Server rules

Every rule below exists because something actually went wrong at some point on some server, not because we enjoy writing rules. They apply to everyone equally, including people who have been playing here since the beginning.

1. Do not grief

Griefing means damaging, destroying, or defacing something another player built, without their permission. Breaking blocks out of someone's house, burning a build, flooding it with water or lava, hollowing out the ground beneath it, or scribbling over it with signs and blocks — all of it counts.

This is the rule we enforce hardest, because it is the one that actually drives people off a server. Someone loses a build they spent three weekends on, and they do not come back. We keep backups and we can usually roll back a griefed area, but a rollback is a repair, not a fix — the time is still gone.

Two clarifications that come up regularly. Building something ugly right next to a base is not griefing, though see rule 6. And "the chest was unlocked" is not permission, any more than an unlocked front door is an invitation.

2. Do not steal

Taking items from another player's chests, furnaces, item frames, or storage systems is theft, whether or not the container was protected. The same applies to harvesting someone else's farm, milking their animals, or emptying their mob grinder while they are offline.

Shared community projects are the obvious exception — if a build is explicitly marked as public, or you have been told to help yourself, take what you need. If you are not sure, ask in chat. "I assumed it was communal" is a defence that works exactly once.

Items dropped on death belong to the player who died. If you happen across someone's death pile, the decent move is to say so in chat rather than pocket it.

3. No cheating or unfair clients

Anything that gives you an ability the game does not give other players is banned. In practice that means:

• X-ray — texture packs, mods, or resource packs that make blocks transparent so you can see ores or bases through terrain.
• Fly, speed, reach, and no-clip hacks in survival.
• Combat automation — kill aura, aim assist, auto-clickers, triggerbots.
• Macros or bots that play for you while you are away from the keyboard, including AFK-fishing setups driven by an auto-clicker rather than by redstone.

What is fine: minimap mods without cave or entity radar, performance mods like Sodium or OptiFine, shader packs, inventory-sorting mods, and cosmetic resource packs. If a mod only changes how the game looks or how well it runs, it is almost certainly allowed. If it changes what you can do, assume it is not, and ask first.

4. Report exploits, do not farm them

Duplication glitches, item spawning bugs, and anything else that produces resources the game did not intend must be reported, not exploited. Duping wrecks a survival economy quietly and permanently — once a few thousand duplicated diamond blocks exist, every hour anyone else has spent mining is retroactively devalued.

Report a bug and we will thank you for it. Farm one and we will remove the items, which usually means rolling back an inventory.

5. Keep chat civil

This is a mixed-age, mixed-language, all-provinces server. Assume a twelve-year-old is reading.

Not acceptable: racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other slur-based abuse; targeted harassment; threats; sexual content; spamming or flooding chat; and advertising other servers or Discord communities. Racial abuse in particular is a permanent ban on first offence, without a warning and without a discussion — in this country especially, we are not interested in hosting a debate about it.

Mild swearing in passing is not something we hunt for. Swearing at another player is. The distinction is whether there is a target.

Speak whichever language you like. English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana — all fine. Do not use a language switch as a way to insult someone and hope staff will not notice, because that is exactly the sort of thing that gets reported by other players.

6. Respect other people's space

Do not build directly against someone's base without asking. Do not wall people in, block their entrances, or dig tunnels under their build. Do not claim land you have no intention of using, and do not build a perimeter around someone specifically to trap them.

Keep a reasonable distance when you settle somewhere new — far enough that neither of you is redesigning your skyline around the other. If two players end up in genuine conflict over territory, staff will mediate, and the usual outcome is that whoever got there first keeps the spot.

Roads, public farms, spawn structures, and community builds are shared infrastructure. Use them, maintain them if you like, but do not redecorate or dismantle them unilaterally.

7. Do not deliberately lag the server

Low latency is the whole reason this server exists, so anything that degrades performance for everyone is taken seriously. Avoid enormous mob farms left running unattended, huge stacks of dropped items, giant always-on redstone clocks, and rapid chunk-loading loops built purely to see what breaks.

Almost nobody does this maliciously — it is usually an over-ambitious farm that nobody realised was a problem. If staff ask you to switch something off or scale it back, that is a request to cooperate, not an accusation. Deliberate lag machines are a different matter and are treated as an attack on the server.

8. One player, one account

Play on your own account. Alt accounts used to dodge a ban, farm rewards twice, evade a mute, or stack votes in a community decision are not allowed, and ban evasion converts a temporary ban into a permanent one.

Siblings sharing a household connection are fine and common — just tell us, so that two accounts on one IP does not read as evasion. Account sharing is at your own risk: if someone else plays on your account and breaks a rule, the consequences land on your username, because that is all we can see.

9. Do not impersonate staff

Do not claim to be an administrator or moderator, and do not use a username or skin designed to be mistaken for one. Staff will never ask you for your Microsoft account password, your email login, or a payment of any kind — nobody on this server has any legitimate reason to want those, and anyone asking is running a scam. Report it.

Equally, do not act as staff. If someone is breaking the rules, report them; do not organise a mob, and do not dispense your own punishment. Vigilante justice on a Minecraft server reliably ends with the wrong person losing a base.

How enforcement works

We are not trying to catch people out. Most rule-breaking on this server is a new player who genuinely did not know, and the usual first response is somebody explaining the rule in chat.

Broadly, the escalation runs: a verbal warning, then a temporary mute or ban, then a permanent ban. Where an incident lands on that scale depends on how much damage was done, whether it looks deliberate, and whether it has happened before. Some things skip the ladder entirely — X-ray, duping, ban evasion, scam attempts, and racial abuse are grounds for immediate removal.

Where a rule was broken at someone else's expense, we also try to put it right: rollbacks for griefed builds, returned items for theft, removed items for duping. Restoring the victim matters at least as much as punishing the offender.

If you think we got it wrong

Appeal it. Genuinely — email [email protected] with your username, roughly when it happened, and your account of it. The contact page sets out what to include. Staff make mistakes, logs can be ambiguous, and we would rather reverse a bad call than defend it. What does not help is a second alt account or the same appeal sent five times.

These rules will change

Something will happen that none of this covers, and we will add a rule. When that happens the change is announced in-game and updated here. Staff have discretion to act on conduct that is obviously against the spirit of the server even where no specific rule names it — that discretion exists to close gaps, not to invent offences.