A New Chapter

Evercraft is set to start it’s 6th season this month, chronologically our 7th, including Summer Season. There’s just one thing missing. That spark.

Since September 2019 we’ve gone on a lot of adventures as a community. Some more active than others, but always a blast. In preparing for the upcoming season though, I’ve noticed a worrying trend. Not only is activity at an all time low, but that old Evercraft spark just doesn’t seem to around anymore. Somewhere along the way I got so caught up in legitimizing ourselves as a server, that we lost what made Evercraft, Evercraft.

I put so much mental labor into making each launch *perfect* and by the books, that I burned myself and fellow staff out completely. It takes away the fun from playing a game we all love, which at the end of the day, is the only thing that really matters.

A Clean Slate

To get back to our roots, and recapture that spark we lost along the way, we’re starting from scratch. We’ll be purging our Discord server down to only the most active members. No one is exempt, not “OG” members, not Staff, not influencers; no one. If people aren’t actively participating in the community, and excited to play Minecraft; they will be trimmed.

We also want to make it a simple and pleasant experience to join Evercraft. When we started, it was as simple as DMing me for a Realm code, and you were in. So long as you didn’t cause issues, you were a part of the community. Over time we iterated on our joining process so much, that joining became less about the joining, and more about the process. In short, fuck that shit. It’s boring, annoying, and if I was joining a server and had to go through that, I simply wouldn’t.

Going forward, if you express an interest in joining, and are ok with our rules: that’s it, your in. If you fuck around though, you will find out. We will ban first and ask questions later, as it’s a hell of a lot easier to unban someone than it is to rollback damage in the community caused by a bad actor.

Hopefully this new perspective will make it easy for members who get purged to rejoin if they choose, and easier for new players interested in Evercraft to become a part of our community.

A New Outlook

In addition to overcomplicating our joining process over the years, I’ve also overcomplicated the experience as a whole. What is Evercraft? Is it a realm, is it a server, is it Everstart, or Everdark, what about Vox SMP? I don’t fucking know frankly. In an effort to appeal to everyone at once, we’ve appealed to no one and just kind of made everything a confusing mess.

Until we can find our identity again, all of our side projects are being put on the back-burner. They may come back in the future as one-off events, but for now we are simply Evercraft and nothing else.

A Fresh Start

To mark this major transition in the very concept of Evercraft, we’re also changing what we call the very worlds we play on. After Evercraft version 2, we started calling new worlds “Seasons” to cater to content creators in an attempt to follow trends at the time. Going forward, each new world will be a Chapter in the book that is Evercraft. We’re not catering to anyone. We are all the writers of our own story. Some of us may be guest writers who help write the story for a few chapters, and others may stick around for the long haul and change the long term narrative. It’s up to you.

To really drive home that Evercraft is starting anew, our next launch will be aptly named Chapter Zero. This is the start to our new story, and I hope you choose to be a part of it.