The Outpost

The Outpost was a Minecraft Java Edition server. I started there as a player and became a moderator in September 2019. After a few months away experimenting as a developer, I came back as an administrator by March 2020, while the owner had stepped back, so managing it was up to us admins. I also wrote Java plugins for it.

All projects

Role Moderator, then administrator
Years 2019–2022
Players About 10,000 over the years
Discord 2,000+ members
Staff About 20 at its largest
Admin team Seven, by May 2020
Stack Java · Spigot · Community · Staff management

What it was

The Outpost was a Minecraft Java Edition server, and I was part of it from 2019 to 2022. As best I remember, about 10,000 different players joined it over those years. Its Discord had more than 2,000 members.

There were crate sales every month and community events every week.

It was not my server. I was on its staff, first as a moderator and later as an administrator.

My path

From player to administrator

Player to moderator. I joined as a player and worked my way up the ranks. In September 2019 I became a moderator.
Time away. I left the server in November 2019. The next month I got into coding, and I spent the time away experimenting as a developer.
Administrator. By March 2020 I was back, and I was made an administrator because of that development experience.
A team of seven. The lead moderators I had worked closely with were promoted as well, and by May 2020 we were a seven-person admin team. I stayed an administrator until I left the server in spring 2022.

Admin team

Running it as a team

I became an administrator during a stretch when the owner had stepped back from the server. That left the admins responsible for the player base, uptime, server management and revenue. It was a lot of responsibility, and it made us a development team, managing the server around the clock and coming up with new ideas for it. The server was a net-positive business while we managed it.

At its biggest the staff was about 20 people: helpers, moderators, lead moderators and admins. As admins we hired, fired and managed the roles below us. We also looked after the general player base and settled disputes and problems.

The server’s Discord had its own bot, Baylee, which ran from 2020 to 2021. The owner built the bot and was its lead developer. I built Baylee’s website myself. On the bot, I extended and tweaked what the owner had built and added new commands and add-on features. I was still very new to coding, and it was my first time working on software that a whole community used every day.

Development

The plugins I wrote

I wrote server plugins for The Outpost in Java, for Spigot and Paper. The code for two of them is public. Minigame Leaderboard ran on the server for its events.

October 2021 · Java

Bounties

In the plugin, a player can put a bounty on another player, paid out of their own in-game money, and whoever kills that player collects it. Every hour the plugin places a server bounty on the online player with the most playtime for their number of kills, for a random $1,000 to $50,000, with the big amounts rarer. Nobody can set or carry a bounty without opting in first, and moderators can take a player back out. A menu of player heads shows which online players have a bounty, and for how much.

I wrote it for The Outpost in October 2021 and updated it for Minecraft 1.18 in January 2022.

Bounties on GitHub

December 2021 · Java

Minigame Leaderboard

Floating hologram leaderboards for the server’s events. Staff made a board in game with one command, naming the database table and stat to rank, a title, the sort order, how often to refresh and how many players to show. The board then appeared three blocks above where they stood. It worked alongside the Minigame Maker plugin and read the stats from MySQL.

Each board refreshed on its own timer. It ranked the players off the main server thread and skipped a refresh while the last one was still running. Version 2.0, in February 2022, gave every board its own file.

Minigame Leaderboard on GitHub

I also started a dungeon generator plugin of my own, DungeonGen, but I never got far with it. The server’s Bedwars and Skyblock game modes were forked from elsewhere. We did not write them.