filter our userbase with more mature people. That worked out well, then the Chrismas vacations came and we started receiving more than 50 applications per day. For the small size of our staff back at the time, it was quite time consuming to review them and to promote the members.
About two weeks later we took the decision to become a “pay to play” server to cut down the amount of applications we were receiving. We were asking $5 to become a member. We then upgraded our hosting one more time to a bigger dedicated server. Even with the “paid whitelisting”, our server kept growing pretty quickly. Our community was different than others and was filled with more mature members than others due to our strict whitelist system. After 5 months, in May 2011, there was a lot more servers out there and a lot more plugins to help the management. We decided to make a promotion and to accept 100 members via applications. We received approximatively 10 applications per hour. The promotion ended up quickly, but we then took the decision to keep the application form to accept new members for free and to leave the option to join our server without application for $5. The size of our staff at the time made it possible, we had more people to review and accept applications.
Then in August 2011 we had enough money saved, we decided to buy our own dedicated server. We did everything from scratch, we ordered the parts on the internet and one of our admins (Chester) assembled it. One of Chester’s friends is a relative of the owner of a big datacenter in Michigan, and we were fortunate enough to get our server hosted there. After a couple weeks, everything was finally set up and we were running on our new awesome server. This gave us the power to run more worlds and to host many more players. Our server was now peaking at 200+ players, our staff was a lot more organized. Things were running pretty well. Months passed and we kept coming out with new features and new worlds. 2011 ended, we went from 4000 to 19000 members during that year.
Then in January 2012, we were starting to hit the limits of the game. The game was never made to support hundreds of players and multiple worlds (especially not multithreaded!). So to counter this issue, we decided to come up with a new system. We would buy 3 more servers and run each of our worlds on separate instances of the game to share the load. We did as we had done with our previous server. We ordered all the parts and 2 of our admins assembled the servers (Chester and DeusLemmus). This time we knew what were the weakness of our first server, we built 3 very powerful machines with the latest processors and multiple SSDs.
At the end of April our servers were set up and running, we then made the switch and transfered the game server files. Our admins and developers are currently working on the custom software solution that will run on those servers to allow multiple game instances to communicate with each other. We should be able to release it in the next weeks, in the beginning of July 2012. We have a lot of projects planned for the summer, a bunch of new worlds and unique concepts.
This is our story up to this day, quite shortened, as it would take hours to go in details about all the good things that happened. We now have over 33000 registered members and we receive more than 100 applications on busy days. We have great plans to increase the growth of our community even more in the next months and I believe the best is still to come.
Q 2. If you could describe the Minetown community in a single sentence, then what would it be?
A very nice and friendly place to enjoy Minecraft under all its aspects.
Q 3. Is there anything that makes Minetown unique to other online communities?
The community itself. Our community compares to no other, the time we’ve taken to filter out our userbase with the application system is really making a difference to the gameplay. We have more mature members and a more friendly atmosphere than most servers.
Q 4. I noticed that among other things, you are selling some pretty cool looking t-shirts to support the servers you run. Are they proving to be popular?
Our server is mainly supported by our donations, the clothes shop is more of a bonus for people who really like our server. We take no profit on the sales of clothes to make them the cheapest we can. We’ve sold around a dozen of them. With Minecon 2012 coming up, it’s our staff that is most likely going to be ordering some more to attend the event.
Q 5. Minetown is a big community, and Minecraft is a big game. You have many rules in place to make sure everyone is happy, but have you had a lot of trouble in your beginnings? What tips do you have for others out there in starting a peaceful community, where people follow the rules?
We had our tough times in the beginning, our staff was smaller and less organized. Nowadays it’s more easy to handle as we have established some guidelines for our staff and members that help to get everything working out together without too much hassle. If I had any tips to give, I would recommend to take the time to choose the right people to assist you in the moderation of your server and to put in place systems (such as report forms, ingame log plugins, etc) that will help reduce the work load on the staff and make the moderation more efficient.
Q 6. Is there anything else you would like to add yourself?
I’m really happy and honored that Minetown was your first choice to make an interview of. I wish you the best of luck for your magazine and website. We are also working on another project called EximiusGaming, which is the network that englobes Minetown and all the other stuff we are planning to host. I will use this last sentence to give it a small shoutout and to tell you to stay tuned as we have many things to come in the next months!
Thanks very much to Sawine, and all the Minetown players who came and showed me their world!
