The life of the server
TWiTcraft was not a map. It was a few thousand people doing things to each other and for each other for nearly three years: racing pigs for money, hiding treasure, suing each other over land, voting on which buildings deserved to outlive them, and burying pets. Almost all of it left a trace somewhere. This page is what the traces add up to.
Every claim here comes from something you can check: a forum post, a numbered line of chat, a timestamp in a recording, or a sign still standing in the archived world. The links go to the thing itself.
Games & contests
Trivia, seven nights, autumn 2013
VanDerProtofsky asked the server “say... who likes trivia?” and then ran quiz nights in public chat for five weeks, setting the questions, judging the answers and paying the winners in diamonds. He brought a bank of 377 questions he had been writing since 2012, a year before he joined. The full reconstruction — every question, who answered it, who won each night — is on its own page: Trivia Night.
The monthly geocache
From June 2013 spkarrer hid a cache somewhere on the map every month and ran the hunt out of a red brick bunker at plot D12. “Go places, Win prizes!” Riddles if you got stuck, coordinates if the riddles did not help, an easy mode from August, and a prize draw at the end of each month settled by asking a bystander to pick a number. Six of the logbooks are still sitting in their chests with the rules and the signatures in them, and SkyerCorp and D4veroche are in nearly all of them. The whole hunt, with the coordinates →
Racing, and betting on racing
The pig races. Gooblerz ran a series at the Goobnesian Speedway under the banner of T.R.A.C.K., the Twitcraft Racing Association for Cool Kids. Fifty coins to enter, split between the winners and the Department of Transportation. The second race, in June 2013, ran qualifying brackets and finished 1st Breet, 2nd DragonofHalo, 3rd Ben — with PosterAnonymous disqualified from his own final. rules · results
The Krazy Race parkour tournament, 2 January 2013, at the course in Sandy Blocks. Fifty-dollar buy-in, enchanted prizes, and a payout split 50/30/10/10 with a cut for the rail service. PosterAnonymous and abigail ran a book on it. Winners: SamuelProsser, blackniph99, The_Rage. The argument afterwards about how the odds should have been set is better than the race. results and prize list
SouljaSam's horse race, 30 September 2013. It starts as one line — “Horse race meet at spawn with your horses!” — and turns into a real event. The lap count gets negotiated live, everyone is told to “line up”, and then:
ok ready in 3 · 2 · one
SkyerCorp won, vantes came second, and the last thing handed out was a consolation prize delivered over three messages: “for good sportsmenship you get... a... melon.” He signed off by announcing the next one: a skydiving contest. the whole race
The Aquadome sculpture contest
April 2013. The underwater arena had empty corners, so PosterAnonymous ran a contest to fill them: blind anonymous submissions, judged by public vote, with a prize ladder from 2,000 coins and an apartment down to 500. The vote tied for third, so a second thread ran the tie-break. Final: 1st Timberwolf1777, 2nd and 3rd blackniph99 with two different sculptures, and 4th place to SkyerCorp for an entry called “Flat”. the rules · first results · the run-off
The TWiTcrafties
August 2013. ToucanMonkey ran an awards show, voted by public form, with categories including Most Talented GIF'er (PosterAnonymous), Worst Mistake on TWiTcraft (t2apocalypse, on 36% of the vote) and Most Likely to Shame Kids Into Leaving. The thread is also where someone brings up Smokey again, a year after the fact. the announcement · the results
Hunting Shelldon
The Ender Dragon respawned after the wither attack regenerated the End, which nobody had planned, and the fight that followed went so well that people asked to make it monthly. They named the dragon Shelldon and joked about dragon steaks. Two hunts are documented: Warriorbox took the egg in September, and in October Timberwolf1777 walked SkyerCorp to the stronghold and then confirmed it was SkyerCorp's arrow that landed the kill, so the egg was his. October's hunt
Drop parties, and betting on grass
On 24 August 2013 Dio threw loot into a crowd at spawn and asked people to vote for the server on Planet Minecraft in return. 5murg111: “First drop party ive seen on here.” It was not the last — You_just and ToucanMonkey were still running them in 2014.
Stranger and longer-lived: the grass-growing arena, where players bet coins and diamonds on which square of dirt would turn to grass first. VanDerProtofsky ran the book for at least eight months, recruiting new marks with the same line every time — “you look like a betting man” — and when the map reset in the middle of an outstanding wager he settled up anyway: “here, have 12 IOU diamonds for the new world.” helicologo, watching: “You kids and your silly games.” the IOU · the pitch
Business & civics
The Department of Transportation
A non-profit rail service, founded December 2012 and run more or less single-handed by Robrotheram, connecting Leoville to the new hub cities. It ran on donated iron and rails and took a cut of race entry fees. It also had a genuine public pricing dispute: players worked out they could buy minecarts from DOT and sell them back at a profit, complained about the spread, and Robrotheram declined to change it. the founding plan
Sky5 City
asim0v's city in the sky, “Est. 4/10/2012”, more than a hundred numbered lots with a posted ordinance of ten rules ending at “#9 Griefers are not tolerated. Period.” What makes it live is that the mayor did his own rounds and left notes in the first person on people's property: “Your vines can't grow off your lot. -asim0v.” “Please light up your roof. -asim0v.”
There is also an eviction letter, written as a book and left in a chest, from asim0v to a tenant called Flubber8100: “You demonstrated a complete disregard for the rules of Sky5... I felt it necessary to evict you from the city entirely.” And on lot 75, a McDonald's parody advertising THE LEGENDARY VIKING BURGER at $500,000,000 and wishing customers a HAVE A NICE FUCKING OBESE DAY. the city · the eviction notice
The ten flea market commandments
The market north of spawn had a written constitution on the wall, numbered one to ten, from “#1 Flea Market is for commercial use only” to “#10 Griefing will NOT be tolerated.” Inside it: Teh_Rage's Dollar Menu, selling 256 cookies for $1 under the label “mmm Diabetus”, and SWfan85's Rougaroux Distillery, a Cajun moonshine-themed potion shop selling Sugarshine and Full Moon, “made in small batches”. the commandments
TJ.co
TJMinerCrafter started, in his own words, by asking for help: “Could someone please help me find a better name for TJ Enterprises.” What he ended up with was an eighteen-floor tower east of spawn containing a stock market with numbered certificates, rentable apartments, a jail, a spleef arena, a parkour course called the Skycourse, and a working redstone computer with labelled registers and signs reading Write RAM and Read RAM.
He ran a lottery you entered with five experience levels, drawn by pulling paper out of a chest. He opened a paid attraction: “TJ.co BASE jump is now open. Max fall distance!” He invented a live-action game built on a Splash Potion of Pseudo-Death, where anyone killed had to carry a book back to headquarters to register the death. And he kept a Hall of Fame for people who helped him: “NGT has earned a place in the TJ.co localized Hall of Fame.” One floor of the tower thanks curley and vantes for keeping the server a nice place. TJ.co HQ · the naming · the BASE jump
He was not alone. The same spring, Redstone Inc. and Day Glow Industries were recruiting members and running a contest for the tallest building on the server, which collapsed when gregor1942 pointed out that everyone could simply keep going up. Day Glow's land grab produced an actual legal narrative: a rival firm, Blaze Inc., formed specifically to help a player called Lexieminecraft “sue Day Glow” over a clubhouse annexed into their territory. Day Glow's border is still marked out across the map by about fifteen identical signs reading DayGlow In.
Hyrule
ODSTLink's Zelda-themed town, run with a bureaucracy that would embarrass a parish council: a nether colony rule book charging ten coins a week and advising tenants “Don't be stupid and you'll be fine”, an eight-rule handbook for the south district with escalating penalties — “1, warning. 2, will forcably shrink your house, 3 eviction” — and a records book tracking citizens, their districts, their join dates and a monthly Citizens of the Month award, won at one point by Inertpyro and geo131313. The castle itself was a months-long group build with a recruited team and assigned roles. the rule books
Trouble
The wither attack, 9 September 2013
At about half past six on a Monday evening the account omgchad logged in, handed a few people ten septillion coins, filled inventories with diamonds, and then spent half an hour cutting holes in the world and spawning withers. It was not Chad — an authentication bug let an outsider log in as anyone. The community blamed the wrong man and apologised to him twice over; Curley read the server log for three hours and put the repair to a public vote; people handed the free diamonds back; and regenerating the End brought the Ender Dragon with it. The whole day →
The nine-day rollback
July 2012. A moderator made a syntax error in a rollback command and reverted the entire server nine days. Rails, redstone, stairs and buttons all over the map stopped working. The same week, a second mistake flooded an area and took the server down for four or five hours. They told the story themselves on the community's own podcast, in an episode that only happened because the admin could not be reached — five Skype messages, five texts, six DMs — and the summary they landed on was:
Breaking news, the server's run by humans.
podcast episode 4, [05:12] and [08:04]
The villager apocalypse
A bug in Minecraft 1.5 meant that if you put a villager in a minecart and left the chunk, the entities kept duplicating. Two players found out the hard way and were frozen in place, unable to move. The count was eight thousand when someone checked. By the time other people had wandered over to see what was happening it was sixteen thousand, and the server had to be restarted to cull it. The advice offered afterwards was straightforward: “do not leave villagers of minecarts even if it's like a weird circumstance.” town hall, [05:06]
The fake announcements
On 9 August 2013 thesillychicken worked out how to make text appear in chat as though the server itself had said it, and spent twenty minutes announcing the end of the world: “[Server] twitcraft is going away aug 26 guys”, then the map being wiped, then a fake game of hide and seek at spawn. People who were mining and could not tell what was real asked him to stop — “ok, like seriously.. please stop”. Two weeks later, for something else entirely, he was permanently banned. the fake broadcasts
The pigmen at the portal
The resource nether's portal had a standing hazard: provoke the zombie pigmen there and they stay angry, so everyone arriving through the portal walks into a mob. It ran the whole length of the archive as a semi-tolerated form of trolling, with repeat offenders and a formal request for permission — “am i aloud to anger the pigmen for fun or no?” On 8 February 2014, watching Robrotheram and thornton77 die over and over, vantes summed it up: “Dropping like flies.”
Things they decided
The Grand Compromise
By September 2013 the question of whether to wipe the map and start again had been running for over a year. Minecraft 1.7 was about to change how terrain generated, which meant the edges of the old world would meet the new one in cliffs. vantes put a proposal to the forums: a full reset, nobody carries anything over, in exchange for five new spawn cities linked by a Stargate network. Seventy-six posts followed. People argued for expansion instead of reset, for keeping two worlds, for letting players buy a transfer of their old build; someone brought up a rival server that had died after a bad reset. The reset happened on 6 January 2014. The five cities and their elected mayors mostly did not, although Chadville got built and gregor1942 spent 2014 being called its mayor. the proposal
The Historical Preservation Society
The reset debate produced something better than the reset. PosterAnonymous proposed a register of builds too important to lose, protected even if their maker never logged in again. Everyone was asked for five, and without anyone suggesting it, five of the ten people who answered refused to name their own work — including the two whose builds were being nominated most. The nominations, counted →
Push It Somewhere Else
When a player stopped logging in, the moderators cut their build out of the world and pasted it into a separate storage world. The policy got its name from a joke about the flea market that had lagged the server to death — “why don't we just take the flea market and push it somewhere else” — and the name stuck, and then the initials stuck: PISE.
Both halves of it survive. The storage world is still there, and it is full of vantes's own labels, written on the spot, recording whose house this was and why it was moved:
DJDeadMoose54 · 2080 71 -561 · PISE 9/13/14 · -vantes
moustachegirl48 · Offline 2 mths · -PISE Request · -Vantes
And back at spawn, the players built a graveyard for the practice — Push it Somewhere Else Heaven — with a sign reading “This is a memorial of all the builds... Never forget. May they rest in heaven.”
Is it cheating if it's allowed?
April 2013, and the town hall spent five minutes failing to settle an argument that has no answer. Iron golem farms let a player sit motionless overnight, sometimes on a second account, and wake up rich. Nothing in the rules forbade it, because it is ordinary Minecraft. Several people said it was “a detriment to the spirit” of the place and that not everyone could afford to leave a computer running. Somebody proposed just removing iron from the shop and being done with it. The line they tried to draw — sitting in a mine to keep chunks loaded is fine, sitting there while lava does the work is not — is one they could not write down, and the conversation moved on. town hall, [39:40]
What they remembered
Smokey
Timberwolf1777 kept a wither as a pet. In late 2012 a rule change about block damage let it out, and it wrecked East Leoville; the incident was still being brought up as Smokey's Wrath a year later. His grave is inside the Citadel walls:
R.I.P. Smokey · 12/29/12 · Mad Pet Wither · You are missed
Six blocks away is a second one. There was a Smokey #2, and in August 2013 somebody killed it, and the sign does not let it go:
R.I.P. Smokey#2 · 8/23/13 · Killed in cold blood by TSC
Memorials to things that were never in the game
Inside Sky5 City there are fountains commemorating real TWiT shows that had been cancelled: a Game On Memorial Fountain, an Online Ethicist Memorial Fountain, and a Max Trollbot Memorial Park, named after an in-joke that dates to the server's first month. A plaque nearby reads “Dedicated to the memory of Game On.”
A short walk from those, on the same rooftops, somebody built something else entirely:
Dedicated to my grandfather · 02/1919 · 04/2012
Elsewhere on the map: a 9/11 memorial at the foot of a rental tower called the Trade Center, listing 2001 and the 1993 bombing and the Pentagon and Shanksville, with a “Sponsor a Cobblestone” scheme parodying the real memorial's fundraising. A memorial to wildfire victims, one sign for 2012 and one for 2013. A pet cemetery on an island, where two of the graves are dated 2010 — real animals, remembered in a game that did not exist when they died. And on a hillside, nine horses in a row, including Creme Brulee, Sweet Tooth, Lickety Split and Lickety Split Jr.
Game On fountain · the grandfather · 9/11 beacon · Memorial Island · the horses
Paul, and the death record
On 22 January 2014 You_just got stuck between his bed and a zombie and died roughly forty times in eight minutes while chat watched. When he finally won he gave his opponent a name first:
he is DEAD!!!! · i will call him Paul · Paul is DEAD!
Seven weeks later, in the middle of another pigmen swarm, Robrotheram turned to him and said “YouJust You will not beet my death record”, and JGBBall64 filed the correction from the sidelines: “yeah robro, you die at least three times a day.” Paul · the record
The last voices
The bot that copied in-game chat into IRC broke in March 2014 and was never fixed. The channel carried on without it for another six months — griefing reports out of habit, outage complaints, people asking whether anyone was even on. asim0v was thanked and wished well when he stepped down as a moderator. The final two lines in the entire archive are SkyerCorp, on 25 September 2014, at 17:28:
I suppose I should remove this server from my auto logon list.
Bye bye
How this was made
Assembled from the server's own record: 1,277 forum threads, 619,757 lines of game chat and IRC, eight surviving audio recordings, roughly 14,000 signs and 210 books players wrote. Every story here was traced back to a source before it was written down, and the links go to that source. Names are as people wrote them. Quotes are exact, including the spelling.
There is more than this. If you were there and something is wrong, or missing, or you would rather a thing about you was not here, tell the archive.