Minecraft has always had a special place in my heart, from the very early days to nowadays, I still enjoy jumping in once in a while to visit some new servers friends recommended me.
Let’s go over a few that marked me in some way.
FunCraft
FunCraft is a French Minecraft server that opened in 2012 and closed in 2023. It was known to be one of the largest French-speaking Minecraft servers that also accepted cracked versions of the game.
While my account is older than this server, I spent countless hours on it as it was the place to make friends and play with friends.
The server was no Hypixel but still had plenty of classic games, such as Factions PVP, CTF, and a freebuild.
Around the time I stopped playing on it, the most popular game was some sort of GTA clone in Minecraft. Everything was pretty jank and you could get killed in one shot by some guy who definitely used his mom’s credit card.
In the end, I only have sparse memories of that one, but I still remember having some fun times over there.
Serveurs FRM
Yet another set of French servers, Serveurs FRM, was a set of two Minecraft servers administred by the same person, one FreeBuild and another hardcore one. It used to be an offshoot of the Minecraft news site FR-Minecraft, but that eventually became independent.
The hardcore one was already either abandoned or closed when I joined the freebuild, so I never experienced it. The freebuild itself also had a process to be able to even build. You needed to be a visitor for a while, go around and see stuff, then head to the forum and make a long application about why you want to be on the server and what you saw there.
In any case, I probably spent half a decade playing there, doing all sorts of stuff, even hanging out in the IRC and TeamSpeak servers.
You’ll notice the website of the server is not linked, and there’s a good reason for that. One night, while hanging out in one of the IRC channels, I asked the administrator why the website and forum didn’t have HTTPS. He replied that “it’s useless” and “it’s just a Minecraft forum anyway” and a fight started. This ended in me asking him to basically ban my account and scrub all my data from the forum.
To this day, the website still doesn’t have HTTPS, a truly wonderous feat of engineering.
The server itself is still open, though it has very low traffic nowadays and has had a map reset since I’ve last played on it.
Hypixel
Founded in 2013, Hypixel is just the largest Minecraft server around. While I first logged into it in 2014, it’s only later in 2015, that I really started playing on it, as this was the year that the housing and skywars gamemodes released.
I originally liked the housing as it was a way to just chat to people and have cool parkours. Same for the skywars, there was that special mode that would spawn an ender dragon randomly at some point; some sort of “chaotic edition”. I had plenty of fun playing on that one with school friends as well.
I still revisit the server once in a while, but less than I used to. For instance, the hit game from Hypixel is still the “skyblock”, but it’s not a gamemode I find fun. I also haven’t done any sort of PvP in Minecraft for probably half a decade now.
The only thing I visit is the housing, as some rare times you can get a good surprise (for instance, with oThoron’s Slimekour Funhouses). However, sadly, most of the parkour houses nowadays are just large cubes with lanes trying to fit as many levels as possible, so not fun at all to play. Also those tend to harass you to get some “cookies” (a worthless in-game currency that affects how your house is ranked).
MCC Island
I will be honest, I wasn’t expecting that one to make it into this post. Opened in 2022, MCC Island is a fairly recent server which I was made aware of by a friend. Apparently they host some kind of Minecraft competition, but I don’t watch that kind of stuff.
It was two major gamemodes that are what I’m connecting to this server for: the parkour and the fishing.
The parkour is fairly simple, every month, you have a new set of parkours, complete them, get medals, and try to get a good time. I like that; the tracks are nicely decorated and fun, there are even bonus tracks that allow you to get more medals. As for what do those medals do? I have no clue, and I can’t say that I care a lot. I’m having plenty of fun with the game as-is like that.
The fishing is a bit more funny, it’s a minigame in which you… fish. That’s it. Fish stuff, sell it, get tokens, buy upgrades, fish more. In a sense, it’s relaxing, that’s why I like it. You just fish, and once in a while, you get some upgrade to fish somewhere else.
The only reason I’m even mentioning MCC Island is because of how much work went into it. The server itself was made by Nox Crew, which are known to have made maps like Terra Swoop Force. In short, everything is really high quality and custom. Everything has nice sound design, animations, icons, and interfaces; everything. For instance, the global level shared across all minigames is represented by a crown which gets XP added every time you complete certain objectives in games. When you gain that XP, an animation plays of those small XP orbs being absorbed by the crown, which is something I’ve never seen animated that fluidly in Minecraft.
Though I must still mention the elephant in the room: the monetization. This server feels very much like a “go take your mom’s credit card” kind of server, especially when seeing they have a battlepass and some sort of craftable cosmetics with lootboxes.
Overall, it’s still one of the most polished Minecraft servers out there, but also the freshest one in my memory, hence the longer paragraph.
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