CowCraft.net: Minecraft Server Network

CowCraft is a network of Minecraft servers. It was originally founded back in 2012 and has peaked at over 1200 concurrent players online. In total, around 2 million unique users have played CowCraft. The project has profited seven figures in NOK in its lifetime.

Technologies used

History

CowCraft was originally started back in 2012 as a hobby minecraft server. After a couple years the server began to earn quite a lot of money. This led to a budget for advertisement to gain more players, which in turn brought CowCraft higher profits. Java developers and graphic designers were hired to create custom plugins and gamemodes from ideas I came up with. Custom content brought it even higher profits, which were used to further expand the team and advertisement budget. In 2015 CowCraft had peaked at over 1200 concurrent players online, which were considered high numbers back in the day.

The project began losing player base in 2018 due to burn out and lack of motivation to work on CowCraft. The network was considered abandoned in 2020, but is still kept up and running with minimal maintenance. Due to personal nostalgia and community requests, the network will be kept online for as long as possible. CowCraft can be considered one of the oldest minecraft servers still online till this day.

Technical

CowCraft forums are run using Xenforo, which is a popular forum solution. CowCraft at its peak had about 12 different minecraft servers running in a reverse proxy called BungeeCord. This allowed for one server "Hub" to be public facing, while the rest of the server were local and could be only accessed from the hub server. Such a set-up allowed for unlimited scalability while only having one IP for users to access the whole network of servers.

Each server ran optimized server software called PurPur, which is a fork of Spigot server software. Further optimizations were applied using java flags for garbage collection and similar. All of the servers were connected to a shared MariaDB to track user ranks and other statistics across all of the servers.

Around 2015, all of the minecraft servers in the network were converted to Docker containers. Using one base image providing common configuration and plugins. Furthermore, each server had its own Docker image which was layered on top of the base image. All of the images were built using DroneCI and published to a private image repository.

Private Git solution called Gitea was run to store the code of all custom plugins developed by the team. Solutions for building and publishing Java plugins automatically were also implemented.

Currently CowCraft servers and websites are run on Singlbit's infrastructure using Docker.