Celebrating Christmas 🎄🎁

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the server
Not a creature was stirring, not even a creeper…
Cube64128, at Cube Inc. on Christmas Eve

Here comes the time of the year when we gather around and celebrate, and look back at the year soon to be left behind. What a year of 2019!

In 2019, Jungle City Server has become the most popular and successful Bedrock Edition Server I’ve ever run. In fact, its success was completely accidental… Well, not completely. The player base certainly wasn’t formed in one day. But mostly, it was like an accident.

Jungle City Server was actually started back in November 2018, when Desert City Server, formerly owned by Hylocereus and running on my desktop, got seriously griefed. As it became apparent that damages to the glorious desert city and the player base was unrecoverable, we decided to shutdown Desert City Server and started a new survival server, using the seed from Hylocereus’ Creative world. Worlds generated using the seed have a spawn point on the edge of a jungle, facing an ocean. Thus the name Jungle City.

But back then, most players stopped playing on our servers when they acknowledged that their hard work in Desert City was destroyed and abandoned. Jungle City Server was kept running but very few players joined. A small base was formed east of the spawn mostly by players from Reddit. But they never went far and soon got damaged by griefers.

Then one evening in May 2019, the miracle happened. A group of 4 explorers, led by Vemms, CravingSky76906, snakeboy9527, baka2bc (Okay, all of them are group leaders :), started running around in the map. Soon they gathered in a grass plain and settled. I quickly noticed their online activity and invited some other players to join. We immediately started to build our house. A new base was formed.

In the following days, we had new players joining every day and we were seeing the peak number of online players being refreshed on a daily basis.

Screenshots of online players on Jungle City Server in May 2019

On June 1st, we celebrated Children’s Day together. dusk1969nozomi built a glass platform on the sea and prepared cakes for us to eat together. Then we watched a firework show at night. This was our first celebration together. We had a great time.

But… Good things don’t really last. As more players joined and played, I have had to deal with more disputes, stealing and griefing cases. The rule was pretty simple and straightforward. Once reported for stealing or griefing with proper evidence, we, administrators, could temporarily remove someone’s member status, which was required to interact with any in-game items, for up to 24 hours. Within the time, administrators were supposed to investigate the “incident” and the suspect was supposed to engage. Based on the investigation result, the suspect would be banned from being an member only if enough evidence suggested the suspect actually committed an violation.

You might think, these rules look pretty fair and simple. But as it turned out, it was extremely hard to enforce it effectively in Bedrock Edition, without any assisting plugins, or any meaningful logging by the server software. There simply couldn’t be enough information for us “law enforcement officers” to actually bar anyone from doing anything, at least according to the rule.

Because we can’t effectively enforce any rules, the order of the server got worse day by day. Under extremely high pressure (from our curiosity mostly), I was able to find traces in between login events and screenshots of in-game chat and convict some griefers. But the most deadly griefer reacted badly after the prosecution of some other griefers, who could possibly also be his own account. Most part of the Jungle city was bombed and destroyed before a few new players played for hours for their new base far away from the city. Due to the low frequency of backup and low discoverability of destruction events, we had to decide to either recover from the backup and nullify everything the new players worked on for hours, or abandon everything we built in downtown Jungle City, or split the server into two different branches, one for the new players and one for the downtown players.

We eventually decided to split. But of course it didn’t end very well. The branch with downtown Jungle intact was eventually terminated and archived. The remaining one continued to develop into a new city south of the spawn.

But… In the meantime, while I was all frustrated by Minecraft after these events, KeitodamaCJ introduced me to the Minecraft modding community. I was very much intrigued by the idea of electricity utilization in Minecraft. He started a modded server and invited me to join. After a while of getting used to it, I could say I fell in love with Minecraft again, this time with mods applied to it. Because CJ’s hardware can barely handle a modded server instance, I overtook the control of the server and started to add other mods to it. I came up with the name “Cube, Inc.”, because it all started with the mod IndustrialCraft 2, which focuses on industrializing using new machines powered by electricity. And the original focus of the server was industrialization, which I was new of and completely unfamiliar with.

My newest Minecraft server, Cube Inc., quickly absorbed a few active players, including myself. I was so obsessed with it (I still am today) that I stopped spending time on managing my two Bedrock servers. Soon I transferred Jungle City Server to Gundami, and stopped running Bedrock City Server in the following month. The focus has completely shifted from Bedrock Edition to Java Edition, specifically with mods. In the past few months, I learned a lot from you guys. And the server had undergone a lot of changes. I want to take the time to thank all of you, who we played and discussed with. Without you, Cube Inc. couldn’t still be running with daily active players and new content every few weeks. We have built Cube Inc. together by exchanging ideas and spending time together. We have gotten to know each other a little bit. And most importantly, we all have had a great time together!