Game Servers

A timeline of past multiplayer servers and gaming communities I'v created over the years!

You can now download all my old Minecraft server worlds here!

2023~ MelonLand Minecraft Server

This website still has a minecraft server! Its a retro 1.5.2 server closely modelled after my Okicraft (2013) setup with some elements of older Meloncraft (2012) servers mixed in. It requires a MelonLand forum account to play - but is stable, always online and is a survival/community server with a small but friendly group of regulars. Here is a picture of spawn and Dotmidi's big ozwomp! Info about playing is here!

2016-2019 - Late Era Minecraft Servers

The last standalone server, Oasis (2019) featured the LoyLoy spawn positioned in a vast desert. It was set thousands of years after the old LoyLoy server. Not many people played this one and I treated it more a private server that just happened to be online - I wish I had saved this one because it was a really cool lil space!

In late 2017 I started a big reincarnation of Meloncraft which featured magic, quests and a large, covered city (due to acid rain). I feel like it represented some of the best of community projects and server design we ever had, with more features, humor and stuff to do than any server before. It took everything I’d learned over 8 years of Minecraft servers and put it to good use. However it never quite felt like home, I think it was just too late and closed mid 2018.

In 2016 hybrid community was formed in 2016, between two of my old servers (run by new admins) and a number of others run by friends. It was a fun idea, but we ran into issues. The different servers had conflicting cultures which was not a great start. That and there was a tendency for all players to gravitate to one server at a time leaving all the others empty.

2014-2016 - LoyLoy

The longest running and most well-developed server was LOYLOY (named after my Sims4 family!). It was a follow up to Okicraft. Set in a vast sea of islands which could be claimed by players and protected using our custom Totem plugin (not present from the start and added after much complaining). It was maybe not as successful as its predecessor, I suspect primarily because too much focus was put on performance and polish and not enough on raw silly fun :/ but plenty of people did enjoy it and we had good times too!

Loy had a number of unique features including the island naming, the Loy phone, which was an inventory GUI for text commands, banks, collectable prefixes, TravelTicket warps and hub islands. Along with the dastardly Tana cult that attempted to take over the world! Loy also have a closed-loop semi-functional economy that kept crashing and ended up with a sort of forced communism to stop people hoarding all the money...

There were a number of art contests and fan art productions during the LOY era. The server was also at one point called LoyCore? Not sure why that was but I’m sure we had a good reason! Below is a video produced by one of the admins and below that is some fanart by a player:

2013-2014 - Okicraft

Okicraft was the most successful server I ever worked on, and by far the most fun! Running a small profit (for like a month) and bringing in more players than all the other servers combined. It was fun to play and had so many good people, but it was a mess to manage. The lesson here being; a good community will always be on the edge of collapsing its support structures - order does not make things fun, and creative chaos is where you make the best friends.

Okicraft Intro: We think servers should be fun and friendly. People should be treated as people and not just players. When folks logoff their builds auta be safe, although rules should be a guide not an iron law. After all a server is made of people, not oversized spawns or truckloads of plugins.

So we made Oki rock solid, with daily backups, auto protection, if you have played any time since day 1, your house is right here waiting for you. With an awesomely rich range of features, worlds and community craziness.

All that together gets you Okicraft, where you are free to build great cities, mine to the depths of the earth, RP to your hearts content, fly the creative worlds, or just live in a hole with a pig... Its all good :3 Say Hi at play.okicraft.com! I know you're gonna love it!

Later era Okicraft featured a new skyworld based on the Jetsons futurism. This was reused quite frequently in later servers by both me and Mip (a former admin) who took over the community in later days. Okicraft featured a healthy religious rivalry between player made gods, ridable dragons, vampires and was briefly home to the cat clan. While she was not invented on this server, the server bot called Molly was a popular and well known personality that people really loved and she would auto reply to certain messages (often very annoying).

Okicraft also featured a modded server that was quite popular called Mokicraft. We created our own modpack and installer and it was really awesome, but way to hard to maintain.

2011-2012 - Meloncraft One, Two, 4, 5

Meloncraft was my first step into Minecraft hosting and largish online communities. It started as a server with some school friends and a summer holiday project. It later attracted a close following of online players, a few of whom I’m still friends with.

Meloncraft had multiple resets and revisions, most of the content relating to it has been lost including old wikis and websites. Meloncraft One was succeeded by Two which was set 1000 years in the future and had the ruins of the old cities. Meloncraft Three was canceled due to admin disputes but would have had an ancient Rome theme. 4 was possibly the best of them, it was a full restart and saw the introduction of the server bot Molly who featured in every one of my servers after, and 5 was a short-lived expansion that added more worlds but largely missed the mark with too much focus on mini-games and oversized builds.

Pictured above is the final Meloncraft 5, then Meloncraft 4 and bottom is the first generation, One.

This server coined many of the recurring themes in later servers such as Fe currency which was developed into its own plugin. The Molly bot which was developed into its own plugin by LOYLOY era. Okicraft’s wisps were a remake of Meloncraft Twos goblins etc. It also featured some of the first player contests such as the brick factory contest.

Meloncraft Two featured a totally radical cross connected game server with mods, long before other servers tried doing the same with Bungee. It featured cross server chat and a portal that let you step from one game to another. It was shutdown due to a player spawning a nuke in spawn on the modded server.

2008-2010 - Blockland servers

My first experience running and working with online communities was running game servers in Blockland in the late 00s. The most successful of these was my city RPG which were inspired by a server run by another player called CeeCee. I also did some custom mini games such as a rocket launcher battle in a volcano, aircraft battle, trench war and infinite miner that looked a lot like Minecraft before Minecraft existed!