WikiCraft is an MCPE server I ran from December 2015 - November 2017. The server had thousands of members from nearly every country during its 2 years of being online. The server's main attraction was creative plots, but had many other features throughout the years. This page is meant to narrate the history of WikiCraft through photos and videos.
Pre-Release (2014-2015)
WikiCraft was planned for at least two years before it opened. The first real attempt at creating it was in 2014 when another user agreed to split the server bills with me to create WikiCraft after he had received a free trial for a server. A spawn was built for it, modeled after the spawn on my old DblCraft PC server. But, the deal quickly fell through.
The video shows what the DblCraft PC server looked like: Ignore how cringey it is.
The video shows what the DblCraft PC server looked like: Ignore how cringey it is.
In June 2015, I purchased and began the server which would eventually grow into WikiCraft. After the purchase, I called upon the Wiki community for ideas and suggestions, and assembled a small but effective build team made up of Ultramarine, IrishGamer13, XxCherryGamerxX, and a few others.
The server was supposed to have many different gamemodes upon release, but most were cut. In fact, the server almost did not open at all due to the lack of features, but opening with just Creative Plots proved to work just fine. The server was supposed to have Survival, Factions, and Minigames.
Release and Early 2016
The server opened on December 29, 2015 with creative plots and parkour. The server was a quick success and peaked at over 30 players on the first day due to advertising on both Youtube and the MCPE Wiki. The first player to join was MarioLover23. In the coming months, it wasn't rare for the server to have over 50 people on at once. Many new staff members were chosen during this time such as lily1234 and Dampian. Many other players from this time would go on to become staff members such as xxxPinkLionxxx and Itz_Dubz. There were several popular features from this time period such as /mail and Nether Chests, which were eventually phased out.
Soon after release, the PVP Arena was opened on January 17, 2016. Originally, the arena, designed by IrishGamer13, was meant to have a mining system in order to collect supplies. But, this idea was scrapped in favor of a chest shop area where you could purchase items using money gained by voting. The arena was very popular, and arguably marked WikiCraft's golden age. Unfortunately, it was eventually phased out, and PVP on the server never reached the popularity it did with the original arena.
The following video shows what the server looked like during this time. It shows the PVP arena, how the chat looked, and much more.
The following video shows what the server looked like during this time. It shows the PVP arena, how the chat looked, and much more.
Throughout February, the server continued to grow. Not many new additions were added, but small improvements were made, most notably by planting vegetation at spawn. Roleplay had also become a very popular pass time on the server. Some roleplay plots included schools and towns. Some roleplaying themes got out of hand and even had to be banned such as birth roleplay. There was a great debate for many months over whether roleplaying should even be allowed at all; but in the end, it became a very popular and important aspect of the server.
Spring-2016 and LaVida's Spawn
In March 2017, we hired a new builder, LaVidaLoca. He and Fermine created the new WikiCraft spawn which was used for many months. LaVida was a controversial staff member that caused much debate over whether he should be banned or not due to accusations of "hacking." Nonetheless, his spawn was used for a long period of time. The centerpiece of the spawn was a large quartz pavillion. Around the center was many trails and buildings for things such as staff information and donator lists. Around the outside were walls and hills.
Around this time, the WikiCraft Discord was created. The Discord server allowed users to chat outside of the server. Most notably, users could voice chat with eachother. The Discord server led to many inside jokes/memes in the WikiCraft community such as "Wendys Lemonade," "Canadmin," and #ZAYLI. Wiki also had its first plot reset and the old PVP arena became broken. ColorMatch was also added to the server. It had three gamemodes, and was a popular minigame. It was eventually removed due to the lag it caused. In April, WikiCraft hit its all time highest player count with 96 players on at one time!
WikiCraft Survival Server
On May 30, 2016, the WikiCraft Survival Server was launched. After several failed attempts at integrating a survival gamemode into the main server, this new server was created. Though it was a separate server, it was still somewhat successful. The spawn consisted of a very simple pavillion with a path leading out into the wilderness with rules and info boards along the way. A shop was also built at spawn but removed due to high amounts of lag. The server had many unique features to add to the survival experience. Unlike the main server, the survival server had weather, animals, and better terrain, all while remaining less laggy. Grief protection was implemented onto the server, but it costed money to claim land. You could earn money through taking a job (such as mining, farming, and logging) or by selling your items to other players.
WikiCraft Survival, though well integrated with the main server, began to branch off in its own unique way. Most of the players played on both servers, but the survival server was seen as a quieter, friendlier, and overall more stable server. It soon became a safe-haven for long time Wikians who wanted a break from the much busier and laggier creative server. Because it ran Genisys, WikiCraft Survival was able to have many unique plugins which were unavailable to the main server. These features included the ability to sit in stair blocks as if they were chairs, VIPs and voters getting special kits each day, players taking jobs, and much more.
The survival server was even more tightly-knit than the main server. Players often worked together or had long friendly conversations. But despite the easygoing atmosphere and vast amounts of features, the server ended up closing 2 months after it began. The decision was made due to a low amount of donation funds to keep it open. The original plan was to attract new players and have the survival server be as successful as the creative one. Because it failed to attract many new players, the server's donation goal was not met, so the decision was made to transfer survival onto the creative server.
The decision to close the server was highly controversial. The idea of bringing the survival map onto the main server soon proved to be a bad decision. Survival players now faced increased lag, items being cheated from creative mode, and the loss of many unique plugin features that made the survival server unique. In less than a week, Survival was closed and the map deleted. There would be a few more future attempts to bring survival onto the main server, but none would succeed quite like WikiCraft Survival did.
Summer-2016 and SkyWars
WikiCraft did not change very much in the Summer of 2016. WikiCraft's golden days of having 50+ players on at once were now gone. Despite this, wiki remained stable and maintained a large and active playerbase. The survival server was also open for much of the summer months. Some new staff members included Bear/Madly75 (known as phe at the time), KayDee132, and PrincessBlueCake. TenguMaster, a well know builder from the MCPE Wiki was welcomed onto the server as our official builder in August to replace LaVida.
SkyWars was added towards the end of the summer. It has 5 custom maps built by various players. The map themes included: mushrooms, cartoons, youtubers, and mesa. Unfortunately, I cannot find any photos or videos of the SkyWars maps. The original SkyWars release video made by me has been lost. A popular "meme" around the server at the time was Bob the Zombie. Due to excessive glitches with the server, a zombie has been accidentally spawned in at spawn but could not be removed. It remained there for weeks. Players decided to name is "Bob The Zombie" and there was even a plaque created underneath him. Eventually though, he randomly disappeared.
Fall-2016 and new PVP Arenas
As fall approached, WikiCraft began to slightly decline in terms of active players. In mid-September, the first Kit PVP arena, made by several users, was released. It was meant to replace the very missed original PVP arena. The arena was called "Pandaland" and had many buildings based on traditional Asian style pagodas. The yin-yang symbol in the center was the safe-zone.
Meanwhile, TenguMaster was working hard on a new Survival Games arena for the server. When he decided to only do the arena part of it and not the outside, the map was made into a KitPVP arena instead of a Survival Games map. This arena opened in early October after months of work. It is a vast ancient-style colosseum with several tunnels, rooms, and a large open space. Players would spawn in one of the corner rooms, which acted as safe zones. Originally, when a player wanted to play KitPVP, they were teleported to a small room where they would chose their kit and then their map. After the Pandaland map was removed, the kit selection room was moved into Tengu's arena.
Despite the original popularity of the arena, it never got as popular as the original PVP arena. But, it did give players a place to PVP in, and the map was kept for many months as the main arena. In an attempt to get more players onto the server, the youtuber CrushedPE was hired to make a promotional video on the server. Unfortunately, the video has been taken down, but it gained over 10,000 views and brought hundreds of new players to the server. WikiCraft began to feel much more active in November due to this.
WikiCraft Minigames Server
There was a brief attempt in fall-2016 to open a separate minigames server for WikiCraft. This was done because of the lag minigames caused on the main server, so putting them on a seperate server seemed to be logical. Though several minigames were planned, only SkyWars made it onto the server. Most of the maps were reused from the old WikiCraft skyWars. The minigames server used the original WikiCraft spawn made by IrishGamer13. The server did not get to be as popular as expected, though a small group of people did play SkyWars. The server closed after only two weeks and SkyWars was moved back onto the main server.
Late-2016: New Parkour & Tengu's Spawn
In late November, TenguMaster completed his new spawn project. It was styled after a medieval village and is centered around a market square where the player spawns in. There were several building, walls, easter eggs, and much more scattered around the spawn. It soon became a popular spawn and was used for an entire year until WikiCraft closed in November 2017.
Shortly after Tengu's spawn was released, a new Parkour map was completed. Parkour had been a long requested addition to the server due to the popularity of IrishGamer13's original parkour map. The map had a small spawn room with four halls leading to different parkour levels built by various players. This parkour soon became a very popular part of the server, but was short lived due to it being lost after the MCPE 1.0 update.
Late-November and early-December were very active months for the server with player counts increasing constantly. Many new features, such as pets for VIP members were added. But, in mid-December, Update 1.0 was released. It broke many things on the server causing it to be down for over a month until mid-January. This caused WikiCraft to miss its one year anniversary and the WikiCon celebration that was planned for the New Years.
Early-2017 and Version 1.0 Downtime
WikiCraft's future was very uncertain in January. Many efforts were made to reopen the server, but the 1.0 update broke many essential plugins. The server almost did not reopen at all. In late-January, the server finally reopened. Plots had to be reset, and old plot worlds had to be reused because new ones would no longer generate. This meant that there were limited plots available to claim, and lag from world generation glitches was very common. The server lost most of its players due to the long downtime and struggled to carry on. As the months went on, the server slowly became more stable, but lacked many active players. The server rarely reached above 15-20 players on at once. In February, HeyItsKayliKat was promoted to HeadAdmin after the former Head Admin, xxxPinkLionxxx (Liv), became inactive.
In February, the popular meme on WikiCraft, #ZAYLI was started. #ZAYLI was the 'ship' name between I, Zach and Kayli. The joke originated from Discord and Twitter conversations with several members of WikiCraft. It quickly became a popular joke around the server and even led to a #ZAYLI fanpage on Twitter.
Mid-2017 and New PVP Arena
In early June, the youtuber TheAndroidMiner agreed to make a video to help promote the server to her audience. The plan worked, and WikiCraft gained hundreds of new active players. This began a resurgance in activity on WikiCraft during the Summer of 2017. Though it could barely compare to how the server was in 2016, it was a much needed change from the server's stagnant first five months of the year. There was still a limited plot supply, but new plots could be added manually through a long process taking several hours.
New plugins such as slappers were added. Two new parkour maps were built by Bear: One was a cave themed course and the other was a sky/tower themed course in which players would be rewarded by elytra wings if they won. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos of parkour, but it can be seen in TheAndroidMiner's video. There was a warp room for all parkour maps, and planned minigames which were never added.
Due to glitches with Tengu's arena, a new PVP arena was built in June that was meant to be based off of the original PVP made by IrishGamer13. The project was led by Bear. It had four biomes with a spawn/safezone in the center where players could select kits. A shop was later added on top of one of the walls. In the shop, you could purchase items with money gained by killing other players. Slappers were used for selecting kits, and three of the kits were VIP only. The arena was somewhat popular and generally more liked than Tengu's arena due to its resemblance of the original PVP arena.
Late-2017 and Closure
WikiCraft continued to be active, but not as much as it used to be during the end of summer 2017. But, when Update 1.2 was released, many WikiCraft features were broken which resulted in the server being down for almost two weeks. When WikiCraft was reopened, all of the plot worlds had to be reset because they were not compatible with 1.2. The loss of all plots combined with two weeks of downtime caused a huge number of WikiCraft players to abandon the server. The good side to this was that the plots became less glitchy and didn't have to be manually loaded. The need for using an Xbox Account to play on WikiCraft also caused many players to not be able to play. But, this also allowed players to no longer have to type in a password each time they logged onto the server. A top voter board was added during this time at spawn. The top voter each month would receive the "TopVoter" rank for one month.
A popular type of roleplay during this time was country roleplaying based on Heart of Iron IV, which was popularized by the admin Itz_Dubz. On November 9, it was announced that WikiCraft would close due to the lack of active players and donation funds to keep the server open. (The server only peaked at around 10 players on at once each day). It closed a week later.
Final Thoughts
I would like to thank everyone for playing on WikiCraft during the two years it was open! It was an absolutely amazing experience for me to run such an awesome server. I got to meet a lot of amazing people and have many great memories. So, whether you were a staff member, donator, builder, or just a player, thank you so much for contributing to making the best Minecraft PE server anyone could have ever asked for! Thank you for reading this, and I hope you will always remember WikiCraft!
I would like to give a special thanks to:
I would like to give a special thanks to:
- Ultramarine
- HeyItsKayliKat
- Dragonballgtgoku
- MarioLover23
- xxxPinkLionxxx
- Bear (Madly75)
- IrishGamer13
- HippieFlowerGirl
- Itz_Dubz
- TropicalPlayer90
- Bbagee
- Fawn120
- BellaCraftFTW
- 50ShadesOfTotoro
- KayDee132
- khloe
- SurviveUrDie
- lily1236
- PrincessBlueCake
- TenguMaster
- Freddles
- Ushi_Chan
- WhatsItToYou (Lee)
- LordOfHobbits
- Rith4Life
- Surly_Swag
- Wolfboy231
- XxCheryGamerxX
- Dampian
- Arbiter0439 (Pigman)
- RunItsANarwhal57
- CookieeCupcakes_
Other Photos/Videos
Want a photo or video added to this list? Email me [email protected] and I will add it!
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