On most servers, if someone burns down your house, you file a ticket and a moderator rolls it back. On a Civ server, nobody is coming. If you want justice, you and your neighbors have to catch the griefer yourselves, and then decide what to do with them.
The experiment
That idea has a birthday. Civcraft, the first server of what players now call the Civ genre, opened on March 24, 2012, run by an admin known as ttk2. The premise was blunt: give players almost no rules, add tools for protecting property and punishing people, and watch what kind of society appears.
In 2016, one of its administrators explained the goal to News21, a student journalism project:
The whole point of it is a political experiment about what happens when the players are told to figure out how to make civilization from nothing.Jon Holmquist, Civcraft administrator, to News21, July 2016
Players answered with every system they could imagine. News21 reported communist, anarchist and libertarian communities living on the same map, and a subreddit that had grown past 8,000 subscribers by 2016.
The toolkit that made it work
Civcraft did not just remove rules. It added mechanics that let players build their own. CivWiki credits it with pioneering the plugins most Civ servers still run on:
- Citadel lets you reinforce blocks so they take far more effort to break, turning a city wall into a real wall.
- NameLayer handles groups, the backbone of towns, nations and alliances.
- Snitches help a town keep watch over its territory.
- Factories and Bastions add more tools for industry and defense.
- Prison Pearl is the one everyone remembers.
Prison pearls, explained
Kill a player while carrying an ender pearl, and that pearl becomes their prison. The victim is imprisoned, on Civcraft in the End. It gave players a way to capture griefers without an admin, and it also gave wars a new kind of stakes.
When the experiment met a war
Those stakes arrived fast. In May 2013, Gameranx writer Damon Reece described living in Mount Augusta, a neutral city known as "the safest, friendliest city in Civcraft," when players from a rival hardcore factions community invaded. Prison pearls meant even wealthy, well-defended players could be mobbed and locked away.
By 2016, News21 described how a giant war had turned the server from a peaceful place into one where about 200 players were held against their will and residents feared walking through major cities.
Civcraft ran in three versions. The first ended in April 2013 after an admin abused access to the server's backups. The second, from May 2013 to January 2016, is the one CivWiki calls the most renowned. The third lasted only 63 days. When ttk2 retired in October 2016, Civcraft closed for good.
Civcraft 1.0 opens. Citadel and Prison Pearl shape the world from day one.
Civcraft 2.0 launches on May 19, the version players remember best.
Civcraft closes after its short-lived third version. Other Civ servers, including Devoted, carry the idea on.
CivClassic opens. It runs for more than 1,660 days, the longest stretch of any Civ server.
CivClassic's Infinity War begins and lasts about 18 months.
CivClassic ends on December 18. CivMC is announced on Reddit the day before.
CivMC launches after a week's delay. More than 400 players try to join at once, and many wait in a queue.
Civilization-themed YouTube videos send a wave of new players to the server.
The successors
The genre outlived its founder. CivWiki says CivClassic was built by TealNerd because he felt Civcraft's later direction had drifted from what players wanted, so it went back to the Civcraft 2.0 formula on a round map with a 13,000-block radius. Its wars became legends of their own, from the Somber War to the 18-month Infinity War.
When CivClassic wound down at the end of 2021, one of its moderators, Wingzero54, stepped up. CivMC is his server, and it is now the main home of the genre.
How CivMC plays
CivMC's official site lists four pillars: Citadel for reinforcing blocks and locking chests, NameLayer for nations and alliances, ExilePearl for imprisoning players, and a custom combat system called Finale. According to CivWiki, CivMC also differs from its ancestors in a few ways that matter to a newcomer:
You can't bring alts to stack votes, farms or fighters.
Captured players end up in the Nether rather than the End.
Reinforcement decay is localized, so keeping a build protected means actually being around it.
Combat uses 1.8-style mechanics with tuned cooldowns and attack speeds.
The politics are still the point. CivWiki records server-wide wars between 2022 and 2024, including the Generic War and conflicts among nations such as Icenia, Gang Shi and Butternut. Between the wars, the work is diplomacy and trade.
Here's how it looks right now, by our own count:
Live from our pinger · checked 1 min ago
Is this for you?
Civ servers are slow, social and sometimes harsh. You will get more out of CivMC by joining a nation early than by building alone in the woods. If you like the idea of player-run politics but want something gentler, compare it with the servers on our nations servers and survival servers pages.
Join the experiment
CivMC runs on Java Edition, and the site points newcomers to its wiki, Discord and subreddit. Read the local laws of whatever city you land in. Somebody wrote them, and somebody enforces them. Here is the live card:
Sources
- News21: Want to try anarchism? How about communism? Minecraft world allows users to experiment (2016)
- Gameranx: My Journey Through the Great War of Civcraft (2013)
- CivMC: official site
- CivWiki: Civcraft
- CivWiki: CivClassic
- CivWiki: CivMC
- CivWiki Newsletter, June 6, 2022
- Bukkit: PrisonPearl plugin
Player counts, votes and uptime on this page are live from our own checks. Everything else comes from the sources above. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
