Anywhere from seconds to hours. Depends on who's awake and at their computer.

Make ticket.

Use the Dynmap to locate an area where it doesn't appear anyone has settled. Make sure to look around thoroughly before making your settlement permanent. The 2 boxes at spawn are off limits for making a base.

There are no teleports of any kind. We navigate via a Nether highway. Once you have started on your base, connecting to that highway is important if you want to be able to travel back to spawn easily. If you want to get out far fast, find someone's base nearest to where you want to go on the Dynmap, and find their portal in the nether tunnels. You can use their base as a jump-off point.

There is no kit command, but there is a room in the main spawn building with iron armor, tools, food, and beds if you wish to start with little help. These are hand stocked, so let someone know if you need a kit and they're gone.

The overworld is currently 40k x 40k (20k each direction) and the Nether and End have no border. The overworld will be expanded as needed for new generation in an update or more space.

Yearly in December is our plan. However, the current map (our first) has been running since August 2022, and will be a longer map in order to get us to the December schedule.

We try to stay on the bleeding edge as much as reasonably possible. At most we expect to be a few weeks behind major updates for mojang, simply depending on updates from the more important parts of our server software.

We will not change a reset for an update. We think knowing how long a map lasts is important to players. We will simply upgrade the existing map to the new version, expanding the world if needed for new generation. Since December has historically been a time when Mojang releases updates, it is possible we delay a week or two in order to start the next map with said update, but we will never move up a reset for an update.

Of course. We get asked this a lot...do some people really not provide map downloads? That's awful!

No. You open a chest, take an item, and leave diamonds. There are no protection plugins, however we do log everything and can investigate and rollback anything taken without permission from your shop or your property. If you believe you've been stolen from, open a ticket.

No.
Laying down in a bed for a few seconds on your own will reset your phantom timer- a weird amount of people don't know that's how it works so it's worth a mention.
Despite it now being a gamerule, it is still default 100%. Just because it's supported in the 'vanilla' jar doesn't mean we do it. After all creepers blowing holes in stuff is a gamerule too, but turning it off isn't 'vanilla'.
Having the night skipped without your consent is often annoying. We believe every active player should be able to veto a sleep on their own if needed. You should be lighting your base up anyway.
In line with this, the change we made was that afk players are treated as if they are sleeping. Not moving or walking for 2 minutes adds you to a silent/invisible afk tag for this.
Clicking does not cancel afk as we allow autoclickers for mob farms.
In the future, we will add a command to treat you like you're afk for sleep without actually afking, but that is not present yet.

Hard. This is how most people play for a variety of reasons.

Off.
While it is much more reasonable since the introduction of nether wood and lightning rods to play with fire tick on, the vast majority of people want this off because every server they've ever played for more than a decade has turned it off unless it was like anarchy (maybe) and it just makes building with a large portion of the available materials a hazard. I still think that view may one day change given the new ways to prevent fires.