A field guide to the world
Three years of a Minecraft server leave a map full of places — cities with governments, a colosseum under the sea, an airfield with a runway that took a year to lay, a castle a hundred people voted to save. This is a guide to the ones the forum archive remembers, with map coordinates and a link to the post where each one's story is told.
The three most-asked-about
The Sky Tram
still up, Oct 2013An elevated minecart network — the "white lines in the sky" on the old dynmap — built deliberately high and marked by a giant diamond helix, with stops at Hyrule, the Airfield, Sky 5, North Leoville, Vantes Ranch and Bladelands. Reached from spawn down through the Citadel. As the Netherroad made it redundant, Timberwolf put it to a community removal vote in August 2013 — but the teardown was unhurried: the whole network was still in the sky when the October snapshot was taken, its stations and its SKYTRAM AVENUE signs intact. Ride the lifts up from North Leoville (around 345, 70, 127) to the platforms at y 235 and it is still there to walk.
The Mall @ Sky 5
still up, Oct 2013The remodelled successor to Sky 5's free shop strip — regioned stalls at $350/month with anti-scam rules. It never drew the traffic asim0v hoped, and on 14 August 2013 he began winding it down, for the structures to be "torn down and repurposed for residential lots." The teardown was still in progress at the October snapshot: the mall stands up in the sky at roughly 450, 150, 860, its stalls papered with asim0v's own notices — "Sky5 Mall is closing. Please remove all shops." Not to be confused with the Diamond Club Mall, a 16-floor parody mall (Five Guys, Macy's, Starbucks) built in the old creative world.
The TWiTCraft Museum
old mapVanteS fenced off a museum site and the ocean behind it near spawn, overlapping the Aquadome Development District, and planned a "Museum East" — a pirate cove and ship by Legida, and an imposing volcano island by Timberwolf. When the reset loomed, players proposed keeping the whole old map locked read-only as "a living museum… using the current museum building as the entrance" — almost exactly what this archive has become.
Great builds
The Citadel
old mapAn obsidian castle-home rising to y255, a region ~80 blocks square, "a dream I had… in the winter of 2011," valued by its owner near a million coins. It held a Sky Tram station and a shop-and-storage chest room so large it was blamed for the area's lag. Timberwolf refused to lose it in the reset — and left instead.
The Aquadome
old mapA colossal underwater colosseum — a 126×90 arena under a glass dome, built inside a drained dry dock, funded with tens of thousands of the builder's own coins and meant for events and gambling. It chased a "grand opening" for the better part of a year. Its build thread is one of the largest on the forum.
Fort Valkyrie (Legida's Castle / "Fairy Tail Castle")
old mapThe server's most admired build and the top vote-getter in the 2013 preservation poll — a fantasy castle with a full underground section, later valued at $40,000 and gifted to SkyerCorp, who invoked the Preservation Society to keep it untouched.
The Airfield
old mapA working aviation complex: a Runway 18/36 that took over a year, with night-approach lighting and a rail beneath it; the Diamond Control Tower (Freon's home); an airfield village and a defensive wall; and a planned Hangar One with a USS Macon airship. Freon drifted away before the reset.
Hyrule Castle
old mapThe centrepiece of the Zelda-themed town of Hyrule, SE of spawn — a replica castle with a clock tower and sewers, still unfinished when the map was wiped.
The Observatory
old mapA giant telescope down the road from Hyrule Castle, a fan favourite; its builder last posted in November 2013, on the eve of the reset.
TWiT Cathedral
old mapA cathedral right at spawn, later rebuilt on the new map with stained-glass windows honouring "The Profit Poster" (PosterAnonymous) and "St Robro."
Heaven & "Push It Somewhere Else Heaven"
old mapTimberwolf's ornate floating islands, reached by the Sky Tram, with ToucanMonkey's public build-anywhere "Derp Heaven" alongside. Timberwolf removed Heaven over "trolling," orphaning the public build next door — a small feud in the sky.
The preservation list
old mapA registry of builds "protected even if the owner(s) quit." Among them, with their stated coordinates: Edgemerian's Castle (2100, 122, -3900) and his Giant Statue (2500, 144, -2200); Bladelands (1300, 214, 500); the Hanging Gardens (170, 66, 870); Minion5051's Glass Cube (3100, 190, 100); Android_FA5's SciFi Compound (-430, 63, -1670); the Lighthouse of Lag (-80, 111, 122), remembered for the frame-rate drop it caused; and Dio's Home & Store (318, 115, 297).
Novelties: a Donkey Kong, a Space Ghost, 25 TARDISes
old mapPixel-art and oddities dotted the wilderness: a Donkey Kong "in the middle of nowhere," a building shaped like Space Ghost's head, a wool-enderman-topped luxury yacht, and DragonofHalo's numbered series of about twenty-five TARDISes.
The lobby arcade
from the save filesThe forums are consumed with zoning and rents, but the server's own files remember another side of it. Saved alongside the lobby, as WorldEdit schematics, is a whole arcade's worth of games: a Pong, a Bomberman, a Spleef pit, a Space Mountain, a shooting gallery, an obstacle course and a wipeout run — 82 saved builds in all. They are the record that underneath the government, TWiTcraft was also just a place to play.
Cities & towns
Leoville
old mapThe heart of the server. In February 2013 the mods sold numbered building plots ($2,000 in, $1,500/month, rent paid at the Bank), a scheme argued over for a year. Its shop-sign lag was a chronic crisis — and the reason for the hundred-block rule that came later.
Sky Five City
old map"The first player city on the server, and… the largest city in TWiTcraft" — a floating city over the ocean near spawn, with free numbered residential lots, a commercial district, a City Hall, a park and its own rail. Building it earned asim0v his mod position; it was not rebuilt after the reset.
The Mirage
old mapA high-end rental shopping district and mall near spawn, region-protected after repeated griefing. When spawn shops pulled its traffic away, its owner abolished rent and refunded everyone rather than let it die.
Stonerun
old mapAn early medieval-fantasy town with ramparts and a keep, founded 2012 across the ocean from Leoville. When its founders left they declared it "a completely free-edit area," and thesillychicken & VanteS took over its care.
Pod Sixia
old mapAn ambitious underwater canal city with streets like "Lapiz Lane." Its ten-minute commute killed it; it was formally decommissioned in January 2013 and left as "underwater ruins," complete with a roleplay backstory of "Goobnesian loyalists."
The Undersea Dome (Sea Dome Seven)
old mapGlass domes on a cleared ocean floor, planned to branch off the Sky Tram — a second undersea vision alongside Pod Sixia, with room for residents to build their own dome.
Goobghanistan & Halo Island
old mapA full roleplay nation-state with a "Foreign Legion" and the Goobghanistani Speedway, host of the server's first organized pig races. Nearby Halo Island — "Haloton" — was billed as a thriving society of pigs under its racetrack.
Sandale, Stormont & Sheep Port
old mapThe outlying towns: edwin's desert town of Sandale and its neighbour Stormont, rail-linked out past the Airfield; and Sheep Port, a coastal town far to the north that anchored the transit network's northern reach.
The five town squares
new mapThe 1.7 map opened with five pre-built town squares meant to be linked by stargates: Neo Leoville (central spawn), Eureka (nature, SW), Argon / Sci-Fi City (desert), a Medieval town, and a nostalgic Old Leoville.
Chadville
new mapA structured plot-city near spawn, governed by a self-appointed and famously "closed" council (PosterAnonymous, VanteS, Legida, Matt_K, Diego). Its commercial district took a running-joke three months to open — "soon takes how ever long i feel."
The Aquadome 2.0
new mapThe underwater arena, rebuilt from scratch on the new map after the reset took the original.
Laputa, the Castle in the Sky
new mapA floating Ghibli-replica castle south-east of Eureka.
Venteare & New Age Island
new mapTwo of the busier 2014 settlements: Venteare, a space-themed town built around a spaceship, and New Age Island, a tropical mansion development on an ocean platform.
Getting around
The Department of Transportation (DOT)
old mapA volunteer public-works authority with a real bureaucracy: it built and ran the minecart rail — a Circle Line, a Grand Central Station, and hubs some 2,000 blocks out in each direction — plus roads and Nether links. Its existence was the standing argument against instant-travel Stargates.
The Netherroad
old mapThe road network that finally beat the rail and the Sky Tram: four glowstone-lit roads out of a central Nether lobby to every hub and city. Built over one St. Patrick's weekend in 2013, and rebuilt for the new map.
Markets: the Flea Market & the Black Market
old mapTehRage's free Flea Market north of spawn was the original trading hub — until the mods removed the entire district in February 2013 over the lag its thousands of chests generated, sealing the entrances with jack-o'-lanterns. Beside it, Dio's Black Market offered discount goods and a planned casino.
Things that happened here
The weekly Ender Dragon hunt
Every reset of the resource world respawned the Ender Dragon, and the community turned it into a standing event — a weekly group hunt, with /home disabled in the End to keep it fair.
Pig races — and Sir Pigsington's funeral
Organized pig racing (brackets, skyboxes, gambling to fund the DOT and Aquadome) was a fixture. When PosterAnonymous's racing pig — "Sir Charles Pigsington the Third, Esquire" — was killed by a creeper, he was given a full roleplay funeral with a 21-arrow salute.
The Happy Horse Hunt & the Pumpkin God
After horses arrived in 1.6, geo131313 and PosterAnonymous hid tamed horses and clue chests across the map for a server-wide scavenger hunt. And a whimsical "Pumpkin Man Army" kept invading Flatland, until PosterAnonymous claimed to have "banished them to the Nether."
Betting on grass
Perhaps the purest TWiTcraft pastime of all. At the horse track VanteS and geo131313 built sat a grass-growing arena: a field of bare dirt, and a standing bet on which block would be the last to sprout grass. Players spent whole nights on it. Box-holders at VanteS’s Horse Racing Exhibition got access to it as an amenity, and grass bets were even used to decide where a horse race would finish — the wagers real enough that VanDerProtofsky could remind a fellow gambler “don’t forget what we owe after the last grass growing game.” It outlived the 2013 reset, rebuilt in the new map’s mod city, and OMGchad singled it out in his OMGcraft tour of the server as one of the things players loved most.
Trouble
Smokey's Wrath
Dec 2012Timberwolf1777 kept a caged pet wither named Smokey. When Curley changed the wither block-damage rules, it broke loose and tore through the Citadel, the Mirage Mall and East Leoville before VanteS killed it — an incident players were still recounting a year later.
The fake-OMGchad hack
Sep 2013A griefer exploited a Mojang authentication bug to log in as the omgchad admin account, poured over a million coins of diamonds into the economy, ran WorldEdit wipes and spawned a dozen withers in the End. Curley patched the hole and rolled the economy back.
The 1.7 reset schism
Aug–Oct 2013Whether to wipe the map for the 1.7 update split the server for months: full reset, keep the map, or reset-but-transfer the "worthy" builds. It ended in a full wipe — and Timberwolf1777 and FreonKnight left over it, taking the Citadel and the Airfield with them.
"This is TwitCraft, not CurleyCraft"
Dec 2014 – Feb 2015At the end, Timberwolf — who worked at TWiT — revealed that the option to keep the free hardware running under community admins had been "pitched to Chad and Curley months ago… Curley simply did not want to give it up." The full account of the ending is on the history page.
The kid-town wars
2014The reset cost the server most of its veterans, and the players who inherited the new map were noticeably younger — and what they did with it is oddly moving. They rebuilt the whole civic apparatus of old TWiTcraft in miniature: where 2012 had Leoville, the DOT and SGS, 2014 had a dozen small towns — BlazeVille, SkyLandz, Moonville, Athra, Venteare — each with a mayor, a council, a company and its own ban list.
DayGlow Industries vs Diamond Inc.
Oct 2014The era's defining rivalry was between two player "industries" — Diego's DayGlow, with a Weebly site, a radio station and a nether-road service, and goldengrace23's Diamond Inc. When their logos looked alike, Diego opened a front — "my company has Copyrights," he warned, and threatened to take it to court — then escalated to real estate, declaring "Skylandz is now Property of DayGlow In." and annexing goldengrace23's sky-island town outright. gregor1942 refereed with an unsolicited lecture on why a shop that sells stock it doesn't have goes broke.
Government by ban list
2014The little towns governed the way kids imagine governments do: through bans. BlazeVille posted a notice perma-banning a player who "killed every horse in the pen" and griefed the mayor's house — "u may not appeal!" — beside a ten-day ban and one pardon for an in-game apology. Founding Athra, goldengrace23 gave zog011 a full year for "being a jerk to every single person in my council." And when goldengrace23 kept asking to join the closed Chadville Council, gregor1942 answered with the courtesy of an adult managing a persistent child: "there is nothing official. so i ask that you please quit asking. please."
The last word
Dec 2014It ended unhappily for the era's most prolific builder: goldengrace23 was perma-banned amid complaints of bullying. The last word on it is to the community's credit. When players kept dragging the name up, VanteS — by then the only moderator left — shut it down: "stop bringing up Goldengrace, he has been perma banned. If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say it." At the very end, with the server dying around him, the last adult in the room was still looking after the kids.
There is much more
This is a guide to the highlights. The full catalog runs to some eighty places, builds, institutions, events and disputes — every one linked to the post that records it — and behind it sits the complete forum archive and the browsable web maps. For how it all began and how it ended, read the full history.
Reconstructed from the phpBB forum archive (1,277 threads, 8,482 posts). Coordinates are as players stated them and mark a neighbourhood, not an exact block; a few of the places named here were removed or wiped before the surviving snapshots were taken, and live on only in the record.