What the hell is up with the create server?
by Syntaxvgm on Jan 31, 2023
“What sorry excuse for a creative server is this? I can't plan any of my builds with restrictions like this!”
First thing is to not confuse it with plan.ve-mc.com
What is Plan? Plan is a subserver with the same map seed as the main survival map, worldedit, the same setup as the survival server, and no restrictions on what you can place. If you want to plan your build or redstone, this is probably what you want. Plan will be reset with each map, and a download will be provided.
“Ok, if I'm meant to use Plan to plan my builds, what the hell is the purpose of Create and why is it so locked down?”
If you had been playing minecraft in the early days, you might remember some servers with a clay or grass layer and a modded-in creative mode (it didn't exist at certain points) that allowed anyone to build anywhere. They were WILD. I wish I still had screenshots from these places. It's what truly started a lot of us on minecraft- there wasn't much to do in the base game in Alpha & before, but the servers were crazy sandboxes of creative freedom like you'd never experienced in a game before.
It was some time ago that a realized that these servers simply do not exist anymore. Every creative server you find is plots or some other form of heavily controlled creative server where you'll build so far from spawn that you might as well be playing in singleplayer.
This is why Create exists- to be a classic freebuild server, though with less riffraff than being truly open.
You can build whatever you want wherever. You can even destroy within reason- do it to make something better or to add on to something. Maybe part of something is in your way and it's not an important looking build. Worst case, remove that dick or other build you think is not welcome. DO NOT randomly go around destroying things for the hell of it.
Have you ever seen Place on reddit? It's a canvas they open up sometimes where everyone can place a pixel anywhere they want once every few minutes. It turns into a wild collage of communities building on top of each other. That's what old freebuild servers all looked like and frankly place only captures a fraction of the energy they had. Sure they were somewhat moderated, but most of the things like swastikas and dicks were removed by other players not by the careful eye of staff, and the result was a colorful explosion of densely packed self-regulated creativity. Likewise here we may remove anything too egregious or rollback when someone got intentionally griefy with it, but in general we don't care that someone modified your building, nor do we care if someone put a mustache on your pixel art masterpiece.
Being a whitelist community that is focused on the survival server, we'll never achieve that craziness of an open freebuild server, but I think over time we'll capture the essence of it.
Why the restrictions?
It needs to be as easy as possible to moderate and prevent things like lava casts etc that really are unwanted. This is meant to be a low power server with a high rendering range (20 atm) that will live on for as long as Vanilla Extract is around. This means no redstone, no flowing liquids, or any entities that can be used to lag the server or players (for now, I'm open to a minecart tour one day and will implement a way to restrict minecart placement). It also means that it will never be expensive to host, and it can be kept online for the cost of a cheeseburger a month. The map is tiny as it won't be expanded until we've filled the existing map with our """ART""".
Most important of all:
We will never reset this server.
Go, have fun and build a boat, a rainbow, a dick, or a Pikachu with hard nipples, meth eyes and diarrhea (don't ask).