Advanced History of TCD

The CraftersDimension was made in July of 2016 as a vanilla SMP that was meant to bring back the feeling of old beta/alpha survival servers. This server was made by a Dutch person with the username Luccalol. The server had some advertising done before the launch date, with the earliest records of it being July 3rd, 2016. Before it’s launch and there was about 5-10 people who planned on joining before the server even began. When the server started there was a town system where you would pick a town to live in when applying to the gray-listed server. Flos took on the role as the main town, however, there were other towns you could join such as Picea, Melonia and Harenam. The server’s player base was growing fast due to advertising on various forums.

Everything was going good on the first map, until the decision was made to let players make their own towns. After this loads of people tried making their own towns and Lucca literally ran out of rank colors for each town. After this an active player by the name of Byodx suggested a map reset on the Enjin Forum. The idea got more popularity and eventually the first reset happened in January of 2017, beginning the second map. The second map had begun and it was originally planned to be run like the first map (staff regulated town system, gold as currency, no spawn town). However, this all flopped very quick. A spawn town ended up being created, the gold currency failed and everyone started using diamonds, and no staff regulated towns ever came into fruition. With the exception of Invernos by Lifeisgood72. But the town decayed when Life left the server for a few months. Despite little going according to plan, the 2nd map is considered by most to be the peak of The CraftersDimension. The well knit community combined with summer beginning saw the playerbase get so large that Lucca had to increase the player limit from 20 to 40. It was around this time when I and many other players you may recognize joined the server. The growing community came with some issues though, one was spawn griefs becoming a semi-frequent occurrence along with other offences. The active staff team dealt with this well though.

Spawn, with it’s medieval theme was absolutely massive and thriving, despite about half of it was owned by Byodx, who had went inactive for a solid 2 months. Eventually spawn started reaching its limit for how far it could expand and the ambitious Underground Mall was dug out for more space to make shops. There was also all sorts of fun community projects being done such as Frienbd Hub and Sheeptown. About halfway through this map the controversial rank ‘Crafter+’ was added. It was meant to be an award to active members of the server, however, many staff members weren’t keen on the idea at first.

Nothing good lasts forever though and soon summer ended and with that the player base shrunk noticeably, with there being hours were 1 or 0 players were on, which hadn’t been seen for quite a while. _MrDawson, Byodx and others figured it was because the player base was burned out of the second map and they started pushing the idea of another reset in the discord. The idea started picking up traction and a vote was held on resetting the map. The majority said yes and a reset was scheduled to happen on September 3rd, 2017. The reset brought about a one month period were the server reached player activity that it had on the 2nd map, but this faded once the hype died down. The best word to describe the third map was overambitious, spawn had an expensive European theme and many, including me, bit off way more than they could chew. The server also suffered through loads of drama and almost daily bans, mainly for xray.

After that had died down the server was good for a month or so. Ermagerdbacon and _MrDawson founded Nevica while a new player called Creatief founded a town called Pita. There was also Southtown 2.0 made by UnsuperMario. Most of these towns were a product of spawn being too expensive and difficult to build in.

However, the server started experiencing loads of lag for an unknown reason and it got to the point where the server was almost unplayable. A premature reset was even being considered to fix the lag. This resulted in a change of hosts, which only half fixed the problem. This was supposed to make things better, however, by this point the damage had already been done, the heart of the community was burned out from overambition, spawn was impossible to build in, drama had scared off many and lag made the server hard to play. There was about a month were peak hours, on good days, would see about 3 people on. The server was effectively dead. The only chance it had at revival was another reset, which was announced to happen on April 8th, 2018. The server was switched to a new host again, which finally fixed the lag issues. The 4th map was meant to function similar to the 1st map in terms of the town system. There were 3 towns, Wuthering Heights, which had a medieval theme, this would become the largest town because medieval is cheap and easy. Then there was Zikha, which was desert themed, for whatever reason most of the veteran players (1st and 2nd map people who still played) ended up here. And then there was Acton, which was. . . interesting. It had a modern-ish theme. It used diorite, granite, quartz and red sandstone as its main pallete. Most of the talented and creative builders ended up here with Creatief being de-facto mayor.

The community did well for about a month, and I believe in another world this map could have been successful, but the trainwreck that was the later half 3rd map brought TCD beyond repair. After about 2 months the player base was basically reduced to batesminecraft and harrysonburns. After a while even they stopped playing. It stayed like this for a while and on August 20th, 2018, the server was shut down by Luccalol.

While The CraftersDimension was shut down the heart of the community would continue to exist in a discord server called Cactus Family Mafia. They would mostly play random games.

There was multiple attempts to made what were basically TCD 2.0’s across this 10 month period. The most successful of these was The Royal Phoenix, a server made by a former TCD player called Seal_2k43. This server did pretty good for a few months. But a lack of funding and people having moved on with their lives killed the server.

After this the Cactus Mafia continued to do its thing, but the TCD discord’s only messages were people leaving it.

Starting in around the second half of March, 2019 people, including Lucca, started throwing around the idea of bringing back the actual TCD. In late March it was released to the public that former admin, MagicTyFighter, was bringing the back the server with the support of Luccalol. On, April 11th, 2019 the TCD discord server was archived and replaced by a new one were Tyler was the owner.

In May, 2019, hype for the 5th map is high and the server was planned to be put up once spigot 1.14 releases. The idea is a themeless spawn, so long as your build isn’t an eyesore, and after that the journey has no restrictions, except for griefing and stealing of course.

On April 28th, 2019, TCD was brought back to life. After 10 months of the server being shut down, the server was ready to be brought back, kind of.

MagicTyFighter made a 250 block no-zone around spawn, resulting in players scattering and there being a lot of confusion on the first day. Sabriner, Sheepzus and _MrDawson responded to this by making a town about 300 blocks from spawn called Nwaps, which is Spawn spelled backwards. The following day spawn was ready to be built in though. After the confusion was cleared up spawn started doing well with shops and homes being built. Advertising done on forums and reddit also brought in a cast of new players. However, 1.14 being incredibly unstable was a big issue though and would disrupt people and the server on many occasions. The playerbase is small, but dedicated and motivated.

That was until late July when a voting system on Planet Minecraft and minecraftservers.org was updated and voting there was promoted again, this saw a large influx of players come in and the playerbase went from 5 people is peak hours to 10+ people being peak hours. On July 24th, 2019 the application platform was moved from the Enjin Forum to Google Forms, effectively making the Forums obsolete.

In August and September many people started school again and the playerbase plummeted. There is still a small group of people who still play but as of know the server spends most of its time with 0 people on. progress on Spawn and Akitha have more or less come to a halt, with the exception of Epixelated's mansion. The application platform was moved from Google Forms to Discord on October 4th, 2019.

The server would remain stagnant for a few more months before another reset was announced on December 21st.

The 6th Map was very short-lived, only lasting a little over two months. It fizzled out very quickly with basically no new applicants or active players. Nothing much worth noting happened on the 6th map, it was disorganized and rules weren't really enforced. TCD, a shell of what it was in 2017, closed its doors for a second time on February 13th, 2020.