Townscraft's History

== Pre-History (2016 - 2020) ==
=== The CraftersDimension (2016 - 2020) ===
Some time in 2016 a player called Luccalol was playing on an SMP called The CraftersDimension, but the server eventually fell for unknown reasons. So in early July of 2016 Lucca decided to create his own SMP under the same name, the server's earliest public mention was an ad on Planet Minecraft on July 3rd, 2016.
TCD would continue to grow and players who have since joined Townscraft such as SpankingNuns, Earth2Brandon, AnthonyIsSexy, froggysweaters, Sabriner, Historio, MagicTyFighter, and Sheepzus used to play on this server. 
Historio joined TCD on April 17th, 2017, which happened to be exactly 3 years before Townscraft's launch. TCD was a jackpot to him as he had been looking for a small scale SMP like Mindcrack for ages. He would continue to be one of the most active players on the server up until the server finally shut down in February of 2020. 
=== The Vanilla Experience (2019 - 2020) ===
The Vanilla Experience was a short-lived SMP that Historio ran from October 2019 until January 2020. It didn't see the same success that Townscraft had due to underlying flaws such as: a lack of an interconnected community, events, and active staff besides Historio. This eventually led to Historio completely burning out of running the server in mid-December, and 2 weeks later he transferred ownership to a player called Noobie_Action. He would keep the server running for another 5 months but the playerbase was small and quite inactive, rarely even seeing 5 people on at once. TVE effectively shut down around May 2020 after Noobie resigned as owner. The discord still exists but for now at least Historio's old SMP is dead.
Though TVE wasn't a very successful server it did give Historio staffing experience, as he was never a mod on TCD. So Townscraft would probably have weaker community management if it wasn't for this server. TVE is best viewed as a prototype for Townscraft. 
=== Simplistica (2020) ===
Simplistica was a server Historio joined in March 2020 while finding a new SMP to play on after TCD shut down. He felt it had a lot of promise and liked the idea of the town system. So he decided to invite some of his friends from TCD over to make a desert town called Sabaar. They had fun on the server at first but soon underlying issues started to surface, mainly corruption/incompetence in the staff team. This ultimately caused Historio and most of his friends to leave the server around 3 weeks after they joined. Two ex-simplistica players who now play on Townscraft are HungrySoviet and Asikke 
However, Historio still wanted to play on a server with a town system, but without being jammed with Towny plugins. Servers like these are far and few between though so he ended up making a new SMP himself out of an unused private server his irl friends used to play on. After a day of setting up plugins and a discord server Historio started advertising his new server: Townscraft. 
== The Era of Old (April - June 2020) ==
=== The Early Days (April 17th - 24th) ===
Historio advertised the server for the first time on a Thursday and planned to launch it on Saturday. But due to quarantine way more people than he expected joined so he ended up launching the server on Friday instead. Notable players who joined on or before launch day include _Pork, BruisingToaster, and magnetron_hd.
Within the first few hours of the server's launch Montrex, Summerhall, and Bilgewater were founded by Historio, _Pork, and Defiqnce, making the first three towns trio. For the first week Montrex and Summerhall were the main towns with Bilgewater barely sustaining an active population. By the end of the week the first two mods: _Pork and Bluemax2000 were promoted.
=== The Bilgewater Golden Age (April 25th - June 15th) ===
Around a week into the young server's life Bilgewater exploded in population, being the largest town on the server for the next two months, even after closing recruitment on May 22nd to give other towns a chance. This time is considered to be the height of OG Townscraft, the server had a close community mostly centered around Bilgewater with some notable faces being Akatsuukii, Kuroplayer, LilRedLeopard, Agusto, and BruisingToaster. 
This period also saw a lot of community events like Akatsuukii's treasure hunt, the Montrex build competition, the button, and many more. During this time the server hit and eventually passed 20 players multiple times after a few hardware upgrades. Many towns were made as well such as Alabasta, Rivia, Kyoto, Commietown, and Valhalla. The server did struggle with TPS and crashes during this time though, but they were largely side effects of the server's unexpected success. 
If you are a new player reading this though, you will notice most of these names, player and town, are no longer common on the server, and that is because this golden age eventually came crashing down.
== The Crisis of July (June 16th - July 25th 2020) ==
=== A Series of Incidents ===
This section is probably best viewed as a list of events rather than a comprehensive narrative, as it would be very chaotic if it was.
* June 16th - Bluemax2000 and his friend Coolman aquire loads of wealth in a very short time and suspicious activity from Bluemax is found in the server console's logs and he is suspended from the staff team for further investigation. It's found that he was abusing Core Protect to dupe items and he and his friend are permabanned the same day.
* June 18th - The seed is leaked under confusing circumstances, with some believing it to be _Pork who did it, the seed is leaked to a few players but the leak is covered up after a day of confusion.
* June 24th-25th - A tempmap is set up while the server migrates hosts, this map is poorly moderated though resulting in a lot of drama and a ban for building a swastika.
* June 29th - Various towns are blown up in the server's first mass grief
* July 2nd - Pork is removed from the staff team after multiple overreaches of power and confessing to using creative mode in a large build meant for 0 0. The same day Sabriner and Kuroplayer are added to the staff team as replacements, though neither held the position very long.
* July 3rd - Akatsuukii, a very popular player in the community, leaves Townscraft forever after getting fed up with the spiking drama.
* June 27th and July 4th - Various 2b2town members are banned for toxic behavior and harassing other players, second ban is controversial and lifted to a 3 day ban after appealing.
=== The Exodus ===
All of this and more culminated in most of the playerbase leaving the server forever or taking long breaks as the server has become unpleasant and for some even stressful to play on due to the increasingly hostile environment. This left the server somewhat empty and almost post-apoclyptic feeling for the next week with most original players having left. 
Some of these players come together a while later and make a new server known as VillageValley, though this server has mostly fallen into inactivity.
=== The Reforms ===
This time of hardships though also saw reform to combat it though with things like the creation of the staff manual, amendments to the application system and server rules, and the creation of the wiki. 
== The Era of the 2nd Community ==
=== Reconstruction and The Three Kingdoms ===
NOTE: The following sections are vague due to the author, Historio, being fairly inactive during these times. If someone who was there for these events like Salt or Lareno would like to add more you guys are welcome to.
Despite the drop in playerbase, some persistent players such as HungrySoviet, Ufolov, ASikke, kimberrrr and xSweety stayed. Most of these players weren't very prominent in the greater community previously however, with people such as kimberrrrr being borderline hermits outside of their own towns up until August. These players would effectively be the community's life support in the following weeks. 
The weekly flow of server ads kept a stream of new players checking out the server and the remaining members introduced them to the community and is why most of them stayed. During this time people such as Wummeh and co., ASaltedProfessor, and RinKiwa joined. During this time most players moved to Dustpeaks, Summerhall, or Bilgewater. Despite the community still recovering a PvP tournament was held in Dustpeaks, with the prize being the dragon egg. Ufolov won the tournament and would hold the dragon egg for a very long time afterwards. 
This period was fairly unmoderated however. For a space of time xSweety was the only truly active staff member, soon after notreallyjacob and kimberrrr were promoted as well though. This period marks the beginning of the end of Historio's Townscraft as after the tournament he almost completed faded into inactivity for a long time.
Towards the end of this period Dustpeaks was abandon after it's mayors left the server and Bilgewater declined for a 2nd time following most of it's citizens falling into inactivity or moving on to other projects. Many of these people from the other two towns would move to the resurging Summerhall.
=== Summerhall Resurgence ===
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