Good Ol' Minecraft

(Formerly GunnShow)

No BS, vanilla-style Minecraft server

Notice

This server is currently not active.

I used to host this on a powerful gigabit up/down internet connection, but I got promoted and had to relocate out of state and now live somewhere new. Despite having the best ISP available for my new place, it does not perform nearly as well as my old connection, and certainly not good enough to host a Minecraft server.

However, there is still hope! I won't stay where I currently live forever. I may move again in Q3 2022, and barring that, Q3 2023. When I move, I may have far better ISP options than what's currently available. I may also make ISP availability a factor for the next place I choose to move.

Until then, thanks for reading this far! If somehow you're still interested in this server, you can check out the rest of this site to get an idea about us, join the Discord (we may not respond right now, though), and check out the Public Archive if you're into that kind of thing.

The rest of this website will remain unmodified until we return.

About the server

  • Runs Java 1.16.5

    • Overworld generated in February 2020 on 1.15

    • Nether and End generated in July 2020 on 1.16

  • Difficulty set to Easy

  • Community-oriented survive and build.

  • Private whitelisted most of the time, open houses held occasionally.

  • Full vanilla gameplay mechanics, no ridiculous plugins changing the gameplay experience.

  • No commands you need to remember, no weird inventory-GUIs or holograms

  • No special donor or VIP ranks, pay to play, pay to win, microtransactions, etc of any kind.

  • Just plain and simple Minecraft, where you can pretty much do what you like

Extra info

  • 24/7 uptime (or at least close to it)

  • Daily backups and restarts (with plentiful warnings)

  • Aimed for adults. Cursing permitted, but hate speech and etc. are forbidden

  • At the end of a server's life cycle, a world backup will be available to download (See Previous servers for info about the old servers, or Public Archive for downloads).

  • Griefing countermeasures you don't have to worry about. If something does get by, just let a @moderator or @admininstrator know on Discord.

  • We've been hosting servers since 2012. We're not going away any time soon.

Modifications from Vanilla

While we do love a vanilla game, there are a few quality of life tweaks we just can't go without.

  • Keep Inventory is on

  • Creeper and ghast block damage disabled

  • When attacked by zombies, Villagers are converted instead of killed (Hard difficulty behavior, rest of game is Easy difficulty).

  • AFK players in overworld are kicked to prevent blocking sleep, 50% of players needed to sleep.

  • In-game chat linked to separate Discord channel (Must be Trusted rank)

  • Dynmap

All other modifications are for administration and other purposes and have no effect on the gameplay experience.

Joining

Most of the time, the server will be whitelisted, and only approved members will be able to join. But every so often, we'll hold what we refer to as an open house, where anyone can join and new players we like will be approved and added to the whitelist. As of right now, we're doing open houses by request only. You can ask us to do an open house for you in our Discord in the #general chat.

Our history

We started a public Minecraft server back in 2012. It was a simple server, a few plugins for teleporting, basic griefing protection, logging plugins, and other plugins of the sort. After a few updates, we went through 2 more reincarnations of the public server (these two were both too complicated and ambitious given the actual time we had available for it). But over time, we got a few dozen members that stuck around long-term.

Around late 2014, Minecraft had another major update and Bukkit got a DMCA takedown. Unfotunately, we no longer had the spare time we once had to keep up with administering a server, much less keeping up with all of the updates that were always coming out and finding new alternatives to running Bukkit and all the plugins we had for it. So we ended up running a private Vanilla server just for our existing members we knew we could trust to not grief or cause problems. While we were able to finally play the game like we wanted on the private server, it slowly died down due to no new members coming in. And for a while, the server was no more.

By 2018, we decided to boot the private server back up and get it going again. Unfortunately, so much time had passed that most members either moved on from our server, or moved on from Minecraft altogether (us being no exception, hence the long hiatus). So we came up with a solution we believe to be a perfect balance between getting new members from the public, limiting the need to constantly administer the server, and giving us the ability to play the game like we want to.

Our vision

Since the beginning, we tried not to stray too far away from the core vanilla experience that makes this game what it is, while still having the server armed and ready for anything the general public could throw at it.

We never liked memorizing a bunch of confusing commands or dealing with servers where the gameplay experience was completely unrecognizable due to loads of plugins.

Now with our current version of the server, we believe we've gotten closer to the vanilla experience than we ever have before, embracing the vanilla version of Minecraft and taking advantage of all of its Survival mechanics (such as Nether transportation in lieu of /warp or teleport pads), while still having the modern amenities (such as /afk and a Discord-linked server chat) and protections of other Bukkit servers.

The future

A huge consideration about picking a Minecraft server to make home is the longevity of it. Being able to look back on your old work, relive the nostalgia, I believe that's really important. And there's so many servers that will suddenly wipe off the face of the planet without a warning, and no traces of the worlds left in existence.

And that's why I'll be frank. I'm one person hosting this server on my home equipment (although not to undersell it, the server runs very well on dedicated hardware and a very fast internet connection). I may not always keep up with the latest updates to Minecraft. I may not even join the server for weeks or months, even sometimes years at a time. I have a full time job and other interests besides just Minecraft.

Although I will say this. So long as there are people playing on the server, and as long as there's a community still kicking, I'll keep running the server. Even if there isn't anyone active, I may shut down the server, but if there's people bugging me to put it back up, I will. I've been hosting servers since 2012, and it hasn't stayed up all the time. But it's always come back at some point, especially when people asked. I've also kept all the old files (except one server, which was before I standardized archiving and backing up the servers).

To further back this up, I'll go over the financial viability. Because running a server that's very expensive, especially when I wouldn't use it, could discourage me from keeping it running. For this reason, I specifically made running this server very budget friendly on me. The only thing I have to go out of the way to pay for is the domain, which is only about $10 a year. The website is hosted for free using Google Sites, I'm basing the community around Discord for free, and the game server runs on my own hardware that I keep running all the time anyway.