Minecraft plugin · Takuma Masuda
Takuma Masuda
Open source · rolled back Scala

Minecraft plugin: the feature that got rolled back

I played on seichi.click until I was near the top of it, then tried to give something back in code. It did not survive contact with real players.

Server
seichi.click, Japanese Minecraft server
Language
Scala, player-developed plugins
Outcome
Shipped, broke, pulled
Source

The server

seichi.click is a long-running Japanese Minecraft server where players compete at clearing terrain. The plugins that make it work are developed in the open by the players themselves. It runs on the goodwill of the people who show up.

Getting there

I got there the ordinary way: playing alone, watching streamers, buying the Java edition once I had my own PC, bolting other people's mods together until the game was the one I wanted.

Alone got old. A streamer I followed was obviously having a better time on seichi.click, so I went, and stayed, and climbed most of the way up the ranks. That is a straight trade of hours for terrain, and I could see what the top was going to cost.

The feature

Then I found out players could work on the server itself. I read the codebase at random and built a new feature, not knowing the language or really how any of it ran. It shipped, then it broke: bugs, some players' data destroyed, the feature pulled, the cause never pinned down.

What stayed

01I wanted to know enough to actually build. I could use software fluently without studying it and read anything put in front of me, but I could not make a thing hold together, or tell what the person on the other side of it felt.
02Those players were building a world, not just a server. That is what I ended up doing research about.

Today

The maintainers have since put solid foundations under the codebase. Thank you for that. SeichiAssist, the server's core plugin, is still open to contributions, so if you play there, it is a good place to start.