A History of TWiTcraft

What this is

TWiTcraft was the Minecraft server of the TWiT.tv podcast network. It ran for a little under three years, accumulated a small city's worth of institutions — a transport department, a post office, a currency, a court of public opinion — and then closed. This history is reconstructed from the server's own surviving records.

The sources are the complete phpBB forum archive (1,277 threads, 8,482 posts by 319 people, April 2012 to February 2015), seven surviving audio recordings of the community's town halls and podcast, the world files themselves, and what could be verified on the public web. Where the record is thin or contradictory, this page says so.

Origins

The earliest surviving forum post is timestamped 25 April 2012, 01:37. It is Curley — the server's founder and administrator, in-game name panntz — announcing that the forums existed at all:

testerooonie - look at who learned php sql and apache in one night!Curley, in a thread titled "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee", 25 April 2012

Within hours the thread filled with the people who would run the place for the next three years — Cheeetozz, t2t2, joatmon, Drewsipher — congratulating him. Drewsipher offered "a standing belly clap for curley, google, and the powers of a little bit of good ol fashion hardwork." Later the same morning Cheeetozz posted the forum's first guide, explaining how to protect your land with a gold hoe: the WorldGuard region wand.

The server itself opened two weeks earlier. The first day its own files record anyone logging in is Monday 9 April 2012: 175 accounts that day, 69 the next, 39 the day after — the largest arrival the server ever saw, and the date this archive treats as the launch. (The map is a month older: the survival world’s files date from 4–9 March 2012, when it ran privately from Curley’s desktop with a handful of testers.) In the Town Hall recording of 20 April 2013, the moderators open by marking the server's first anniversary, and in an earlier meeting a moderator dates the sequence precisely: the server went public in April, and the Flea Market — its first commercial district — went up in May or June.

What it was built from

Almost none of the server's plugin setup survived the shutdown. Curley offered the plugin folder only by request and only after combing it for his own SQL passwords and other people’s personal data, so no plugin configuration is in this archive. The plugin list, though, survived on video: a launch-week preview uploaded on 10 April 2012 — "Minecraft: Server Preview - TWiTCraft" by WizardCM — pauses on the server’s own /plugins output. There were thirty-four:

MultiInv · SilkierTouch · ShiftMode · Spout · Vault · PermissionsEx · Multiverse-Core · SelfPromote · NoZombe · ModReq · NoSpawnEggs · CraftIRC · iConomy · ProperTime · CraftBookCommon · Permissions · Modifyworld · NoCheat · CraftBookCircuits · Herochat · CleanroomGenerator · Essentials · CraftBookMechanisms · WorldEdit · Multiverse-SignPortals · Multiverse-NetherPortals · SignShop · LogBlock · LWC · uIRCBridge · WorldGuard · dynmap · WorldBorder · VanishNoPacket

Nearly everything the next three years would argue about is already on that list. WorldGuard is the gold hoe from Cheeetozz’s first-morning guide. SignShop is the post office and the shop economy whose lag would later force the hundred-block rule. CraftBook is the lift signs the town halls kept asking to have changed. Multiverse is the lobby-and-portal structure this archive is built around; dynmap is the in-browser map — the same tool whose 35 GB folder once filled the disk and took the server down over a holiday. CraftIRC and uIRCBridge wired the whole thing into IRC. LogBlock and LWC are the two whose databases would have recorded who placed every block and who owned every chest — the moderators used LogBlock to investigate griefs, and LWC locked the chests — and both went with the plugin folder, which is why the pages on this site can only infer ownership from the signs people wrote and the beds they slept in. From the first day it was a heavily built, heavily moderated, IRC-connected, multi-world server — not a plain survival box that grew complicated, but an ambitious one that opened that way.

What the plugin folder withheld, the server's own base configuration quietly kept. The backups this archive is built from still carry server.properties, bukkit.yml, the whitelist, the ban lists, a WorldEdit log and the server's schematic library — enough to add a few things the forums never recorded. server.properties sets the world seed to TWIT — fittingly, but that setting only applies to the world a server creates on its very first start, and no surviving world was made from it: the lobby began as Curley’s single-player save, and the survival worlds were created through Multiverse with seeds of their own (the 2012–13 survival map is -1552941483, shared by its Nether and End; the 2014 map is 5662257491633293167; the resource world 193498126). The WorldEdit log is a small fossil of the server's own birth: its oldest lines load and save the lobby from C:\Users\Curley\Desktop\newbukkit before the paths switch to a Linux box at /home/twit/ — TWiTcraft was cut together on Curley's own desktop, by panntz and t2t2, before it ever moved onto Server Central's donated hardware. And the 82 saved schematics beside it name a side of the server the government-minded forums barely mention: a lobby arcade of Pong, Bomberman, Spleef, a Space Mountain and a shooting gallery.

Who paid for it

Nobody, in the ordinary sense — the machine was donated. In June 2012 the moderator Demonfive, explaining why the staff would not accept player donations, set out the economics: “ServerCentral is giving us our amazing hardware for free, all of the software/plugins we use are free, and our staff all volunteer their time. Monetarily, TWiTcraft doesn’t cost much to maintain.” They had discussed taking donations and decided it “wasn’t really moral/meaningful” to.

Curley named the man responsible a month later, while apologising for a holiday outage caused by his own Dynmap folder reaching 35 GB: the system was there “thanks to Dan Houtz at Server Central.” The specification he posted was serious hardware for a hobby Minecraft server — a Dell PowerEdge 2950, two quad-core Xeon 5410s, 32 GB of memory, four 73 GB 15K SAS drives in RAID10 — with the note that matters here: “The server is provided by Server Central and is not hosted at TWiT itself.”

The full arrangement only became legible at the end, when Timberwolf1777 explained it to the forum in December 2014: the box was provided for TWiT’s use by Server Central for promotional purposes, and Chad — then producing Game On! — had chosen to point it at a Minecraft server and asked his ChatCraft friends to run it. So three parties had a claim on TWiTcraft and none of them was the person doing the work: Server Central owned the hardware, TWiT owned the name, and Curley had root. It is part of why, in December 2014, the server could not simply be handed to the community that had built it — nobody in that conversation was in a position to give it away.

The Game On! question

A long-serving player, NgtFlyer, wrote during the shutdown that the server "was originally brought up as part of GameOn, a show on the TWiT.TV network." That is the recollection of someone who was there, and it is the only account of the founding anyone offered. It could not be confirmed anywhere else. TWiT's Game On! ran from January to April 2012 and its single Minecraft episode, on 11 March 2012, was an interview with Notch and Jeb; neither that episode's page nor any other TWiT.tv page mentions a Minecraft server. The timing fits — the show ended the same month the server opened — but the connection remains a community memory rather than a documented fact.

What is documented is the other TWiT connection. Chad "OMGchad" Johnson created OMGcraft independently in July 2012; TWiT picked it up as a show that August. Chad was a TWiTcraft staffer and co-hosted its podcast, and on 27 March 2014 he devoted OMGcraft episode 146 to a tour of the server — "Chad shows off our very own TWiTCraft Minecraft server." It is the only episode in TWiT's archive about the place.

A server that built a government

What makes TWiTcraft unusual in the archive is how much of it was administration. The forums are not mostly about Minecraft. They are about zoning, transit, rents, taxes, and who gets to build where.

Leoville and the towns

The capital was Leoville, named for Leo Laporte, sitting at spawn. It had plots, a bank, a mall, a rail station, and a chronic housing shortage. Around it grew a constellation of player towns, each of which eventually got its own forum: Sky Five City, the Mirage District, Eureka, SciFi City, Medieval City, Chadville, Stonerun, Sandale, Lakedale, Pod Sixia, Stormont. Old Leoville and New Leoville both have forums, which tells you the capital was rebuilt at least once.

Leoville's dominance was a standing complaint. In August 2013 the moderator asim0v opened a long thread on the state of the server arguing, among much else, that everything was too concentrated at spawn. A newer player, pixelsinner, put the case plainly: could there not be two or three official cities with duplicated services, rather than one? "I mean, could imagine the US being centered around only one city?"

The Department of Transportation

The DOT was a real institution with a real staff, run for most of its life by Robrotheram. It maintained the rail network, the Nether roads, and four transit hubs placed 2,000 blocks out from spawn in each compass direction — built, in Rob's words, so that people did not have to run their own line into the capital to get anywhere. By April 2013 the Nether road served the Airfield, Hyrule, Sheep Port, and every DOT hub. The DOT had its own forum, its own donation drives, and its own bureaucratic tone. When one player listed the builds most worth preserving, they nominated "the whole of DOT," conceding it was not strictly a build at all.

Money, shops and a post office

New players spawned with 300 in currency. There were shops, rents, a mall, a Flea Market and a Black Market beside it, a real-estate agency, and recurring debates about whether to introduce a tax. In one podcast the hosts talk through the problem that a daily tax would simply push players into storing money with each other — inventing private banking to dodge it. A player was already running a rental business out of a Google spreadsheet.

The Black Market itself did not last in its first form. Dio opened it in October 2012 as, by his own description, a “big black building” beside the Flea Market, promising a second floor, a buy room, high-rise apartments and a casino; by December another player was reporting it “currently closed.” The black box was demolished and rebuilt on the same ground as The Palms, a far larger building whose welcome sign at 333, 297 still reads “Casino, Shops and Condos.” Its lobby directory lays out the ambition floor by floor: shopping on the first, a casino and restaurant on the second, condos on the third and fourth (4-A and 4-B “For Sale”), and a penthouse on the fifth, “Owner: Diocia” — every line of it still marked “(Construction)” when the October 2013 snapshot was taken, with a security office, a warehouse vault and toggle-controlled front doors already in place downstairs. It is the building Legida later nominated for preservation as “Dio’s Home and Store.”

Because SignShop kept no database, the shops themselves survive: every one of them is a sign, and 7,262 of them are still standing in the archived worlds — 4,202 on the 2013 worlds and 3,060 on the map that replaced them. Read together they are the price list of the place. In October 2013 a diamond sold in a Leoville shop for about 30 coins and a shop would give you 25 for one; the server’s own TWiTMART store, the [iSell] signs at spawn that turned raw materials into coins, paid 2.4 coins a diamond, which is why nobody sold diamonds to the server and why the forums argued for years that TWiTMART’s infinite appetite for cobblestone and coal was printing money. The ATMs paid 55 coins a day; a repair or a heal at spawn cost 300; somebody listed a dragon egg for 20,000. The post office turns out to have been the plugin’s [DonateHand] sign, which drops whatever you are holding into the chest behind it — 582 of them stand in the worlds as mailboxes and tip jars. The Economy has the whole index.

There was a post office, built on the SignShop plugin, with branches planned for Leoville, the Mirage and Sky Five. Town Hall #1, on 8 December 2012, spent a quarter of an hour on its plumbing — specifically on the fact that SignShop tracked things by ID in a flat file rather than a database, which broke the mail.

The town halls

Once a month, on a Saturday evening, the server held a town hall in Mumble and recorded it. Six survive — plus the meet-and-greet that opened the new map — and they are the best evidence of what this place actually was. The format was an agenda plus an open floor; anyone without a microphone typed into Mumble chat and had their question read aloud. Town Hall #1, on 8 December 2012, worked through the Mirage District expansion, low-cost dorms, the DOT, land ownership, the post office and Minecraft 1.4 bugs before opening the floor.

The policy work was serious. The low-cost dorms were priced at 50 in-game dollars with a starter kit attached, and the stated reason was social engineering: give new players somewhere to live so they stop “littering the landscape” with cobble boxes. To price Leoville plots, the moderators downloaded the SQL table of every player’s balance, took the average, and set rent from it — then had to start over, because a thousand turned out to be half an hour’s work. They debated grace periods, subletting, escrow, and what a landlord owes a tenant when the rules change underfoot: “people can get angry when you change things under their feet like that.”

They were also very funny about it. The same meeting contains a sustained bit about running a Ponzi scheme on the server, a proposal for loan sharks, and the observation that since PvP was disabled you would simply “hire corrupt moderators to shake people down.” Someone summarised the administration as “the laziest landlords ever.” Another moderator, mid-derail: “we’re the worst moderators ever.” When a player pointed out that everything ran on volunteers in their spare time, the reply was — “like government.”

A parliament that could only draft

What the recordings show, and the forums do not, is how little the room could actually decide. Almost every proposal ran aground on a configuration file nobody present could edit. The plot economy is the clearest case: the number of regions a player may own is a single flat number in a text file, applied to everyone at once, with no per-player permission — so the land market the town hall spent two years designing was never possible to build. Entity limits, lift signs, the plugin list and the update schedule were all in the same category. The recurring sentence is some version of we would love to, but we can’t, followed by a promise to raise it: “I can have Curly see if he’s heard any bugs about these.”

By September 2013 the room was diagnosing itself. Discussing whether the town halls should continue at all, one participant argued they had to become “a decentralized thing where lots of people can step in and do different responsibilities and we’re not relying on any one or two certain people” — because “in the past we’ve had issue with one person using it and trying to control the whole situation, instead of it being a community type discussion.” The host of that meeting repeatedly tried to give the job away: if somebody else wanted to host next time, that was fine by him, as long as they recorded it and posted it publicly.

The ceiling is stated most plainly in that same meeting, while working out what powers VanteS’s proposed city “mayors” would hold. Any powers they were given, a participant explains, “would be handed down from the moderators” — the community would produce a proposal, present it, and the moderators would then decide what level of access to grant. The meeting closes on the same note: there would be a draft, and the draft would be presented to the mods.

They had built a parliament that could only draft. Six weeks after that meeting, the plan it had spent the evening refining was overtaken by a forum post announcing the full reset. The recordings are here; what happened afterwards is further down this page.

One more recording survives from the other side of the reset. On 11 January 2014, five days after the new map opened, PosterAnonymous hosted a meet-and-greet in Mumble instead of a town hall — “this is just us saying hello.” Twenty-odd people went round the room: who they were, when they had joined, what they were building. Robrotheram laid out the Department of Transportation’s road standard (five wide, cobbled edges, stone brick down the middle, a pumpkin every few blocks, tunnels tall enough for a horse); ngtflyer pitched horse trails marked with fence posts and torches in place of the old rail network, since “once horses came into play, you didn’t need a long rail system”; the host asked people to spread out from what he was already calling “Neo Leoville” to the other hub towns, which had “everything that the main spawn has — the only thing they don’t have is the big building dedicated to the moderators.” Someone asked whether anyone had seen a wolf or an ocelot yet. The questions that mattered — rent, taxes, portals between the hub spawns — were deferred to a proper town hall, and the meeting closed “under 45 minutes — our shortest meeting ever,” with a promise to nag VanteS and asim0v next time. The committee idea floated that evening became a forum thread a fortnight later, and town halls did resume — February, March and April 2014, none of them recorded — until the April meeting was cancelled and, a week later, the State of the server thread took its place. Transcript · audio.

The absence that would define the server’s last year is already visible in 2012, though nobody reads it that way at the time. Episode 4 of the TWiTcraft Podcast exists in the form it does because Curley did not appear: the hosts explain they have spent about three hours trying to reach him across Skype, text, DMs and Mumble, and are recording a community episode instead. They sign off with “we did everything that we normally do just without Curly.” Fourteen minutes into the first town hall, waiting on him again, someone says — “we’re waiting for Curly to stop hanging.” “Okay. Well, that’s recorded.” “Forever.”

Stargates

The longest-running policy argument was about how people should travel. The rail purists — Rob among them — wanted transit to stay physical and vanilla, because moving through the world is what makes the world feel large. The other camp wanted Stargates: instant teleports between towns. The compromise floated as early as July 2012 was to make Stargates a purchasable civic perk: a town that farmed enough money could buy one, and use it to attract residents. The debate was still unresolved a year later.

The lag wars

A recurring thread through every town hall is that the server was slow, and that the community's own success was the cause. Spawn was ringed with shops; shops meant chests; chests meant entities. One moderator downloaded the entire Flea Market, pasted it alone into an empty flatland world, and found it still tanked the framerate — proving the problem was the build itself, not its neighbourhood.

The diagnosis that emerged was harsher: the original spawn had been generated on a much older version of Minecraft and sat in the middle of everything anyone cared about. One player demonstrated that 325 item frames in a 19×19 area produced a dramatic drop, and item frames were quietly discouraged near spawn thereafter. There was a build so notorious for its performance cost that the community's name for it was the Lighthouse of Lag, and when they later listed the server's landmarks worth saving, someone nominated it — explicitly for the memory of the frame drop.

In early 2013 the Flea Market was closed and its shops relocated. Spawn was rebuilt entirely for the first anniversary that April, the moderators explaining simply that the old one had gotten stale.

The chat logs measure the complaint: 1,760 lines mention lag on 217 of the 254 days the bridge was up — roughly one every eighteen minutes of chat, all year. The admin’s own explanations, typed at the server console, are in the same logs: “we are on a dev build” — Console, 2013-09-01 — “we get denial of service attacks almost weekly” — Console, 2013-09-01 — and, in October 2013, a description of the machine itself: “and we never go above 30 % cpu usage” — Console, 2013-10-13 “they're not ssd” — Console, 2013-10-13

There is a coda to the lag wars that only survives in the audio. Curley had handed out the world seed, and a player who loaded it in single player found himself standing at the exact coordinates of Rage’s shop in the Flea Market. Spawn had been moved early on, so the busiest commercial district on the server had been built directly on top of TWiTcraft’s original spawn point — the oldest chunks in the world, generated in Minecraft 1.2.3 and then played on 1.2.5, carrying a lighting bug the later terrain did not have. That is why that particular patch of ground lagged when its neighbours did not. As someone put it at the meeting: they should not have built the Flea Market on a burial ground.

The Diamond Grief Club

The worst security incident in the server's history happened weeks before the reset was announced. The fullest account is in the town-hall audio, but it was also documented on the forums the same night.

On a Monday in early September 2013 a griefer used a vanilla Minecraft authentication exploit to log in as the server’s omgchad administrator account, arriving with privileges he should not have had. He used WorldEdit to erase the End spawn and an enderman grinder, spawned withers into the world, and handed out diamond blocks in bulk — flooding the economy with currency nobody had mined. The moderators called it the Diamond Grief Club incident; a moderator posted the forensic account the same night, “word vomit… from staring at the server log for 3 hours.”

What followed says a lot about how the place worked. He was banned and the damage rolled back, but the diamonds had scattered — some into the chests of players who had done nothing wrong except accept a gift. There was no way to find it all. So Curley asked people to do the gentlemanly thing and destroy any diamond blocks they had picked up that day, and VanteS spent the following days hunting down hidden caches by hand. Curley patched the exploit. And at the town hall the moderators paused to thank Timberwolf1777 — not present to take a bow — for killing the withers before they did worse.

How much of the Club’s money was ever recovered is unknowable, but the scale of the economy it landed in is not: the October 2013 world files hold about 48,000 diamonds’ worth in chests, counting blocks as nine, against roughly 16,700 in the year-younger 2015 map. The Vault counts them, chest by chest.

As it happened, from the chat logs

SkyerCorp’s logs turn the forum account into a timeline. The impostor logged in under the omgchad name at 14:12 on Monday 9 September 2013 (logger’s clock) and was gone at 14:55. In those forty-three minutes the chat did not know what it was watching: players greeted “Chad”, asked for autographs, and were handed diamond blocks.

The withers went on being reported into the evening — VanDerProtofsky’s trivia night, running in the same chat, paused twice “whilst the wither situation is dealt with” — and at 19:41 the admin stopped the server from the console. It came back whitelisted; at 00:16 he opened it again: “best I can do, thanks for all your help tonight mate, saved my butt” — Console, 2013-09-10. By then the clean-up had started on its own: “Any ideas how to destory 374 diamonds? :(” — SkyerCorp, 2013-09-10 and “okay thanks again - I gotta go puke some illgal diamonds into lava :)” — helicologo, 2013-09-10. The whole day is on The Chat.

It was the first item on an agenda whose second item was the possible 1.7 map reset. Within six weeks the reset had been announced and Timberwolf had left.

The reset

The defining crisis of TWiTcraft was not a grief attack or a hack. It was a version upgrade.

Minecraft 1.7 changed world generation. Any land generated before it would meet any land generated after it at a visible seam, and the new biomes would be unreachable without going far out or starting over. Every long-running server in 2013 faced the same decision. TWiTcraft's map was by then eighteen months old, heavily built, and — as the lag debates had established — anchored to an aging spawn.

The console lines in the chat logs date the mechanics. On 16 October 2013 the admin set expectations — “1.7 has be finalized, spigot has to update, plugins have to be updated, chosen, and migrated” — Console, 2013-10-16 — and on 27 December he was asking who had generated the new world: “who generated "new_survival” — Console, 2013-12-27, “i'd prefer to drop survival and rename new to survival” — Console, 2013-12-27, “will prolly take around 24 hours” — Console, 2013-12-27. On reset day, “stopping to remove inv” — Console, 2014-01-05 at 13:29; at 19:10, “ok kids, have fun, things seem good, i'll be around, hit me up on twitter if i'm needed” — Console, 2014-01-05. Three days later, a fun fact and a regret: “fun fact: total server accumulated cash $88615 over 285 accounts” — Console, 2014-01-08 and “if it was up to me the main world would have been amplified and the server would be on hard lol” — Console, 2014-01-08.

The Grand Compromise

On 7 September 2013 the moderator VanteS posted a proposal he was careful to label as his own and not official. He called it the Grand Compromise: reset the map completely after 1.7 — no carried inventories, no carried money — but move a small number of the community's most important builds across, so that nobody's best work was simply deleted. The sticking point, he wrote, was players losing builds they had worked on for a year and a half.

Nine days later a companion thread appeared: the TWiTCraft Historical Preservation Society. Its author proposed a registry of builds so significant they would be protected even if their owners left the server, and asked everyone to nominate their top five, with coordinates read off the live map. What followed is the single most valuable document in the archive — a community, facing the deletion of its world, writing down what it thought was worth saving.

Its most quietly moving feature is the etiquette that emerged. Several people refused to nominate their own work. Timberwolf1777 wrote that although he adored his home he would follow the thread-starter's example and be a gentleman about it — and so declined to name the Citadel, which was his. Everybody else named it anyway; it appears on more lists than any build except Legida's castle. Laustin_D_Woods likewise left off the Observatory while thanking everyone for the affection it was getting, and FreonKnight left the Airfield off his own list, then wrote several hundred words about the runway he had spent a year scaling to FAA specifications. The builds they chose are mapped further down this page.

The decision

On 16 October 2013 the moderator blendermf posted the outcome. It was not the compromise. It was a full reset: everything back to nothing, money included; the old map preserved as a download and kept online read-only; multiple city hubs instead of one capital; a redesigned lobby; Stargates for transport at last.

The reaction was immediate. The second post in the thread is Timberwolf1777 — one of the server's most prolific builders and posters, and the owner of the Citadel — wishing the server well and saying he would not be joining it:

If this is what is best for the server then of course I give it my blessing. However, it leaves no place for me in the world so I won't be joining you all in this new TWiTCraft future.Timberwolf1777, 16 October 2013

He had spent the previous six weeks negotiating. In September he had said he would accept the reset in whatever form it came, so long as he could keep his home; he offered to have the Citadel copied to the edge of one of the new towns, and promised that if it survived he would spend his time on community projects and transit instead of his own plot. Three days after the announcement he explained what it came down to:

there are two things that make me happy on TWiTCraft: 1: the community, 2: my home that I dreamed up in 2011 and made (the citadel). I must have both to keep playing.Timberwolf1777, 19 October 2013

He noted in the same post that FreonKnight felt the same way about the airfield. The Citadel had been designed a year before TWiTcraft existed, and it is still standing in the October 2013 world file, 249 blocks tall.

A moderator edited that post, and left a note in it explaining they had chosen to leave most of it standing rather than escalate. The third post, from Warriorbox, tried to hold the thread together: people were hurting, nothing had actually been done yet, and this was a chance to discuss the decision like adults. "Let the games begin."

Curley took the world backup that would become twitcraft-10-16-13.zip — the largest file in this archive — on the same day the announcement went up.

The interim

On 30 November 2013, VanteS announced that Curley had replaced TWiTcraft entirely with a temporary vanilla 1.7 server: difficulty Hard, PvP on, amplified terrain, whitelist-only for community members in good standing. It became the second-largest thread on the forums. A second world snapshot, survival-12-05-13.zip, was taken a week later. When the dust settled the server had a new main world — new_survival — and a second world called outworldland, and the old map survived only as the download you can still get from this site.

The long decline

The forum's own activity is the clearest measure of what the reset cost. 2013 was the server's peak year at roughly 4,300 posts. 2014 opened strongly and then fell away month after month.

The rebuilt world was not empty — 2014 produced the Aquadome 2.0, Laputa the castle in the sky, New Age Island, Venteare, a Villager Trading Post, and a steady trade in shops and hotels. But the monthly numbers fall from 447 in January 2014 to 85 in December. By then OMGcraft had also stopped: its last episode aired 25 September 2014.

Arrivals, month by month

The player files give a second measure, independent of the forum. Every file carries the date its player first joined, and counting those by month is as close as the archive gets to a heartbeat. The pattern is not a slow fade. New arrivals were still climbing through the summer of 2014 — 319 in May, 393 in June, 368 in July, 314 in August — and then fell off a cliff: 106 in September, 66 in October, 58, 36, and the last 35 in January 2015. Whatever was said on the forum, people kept finding the server right up until the month OMGcraft stopped airing.

Grey months are inflated by re-stamps: April 2012 (the move to the final server software, when everyone already playing was stamped as they logged in) and January 2014 (returning players after the reset). November and December 2013 fall between the two surviving file sets. Full detail on the records page.

The other end of the same files — the date each player was last seen — tells the same story from the far side. Last logins peak in July and August 2014 — 426 and 463 people seen for the final time in those two months — then fall to 195 in September and about 140 a month for the rest of the year. Even so, 180 people were still logging in during January 2015, the server’s last month. The Last Day has the chart.

Who did not come back

The post counts show the shape of the decline but not its cause. Tracking individual authors does. 86 people posted on the forum between July and October 2013, the last four months of the old world. 49 of them ever posted again. By June 2014 only 32 were still active. So a little over four in ten of the established community never came back after the reset — and the ones who left were not the casual players. (This measures forum accounts rather than logins, so it undercounts anyone who kept playing without posting; as a measure of the community that ran the place, it is the best the archive has.)

Several of the builds the community had just voted to preserve lost their builders. Timberwolf1777 left explicitly over the reset and stopped posting in December 2013, taking the Citadel’s author with him. Laustin_D_Woods, who built the Observatory, last posted in November 2013. Others had already drifted before the announcement: FreonKnight of the Airfield in September, Edgemerian in August, Cheeetozz — who wrote the forum’s first guide on its first morning — in October.

But it was not a cliff, and the archive should not pretend it was. January 2014 was the second-busiest month in the forum’s history: 447 posts from 60 people. The relaunch worked. In February a player asked whether TWiTcraft had got smaller and was firmly corrected — the map seemed bigger, “there are a heck of a lot more people on… if anything its gotten bigger.” The new world’s problem was not that it was empty on day one. It was that griefing arrived with it in the longest sustained wave anyone could remember, and that the numbers then fell every month: 43 active posters in February, 35 in April, 26 in June.

The hundred-block rule

The reset was supposed to fix the new player’s experience. In October 2013 BobMcBob had put the case that newcomers arrived in Leoville, saw the shops and towers, and realised they had “almost no chance to ever own anything remotely close to town” — they felt like second-class citizens. Five cities and stargates were the answer.

What went with them was a rule almost nobody has written down since. To stop the sign-shop lag that had crippled old Leoville, anyone building within 100 blocks of any town square or spawn region agreed to build only “a reasonable sized home” — and explicitly no shop, no grinder, no large storage room, no large redstone. HGLCraft found out the hard way eight days after the relaunch, and noted the part that surprised him: the restriction ran a further hundred blocks past the point where the wilderness began. VanteS confirmed the reasoning — “we were bit pretty hard last map when we allowed shops on Leoville lots” — and thought the cost was small: “100 blocks is not that long of a distance, it’s about a 13 second run.”

The rule applied to all five cities at once. Everything that had made the old capital feel inhabited — the Flea Market, the Black Market and the Palms that replaced it, the shop fronts ringing spawn — was now forbidden in every place a new player could arrive. HGLCraft saw it immediately: with the five cities “and pushing shops out I think it will fragment the players too much.” VanteS named the gap himself in the same exchange, without quite calling it a problem: “What we really need is for somebody to build a shopping district like the Mirage Mall or Flea Market, away from spawn but large enough that it attracts foot traffic.” Nobody built a district. What grew instead, the signs show, was a handful of large private stores far from any spawn — SWfan85’s Rougaroux Distillery Outlet, x3fox’s shop “200 blocks south of Old Leoville”, MightyMat321’s SkyShop, the HGLCraft Store, Wilmetter’s Enchanted Book Store — each with well over a hundred shop signs, and none of them anywhere a new player would walk past.

A month later gregor1942 described the result: “everyone is basically hanging around main spawn.” Five cities, four of them quiet, and the one with people in it under rules that kept it looking empty. The arrivals data follows: 120 people made their first forum post in 2013; 63 did in 2014 — 40 in the first half of the year, 23 in the second, and exactly one in October.

The maintenance crisis

On 2 May 2014 VanDerProtofsky moved the private complaint onto the record in a thread called State of the server…. His list: ten-minute crash cycles, a fortnightly slide into unplayable lag, a server left on an old build with game-breaking bugs, configuration errors unfixed since the day of the reset, the resource-world rotation three months overdue, the IRC bridge down despite working solutions, and community-approved changes never implemented — “despite the assistance offered.” Robrotheram attached a spreadsheet: nine crashes in one hour of play, one every seven minutes.

The thread is not a revolt. What the community asked for was help, phrased as carefully as people could manage. Robrotheram proposed appointing a second person who could restart the box, and went out of his way to make it small: “The person does not need root.” rjlan82 noted he could do it from a phone. Dio: “There are a lot of people dedicated to Twitcraft that know how to administer a server.” DragonofHalo, who opened by saying he did not want to start yelling at anyone, pointed out that town-hall proposals which had won both a majority vote and moderator approval had simply never been implemented. VanDerProtofsky asked who and where the other two administrators even were, and answered his own question about Curley as gently as he could: “it just seems his interests are elsewhere these days.”

The playtime bears it out. The server kept a record of every hour each person spent on its final map, from December 2013 to the shutdown — and it is the quietest possible indictment. The two people asking for a way to keep the server alive had more time logged on it than anyone; the admin who held the only keys had thirteen hours, and had not appeared since June.

Hours are time connected on the 2014–15 world — the only playtime the archive can measure. But the distinction that matters is how each mod left. Three resigned the post outright, and were publicly thanked for it: LeonimuZ in October 2012, ipodparf in May 2013, and asim0v in June 2014 — with the etiquette put plainly when ipodparf went. Timberwolf1777 set out what the job had actually looked like when someone did it: “You, of all the original TWiTCraft moderators, have been the only consistent presence on the server. Since the very beginning you made sure to regularly represent moderator opinion and interests, with constant positivity and a fair-minded work ethic toward your moderator tasks.” Dio made the same point, aimed at the moderators who had stopped playing but kept their say: “Tons of respect for actually resigning, rather than just showing up once every other month and having input on a server you dont play on anymore.” Curley never resigned. He kept the title and the only set of keys, on thirteen hours — while VanteS, who stayed to the end, logged more time on the server than any other player.

Curley did not post in the thread. He did run maintenance on 4 May, and NgtFlyer — the most consistently generous voice on the forum — thanked him for it and reminded everyone that administration is thankless and the hosting was free. Meanwhile ToucanMonkey noticed something else happening: “Happy to see the TWiTcraft mods are now deleting posts in this thread! Watch what you say, kids!” On 3 June asim0v locked it, on the grounds that “the constructive discussion seems to be over.”

December 2014: TWiT offers a way out

Seven months later evilbob66 opened Server Status with the blunt version: the server had “been abandoned by those responsible for maintaining it” — and if it was going to be “left to rot, why not just pull the plug?”

Dio answered the argument that the players had caused it by drifting away. The admin, he wrote, had been given plenty of time to update the server before the exodus and plenty of warning that good players would leave; fixes had been offered and ignored. Dio had offered. VanDerProtofsky had written an entire replacement for the broken bank plugin and handed it over. He credited VanteS in the same breath for having “gone down with the ship,” and then said the part that had been circulating privately for a year: “The fact is Curley does not care about the server. The only way I see it being saved is him giving the admin power to someone else and a rebrand/reboot.”

At that point Timberwolf1777 came back to the forum. He had quit the server in October 2013 over the reset, and he worked at TWiT. He explained the arrangement nobody had ever written down: the machine was provided for TWiT’s use by Server Central for promotional purposes, and Chad — then producing Game On! — had used it to host TWiTcraft with his ChatCraft friends. Game On! had since been cancelled and Chad had left the network, but TWiT had honoured the arrangement and kept the machine running. Then, on 23 December, after speaking with other TWiT staff, he put the situation to the community in writing:

Based on what you all have posted, I am working on the premise that the admins and mods other than Vantes have pretty much abandoned the server. … We leave the decision up to you all.Timberwolf1777, 23 December 2014

The two options were: leave it as it was — unsupported, stuck on 1.7, plugins broken, “unless the admins return” — or have Server Central wipe the box for other TWiT projects. What was not among the options was the thing the community had been asking for since May: giving the keys to somebody who would use them.

VanteS answered the practical questions the way he always did, relaying what he had been told: Curley intended to upgrade TWiTcraft to 1.8, and would fix or replace the broken plugins then. When? “I don’t know.”

The community voted with its posts to keep going anyway. oftenpurplepants: “I would still take a buggy version of TWITCraft over a complete obliteration of it.” 5murg111: “We should keep pushing the server to do good until we can push no more.” On 29 December Timberwolf1777 read the room and stepped back — “Seems like there still is interest and progress. Good. I’ll keep an eye on the forums and check in with you all in a couple months.”

Five weeks later it was over. The 1.8 upgrade never came.

The server said as much itself, right to the end. By the last stretch its message of the day had shrunk to a curt Calm down., and the notice waiting for anyone not yet let in — the server's own automated voice, preserved in its config — read “Working on a better twitcraft, patience appreciated! ^_^”. It was still promising the better TWiTcraft when the box was wiped.

Four things killed TWiTcraft, in this order. The reset took away most of the reasons the established community had to stay. The hundred-block rule took away the thing that had made the arrival point feel alive, at precisely the moment the server needed to convert newcomers. The maintenance failures of 2014 took away the ability to play at all. And OMGcraft’s last episode, in September 2014, closed the pipe that had been bringing new people in from TWiT’s audience since the beginning. Any one of them was survivable. The four together, inside eleven months, were not.

The admin at the console

The absent-admin story has a counterpart in the chat logs. 356 lines on 39 days arrive from a speaker called Console — the server’s own console, and the person at it is Curley: he complains about his in-game name, says don’t call me admin, describes doing IT work in San Diego, and mentions being logged into the console over SSH from his phone at work. It is the only first-person record of running the server, and it is mostly restarts, resets and the occasional lecture. Read together, it is the maintenance log of a machine kept alive from a day job.

Every line links to its place in the day’s chat. All 356 → The world seed, the desktop origin and the “Working on a better twitcraft” message in What it was built from come from the same person’s server files.

Who was actually online

The forum shows who cared enough to post; the statistics files show who stayed to the end. In September 2026 a third witness turned up: SkyerCorp’s logs of the #twitcraft IRC channel, into which the server relayed every join, quit and line of chat for its whole life. The relay itself was never archived; SkyerCorp’s IRC client happened to log the channel every day from June 2013 to March 2014, and he kept the files for twelve years. They put numbers on the busiest stretch of the server’s life. 1,840 different names passed through the bridge; 1,063 of them said something. On the night the old map closed, 179 people were seen and 67 were on at the same moment — the most the logs ever caught — and the two months that followed were the loudest the server ever was, at 75,000 and 77,000 lines of chat.

Distinct players seen by the bridge each week (joins or chat). The pale bars are the reset week; the blank stretch is December 2013, when the bridge or the server was down. SkyerCorp’s capture ends on 26 March 2014, so the record stops there — the relay itself carried on. Every line is searchable on The Chat; the reset night itself is 5 January and 6 January.

The same logs answer the question the forum argued about for a year: did the reset keep the players or lose them? Both. Of the 1,067 names seen before the wipe, 422 ever came back — 244 of them in the first week. Of the 207 who had actually been around in the two months before it, 153 returned (about three in four), and the reset pulled back another 269 lapsed players who had drifted away earlier in the year, plus 492 brand-new names. It also puts a figure on play itself: 40,000 player-hours in nine months, counted login to logout, with January 2014 alone at 9,300 hours — half again the best month the old map ever had. By the last week of the logs, 139 of the pre-wipe players were still there, and 47 of them dated from the server’s first two weeks in June 2013. The full breakdown, and the hours leaderboard, are on The Chat.

The night of the reset, in the players’ own words

The Plank of Shame

TWiTcraft moderated in public. Every ban went into a forum called the Plank of Shame, one thread per case, the sentence in the title — [2 Days], [1 Week], [Perm] — and edited to [Update: unbanned] or [Updated to Perm] as appeals were heard. It is the largest forum in the archive: 508 cases across 1,962 posts.

Griefing dominates, appearing in 134 cases. Theft and stealing account for around 100 more; the rest is spam, bad language, chest-raiding, lava, alt accounts, advertising and a scattering of x-ray. The sentences were short by the standards of the era and appeals were genuinely granted — several of the longest threads are arguments that ended with a ban being lifted or reduced.

The moderators who signed the most cases were VanteS (198), asim0v (112), ipodparf (44), LeonimuZ (42) and Demonfive (38). Curley signed ten.

The last week

On Friday 30 January 2015 late in the morning — 11:49 by the forum’s clock — Curley posted to General Discussion that TWiTcraft was closing. The post is methodical rather than sentimental: every map backed up as of that moment, the plugins backed up too, the server staying up one more week, the map files available at mc.twit.tv/archive separated per world to save everyone bandwidth. Nothing built after that point would be in the backups. After 6 February the server, forums, IRC, website and Mumble would all go away.

The world files carry their own timestamp of that moment. The last save of every world is 11:55:41, six minutes after the post — the backup he described as “as of right now”. Nobody was online when it was taken: the last player file the server ever wrote belongs to BlockBuster1235, who logged out at 10:58 that morning from the survival world; twenty people had been on in the previous twenty-four hours and sixty-five in the previous week, VanteS among them until just after ten the night before. The Last Day reconstructs those hours from the files.

He said he would hand over the plugin folder by request only, wanting to comb through it first to strip other people's personal data and his own SQL passwords — but even after repeated requests over the months and years that followed, he never released it, which is why no plugin configuration survives in this archive. He did, at least, give the community explicit permission to do whatever it liked with the worlds:

As far as I'm concerned you guys are welcome to do whatever you please with the maps and files I offer (host em yourself, play on em in single player, Blow things up, or print out physical copies of builds and have a ceremonial bonfire if you please) — Be awesome to each otherCurley, 30 January 2015

Thirty-seven replies followed over the next week. SkyerCorp thanked him "for your many years of service from the ChatCraft days through now." Player after player wrote that TWiTcraft had been the first multiplayer server they ever joined. NgtFlyer called it a second home for its entire existence. Dio asked why it could not simply continue under new management — "This is TwitCraft, not CurleyCraft." coolmj2000, who had joined only recently, asked whether new mods and admins could be found among the people who still cared. SkyerCorp made a practical request: put signs up in game, because plenty of players logging in that week had no idea it was ending.

The reason, as NgtFlyer explained it to a newer player, was undramatic. The server had run almost three years, had begun as part of a TWiT show and been a fixture of OMGcraft, and the player count had fallen.

Within days, community members mirrored the archive in four places — Canada, the United States and France. Three of those mirrors are gone. The French one is still serving the files eleven years later, and is where everything on this site came from.

It is worth setting the sequence down plainly, because an archive is for keeping the record rather than smoothing it. For nine months the community asked — in public, and about as politely as it is possible to ask — for somebody else to be given enough access to keep the server alive. People volunteered. Working code was written and handed over. The request was never refused in writing; it was simply never answered. Posts making it were deleted, the thread carrying it was locked, and TWiT’s own offer to let the players decide their future ended with a promise to check back in a couple of months. The decision, when it came, was made by one person, with one week’s notice, and the community found out by reading a forum post.

And then that same person backed up every world, published all of them, and told everyone to do whatever they liked with the files. Both of those things are true at once. The first is why there was nothing left to save in February 2015. The second is the only reason this site exists.

The map of what mattered

In September 2013, facing the reset, the community nominated the builds it thought were worth preserving and posted coordinates for them. Those coordinates are the backbone of the marker set now on the web map.

Every coordinate below was checked against the actual world files: the chunk was located in its region file, the column scanned from the top down, and the surface height and top block recorded. All 43 resolved. The block types corroborate the descriptions in a satisfying way — the Citadel really is a tower topping out at y 249, the Glass Cube is glass, the Observatory's dome is glass, and the underwater pyramid is under water.

Not everything that mattered is a tidy marker on the map. A couple of the server’s landmarks were caught mid-teardown when the October 2013 snapshot froze, and survive in it half-dismantled: Timberwolf1777’s Sky Tram — the “white lines in the sky” that carried players to Hyrule, the Airfield and Sky 5 — had been voted out of existence in August 2013 once the Netherroad surpassed it, yet was still strung across the sky when the snapshot was taken; and asim0v’s Mall @ Sky 5, which he had begun closing the same month, still stands up in the sky, its stalls papered with his own “Sky5 Mall is closing — please remove all shops” notices. Others were scarred: in December 2012 Timberwolf’s caged pet wither, Smokey, broke loose after a permissions change and tore through the Citadel, the Mirage and East Leoville before VanteS put it down. And VanteS’s own TWiTCraft Museum gave the community, staring down the reset, an idea that reads strangely now: keep the whole old world locked and read-only as “a living museum … using the current museum building as the entrance.” The October snapshot has one more quirk: it was taken two weeks before Halloween, and spawn, Town Hall and Leo’s Mansion were buried in jack-o’-lanterns, cobwebs and mob heads — largely Timberwolf1777’s work, still being taken down in November. The download is kept exactly as it was; a clearly labelled reconstruction of the nine regions around spawn, with the decorations removed and the December blocks restored beneath them, is on the archive server as its one living world, day, night and mobs included. The full field guide to the world — cities, wonders and lost builds, each linked to its forum post — is on the Landmarks & Places page.

The pre-reset world (Survival, October 2013 — 31 markers)

Also marked: Legida's Fairy Castle, Dio's Home & Store, TwitCathedral, Sandale, Sheep Port, Edgemerian's Castle, Bladelands, Android_FA5's SciFi Desert Compound, the Hanging Gardens, Stonerun, Pod Sixia, Stormont, Floating Trees Village, MoneyCrazed Home, TWiTPark Race Track, Goobghanistani Speedway, the underwater pyramid project, Sandy Blocks Courtyard, and Airfield Runway 18/36.

The rebuilt world (New Survival, 2014–15 — 12 markers)

The Aquadome 2.0 (1641, 69, 13), Laputa the Castle in the Sky (143, 66, 3732), Venteare, New Age Island, Te Town of Mine, the Medieval City town hall, the Villager Trading Post, the Round-About Pick Shop, 5081 Food and More, geo131313's "apocalypse plan" horse vault at 4577, 72, -2791, the point where the DOT's road simply ran out at 988, 63, 490 — and Wilmetter's Enchanted Book Store at 1900, 87, -600, still advertising for customers in January 2015, weeks before the end.

The people

319 people posted on the forums. The most prolific were PosterAnonymous (769 posts), asim0v (670) and VanteS (466) — respectively the Aquadome's instigator, the server's most reflective essayist, and the author of the Grand Compromise. Then gregor1942, Timberwolf1777, DiegoRodriguez10, goldengrace23, thesillychicken, abigail, DragonofHalo.

Curley (panntz) built and ran it — both the server and the forums — and posted 196 times in three years, a light touch for the man who held the only set of keys. Nobody owned TWiTcraft: the machine belonged to Server Central, the name belonged to TWiT, and the place belonged to whoever turned up. Robrotheram ran the DOT. OMGchad and Demonfive co-hosted the TWiTcraft Podcast with Curley. Cheeetozz, t2t2, ipodparf, LeonimuZ, blendermf, SnowSchu and TehRage moderated. The server's surviving whitelist file — its own record of who was trusted with direct access — lists that same core crew and adds three more names to it: nickflame20, thelordnikon and peteyrave.

Sources & method

This history was assembled from:

• The forum archive — 1,932 pages crawled from the surviving mirror, parsed into 1,277 threads and 8,482 dated posts. This is the primary source for almost everything above.
• Seven audio recordings from the Internet Archive — six town halls and an episode of the TWiTcraft Podcast, roughly 5.7 hours — machine-transcribed for this project. They are the fullest source for the Diamond Grief of September 2013, for how the town halls actually ran and what they could and could not decide, for the Flea Market standing on the world’s original spawn point, and for the moderators pricing Leoville rents off a dump of every player’s balance. They also supply the dates of Town Hall #1 (8 December 2012) and #5 (20 April 2013), the confirmation that the server went public in April 2012, and most of the detail on the DOT, the post office and the lag. Read the transcripts.
• The world files, read directly to verify all 43 sets of coordinates.
• The server's own configuration — server.properties, bukkit.yml, the whitelist and ban lists, a WorldEdit log and the 82-file schematic library, recovered from the backup server roots. The source for the world seed, the message-of-the-day, the desktop origin and the lobby arcade.
• The worlds, read a second time for everything in them — all 73,583 signs, every container and its contents, every tamed animal and named mob, every mob spawner, and the timestamps and positions in the 3,028 final player files. These feed the Economy, Vault, Pets & Spawners and Last Day pages, and the ownership guesses made from nearby signs and beds are marked as guesses wherever they appear.
• Public web sources for the TWiT context: twit.tv's own episode listings for OMGcraft and Game On!, and podcast directories for the TWiTcraft Podcast's five episodes (21 June – 31 December 2012).