BronyTales History
On April 14th 2019, BronyTales opened to the public as a “crash pad” for players being displaced from another MLP Minecraft server that had announced it would be shutting down. Over time, it has grown from a hastily-released half-finished development server to a full fledged community, to which I am forever grateful for everyone involved - players, staff, donors, even the trolls. Without you all, we would not be where we are today.
More about the history of BronyTales after the break!
BronyTales was not always “BronyTales.” Creation of the server started as a 1.13.2 server on July 1st of 2018 under the code name “EquisOnline,” but most of the groundwork set up was mostly brainstorming for game modes, plugins, and map ideas. Pages and pages of notes and some plugin work, but not much of substance that could be considered a playable server. At this point the only people involved were myself, Tantabus, and Timely.
Original Discord Icon
The project nearly stalled out, as shortly after starting I switched over to dedicating 100% of my free time to finishing a house I was renovating. The project in large part was abandoned until April 7th 2019 when Tantabus, Igny, Nimbus, Fish, and Timely all expressed interest in getting it started. This was also the time we came up with the idea for the “Rules Train” - the train that first-time players spawn in and take to get to the tree of harmony.
Then something quite unexpected, an old server we used to play on announced on the 14th that they were going to shut down. Suddenly fifty or more players were all looking for a new server to play on, and we had barely just started just the week prior. The only thing we had was the build map and a Discord server, but we opened it up anyway. The core plugin for the server, which I had initially planned on working on for two to three weeks, got fast-tracked and I had it ready to play in under a week. I held a few polls to ask what people thought a good “official” name would be and what they thought looked best, and by the 20th we had a (really ugly) temporary website with the server rules. On the 22nd we opened up the survival map for the first time, as well as the first staff applications. In all, the main core of the survival map was completed and ready for play after only eight days of development - a far cry from the four months that we had been planning on.
One artifact of this fast-track to release still haunts the main server map: one of the terrain generation features was going to have a slightly increased diamond rate because equestria is shown in the show to be a land rich in gems. However, the amount that the diamonds were increased was mistakenly left at a debug setting nearly ten times the intended value, so diamonds went from slightly more common than vanilla to being about as abundant as coal.
The rest, as they say, is history. Griefers and trolls helped us find better ways to handle people with ill intent. Players reporting issues with plugins helped us make the server experience better for everyone. We continually look for things we can improve and like to grab stuff from the suggestions chat room in the Discord, so if you want to provide some feedback, I’d love to hear it!
I’ll be updating this blog later with more stories of the server’s history and other related stuff as I find time to do so. Thanks for sticking around!
The server mascot Novel Tale dressing up as Luna
More about the history of BronyTales after the break!
BronyTales was not always “BronyTales.” Creation of the server started as a 1.13.2 server on July 1st of 2018 under the code name “EquisOnline,” but most of the groundwork set up was mostly brainstorming for game modes, plugins, and map ideas. Pages and pages of notes and some plugin work, but not much of substance that could be considered a playable server. At this point the only people involved were myself, Tantabus, and Timely.
Original Discord Icon
The project nearly stalled out, as shortly after starting I switched over to dedicating 100% of my free time to finishing a house I was renovating. The project in large part was abandoned until April 7th 2019 when Tantabus, Igny, Nimbus, Fish, and Timely all expressed interest in getting it started. This was also the time we came up with the idea for the “Rules Train” - the train that first-time players spawn in and take to get to the tree of harmony.
Then something quite unexpected, an old server we used to play on announced on the 14th that they were going to shut down. Suddenly fifty or more players were all looking for a new server to play on, and we had barely just started just the week prior. The only thing we had was the build map and a Discord server, but we opened it up anyway. The core plugin for the server, which I had initially planned on working on for two to three weeks, got fast-tracked and I had it ready to play in under a week. I held a few polls to ask what people thought a good “official” name would be and what they thought looked best, and by the 20th we had a (really ugly) temporary website with the server rules. On the 22nd we opened up the survival map for the first time, as well as the first staff applications. In all, the main core of the survival map was completed and ready for play after only eight days of development - a far cry from the four months that we had been planning on.
One artifact of this fast-track to release still haunts the main server map: one of the terrain generation features was going to have a slightly increased diamond rate because equestria is shown in the show to be a land rich in gems. However, the amount that the diamonds were increased was mistakenly left at a debug setting nearly ten times the intended value, so diamonds went from slightly more common than vanilla to being about as abundant as coal.
The rest, as they say, is history. Griefers and trolls helped us find better ways to handle people with ill intent. Players reporting issues with plugins helped us make the server experience better for everyone. We continually look for things we can improve and like to grab stuff from the suggestions chat room in the Discord, so if you want to provide some feedback, I’d love to hear it!
I’ll be updating this blog later with more stories of the server’s history and other related stuff as I find time to do so. Thanks for sticking around!
The server mascot Novel Tale dressing up as Luna