A “brief” history of Addstar MC
Early 2012 – Our family Minecraft obsession started on the iPods. After much pleading from the kids to get it on the computer, we eventually gave in and all got accounts… and we were hooked from then on! The problem was that the servers our kids played on were full of bad language and toxic behaviour. We couldn’t find anything we were happy letting our youngest play, so we decided to make our own.
March 2012 – It all started with a LAN server add5tar set up to play with the neighbours, but it was laggy and barely worked. After a bit of tinkering, we set it up as a Bukkit server on the same computer at home, which opened the door to plugins. We never advertised, but the kids would invite friends and trusted players from other servers and our little community slowly started growing. We tried a few plugins, like maze and archery, and the player count crept up (along with the lag).
August 2012 – With more players joining, it was clear the spawn add5tar had thrown together wasn’t going to cut it (let’s face it, building is not his strong point!). Thankfully qw33ty, the artistic one of the family, stepped in and designed a proper spawn, and parts of it still live on in our survival spawn today. We tried factions and towny, but our focus was always on letting younger players protect their stuff and play games safely. The first true survival world opened, and we started listing on server websites to bring in public players.
September 2012 – The home server couldn’t keep up, so it was time to find proper hosting. Australian hosting was far too expensive back then, so we went with the cheapest option we could find, a server in the US, and started taking donations to cover costs. We had around 15 regular players and it was booming, but the US lag was a frustration. We started bringing on players as mods while we looked for something better.
November 2012 – The server was on the move again, this time to Singapore. Closer to home and a much better experience for our players! Our community kept growing, we hit 20-25 concurrent players, and welcomed our 1,000th unique player.
And then things got busy…
2013 – We brought in Archmohaa as our first external admin. He had a passion for games and an even bigger passion for shenanigans. We moved hosting home to Australia (thanks to your donations, we couldn’t have done it without you) and finally launched a website. Mid-year _Razz_ and Schmoller joined the admin team, Razz on minigames and Schmoller on plugins. We passed 5,000 unique players with up to 30 on at once, and held the very first Ender Games, an ender pearl parkour event that everyone loved.
2014 – Things went a bit crazy. We hit 30,000 unique players by April and 45,000 by July, with up to 70 online at peak. We also had a real life community meetup at Luna Park in Sydney, which was amazing. On the server side, AddstarMC became a proper network with a Hub connecting Survival, Creative, Games and more. True Hardcore launched too: when you die, your builds are removed and you start again from scratch. Good luck!
2015 – We moved to our own servers in a data centre, and the extra grunt meant we could handle 120+ players at peak. Alchemistmatt, Narimm and Volk101 joined the admin team and the mod team grew to over 15. Ender Games 2015 was another hit, we hosted a Drop Party and an Admin Q&A, and MiniGames kept growing. We also passed 50,000 unique players, which is still a bit mind blowing when we think back to that little LAN server.
2016 – Reward Keys launched! Keys from voting or the store could now be redeemed in your favourite world, instead of just basic item rewards in Survival. Build Comps also came back after being broken for a whole year (sorry builders). Somewhere in there we passed 75,000 unique players.
2017 – We opened our first Prison server. MiniWorks18 spent countless hours building the world and it’s seriously impressive. Later that year MiniWorks18 joined the admin team, and well earned too. Then December happened. A catastrophic crash caused a lot of data loss and a long outage, while add5tar and family were off on a cruise with no way to help. The other admins did everything they could to recover the data. We call this one “the crash we shall not speak of”… so we’ll stop there.
2018 – Unfortunately, the crash we shall not speak of left some nasty surprises behind. In April they caught up with us, corrupting some critical databases and taking us offline for a month. Ouch. Once we were back, we moved to a new hosting provider and went from two old servers to three much faster ones for the same price. Games Day also became a regular thing, running every two weeks with MiniWorks18 and WVKoreaGirl hosting all sorts of minigames. MiniWorks18 being the cheeky admin he is, you never quite knew when mobs would appear or the rules would suddenly change…
2019 – bizarr0, a fairly new member of the community, joined the admin team and took on a lot of our Linux server management. Skyblock got its first Market world, the servers were upgraded to Minecraft 1.14, and Skygrid was shut down to get ready for a new one. We also started streaming on Twitch! Sometime during the year we welcomed our 100,000th unique player. From a LAN game with the neighbours’ kids to 100,000 players. Wow.
2020 – The new Skygrid launched, lovingly known as “KhaosLand” (for good reason). Survival moved to 1.15, a new Hardcore world opened on 1.16, and more minigames were released. COVID-19 also brought a massive wave of new players. Some good out of a very bad year, and we were so glad to have you all.
2021 – Minecraft 1.17 came out and a lot of our servers were upgraded, with only the Hardcore worlds being reset. We also finally replaced our old, buggy, custom built chat system with a newer and much more powerful one, complete with chat channels. It was a giant migration project and we’ve never looked back. The Limbo world was added too, so if you go AFK, off to Limbo you go.
2022 – Survival was reset for Minecraft 1.18 and we introduced resource worlds that reset every month. That means you never run out of places to mine, and each upgrade brings new content without wiping your build world. Player Vaults also arrived, giving you extra storage you can open from anywhere.
2023 – Community Parkour launched, parkour built by players for players! We finally said goodbye to our very old Enjin site and launched our new and improved website. Prison got a Prestige system so you can play through the whole Prison life again, and we added 2,000 more Unscramble phrases to make it much more challenging (you’re welcome). We ran our first Place event, basically r/place but in Minecraft, and the widely renowned Penguins vs Pandas HC3 event was a huge success. The Penguins and Pandas still talk about it.
2024 – mylesk23 joined the admin team, and HC3 returned with a new event world, “Unchartered Seasons”. Coordinates were scrambled, so players had to find their way using landmarks and markers. It went down really well! We released our very first Wrapped, a yearly summary of each player’s activity on the server. Skyblock got a brand new experience with greenhouses and much more, and Skygrid was reset and upgraded, ready for everyone to leap into the void (while the admins quietly giggle).
2025 – For the first time, we showed off AddstarMC at CubeCon, a virtual Minecraft convention held entirely in-game. Sharrazz, who has played here with her family for years, joined the admin team. We moved away from Tebex/Buycraft to our own self-hosted webstore and launched StarGems, our first ever premium currency, which you can buy on the store and spend in-game. To finish the year, HC3 returned with “Villager Seasons”, where villagers age, retire and eventually pass away. Rest in peace, trading halls. By the end of 2025 more than 125,000 unique players had joined AddstarMC. Not bad for a server that started because a few kids just wanted somewhere safe to play together.