IceLegends SMP
A vanilla-first Romanian Minecraft SMP built for clean 3–4 month seasons.
The Problem
Running a community SMP means balancing plugin depth against vanilla feel, managing a world-reset cycle, and keeping operations simple enough for a solo admin. IceLegends SMP solves this with 11 carefully chosen plugins, strict feature gating per a "vanilla-first" principle, and fully automated backups and world resets.
My Role
Designed, configured, and deployed solo — server architecture, 11-plugin selection and configuration, LuckPerms permission model, economy and nation design, Docker infrastructure, and Cloudflare Tunnel ingress for Dynmap.
Highlights
- PaperMC 1.21 on Docker with a hard 11-plugin cap — every plugin is justified and none are redundant
- Towny nations with seasonal quests (Quests + Citizens NPCs) and a single manually-spawned MythicMobs boss per season
- AureliumSkills passive bonuses only — active abilities disabled to preserve vanilla combat (P-01)
- DiscordSRV bridge logs every death, join, and chat event to dedicated Discord channels in real time
- Daily automated backups with 7-day retention; resource world resets every Monday at 05:00 via cron
Stack
Constraints
- Solo admin — every operation must complete in under 10 minutes (P-02).
- Vanilla-first (P-01): if any plugin disappeared tomorrow, the game must continue unchanged.
- 11-plugin hard cap — every addition must displace something or prove unique, irreplaceable value.
System Architecture
Key Trade-offs
The decisions worth defending — what I chose, what I turned down, and why.
Plugin count cap
Chose
Hard cap at 11 plugins
Rejected
Unlimited plugin stack
Each plugin is a maintenance surface and a potential conflict point. The cap forces prioritisation and keeps the dependency graph legible for a solo admin.
Public ingress for Dynmap
Chose
Cloudflare Tunnel (no open ports)
Rejected
Expose :8123 directly via UFW
No origin IP exposure, free DDoS protection, and zero firewall rule maintenance — the same pattern used by the IceLegends portfolio site.
AureliumSkills scope
Chose
Passive bonuses only, active abilities disabled
Rejected
Full AureliumSkills feature set including active combat abilities
Active abilities alter vanilla combat — a direct violation of P-01. Passive bonuses reward playtime additively without changing the combat model.
Season lifecycle
Chose
Full world reset every 3–4 months
Rejected
Incremental map expansion with no reset
Resets keep the world fresh, prevent terrain exhaustion, and give every new player an equal start — critical for community health in a small SMP.
What I'd Do Differently
An honest retrospective — the stuff I'd change with more time, more users, or a second pass.
- 1Add a staging compose stack so plugin updates can be tested before touching the live season — one bad update cost several hours of rollback work.
- 2Move backup storage off-site from day one; local-only archives are a single hardware failure away from a full season loss.
- 3Wire Dynmap as a named Docker service rather than relying on the host port, so the Cloudflare Tunnel config survives container IP reassignment on restart.
Technical Deep-Dive
Architecture, specifications, and implementation details.
13 — Performance & SLAs
"TPS targets, JVM flags, Paper config, monitoring commands
#Performance Targets
| Metric | Target | Warning | Critical | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TPS | 20.0 | < 18.0 | < 15.0 | Reduce view-distance, check entities |
| Server startup | < 90s | 90–120s | > 120s | Check plugin errors |
| Container RAM | < 70% | 70–85% | > 85% | Increase MEMORY in .env |
| Disk usage | < 60% | 60–80% | > 80% | Prune old backups |
| Backup time | < 5 min | 5–10 min | > 10 min | World too large — prune or upgrade |
#TPS Response Guide
| TPS | Action |
|---|---|
| 18–20 | Normal — no action needed |
| 15–17 | Monitor — check docker stats mc and entity counts |
| 12–14 | Reduce view-distance to 6 immediately |
| < 12 | Restart server if no recovery in 5 minutes |
| < 8 | Emergency restart: docker compose restart mc |
#JVM Flags (Aikar's Flags)
# Add to docker-compose.yml environment section
JVM_OPTS: >-
-XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC
-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch
-XX:G1NewSizePercent=30
-XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent=40
-XX:G1HeapRegionSize=8M
-XX:G1ReservePercent=20
-XX:G1HeapWastePercent=5
-XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget=4
-XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=15
-XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent=90
-XX:G1RSetUpdatingPauseTimePercent=5
-XX:SurvivorRatio=32
-XX:+PerfDisableSharedMem
-XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=1
#Paper Performance Config
# config/paper-global.yml
chunk-loading:
autoconfig-send-distance: true
target-player-chunk-send-rate: 100.0
anti-xray:
enabled: true
engine-mode: 2 # best protection, sends fake ores to client
max-chunk-section-index: 3
update-radius: 2
# paper-world-defaults.yml
spawn-limits:
monsters: 70 # vanilla default — keep it
animals: 10
water-animals: 5
tick-rates:
sensor:
villager:
secondarypoisensor: 40 # major villager lag reduction
#server.properties Performance Keys
view-distance=8 # balance between performance and experience
simulation-distance=6
network-compression-threshold=256
max-tick-time=60000
entity-broadcast-range-percentage=100
#Monitoring Commands
# TPS
docker exec mc rcon-cli tps
# Online players
docker exec mc rcon-cli list
# Container resources
docker stats mc --no-stream
# Disk
df -h /opt
# Memory details
free -h
# Recent logs
docker compose logs mc --tail=50
# Check healthcheck status
docker inspect mc --format '{{.State.Health.Status}}'
#Log Locations
| Log | Path | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| MC server (current) | data/logs/latest.log | Overwritten on restart |
| MC server (archived) | data/logs/YYYY-MM-DD.log.gz | 30 days (Paper default) |
| Backup script | /var/log/mc-backup.log | Manual rotation |
| World reset | /var/log/mc-resurse.log | Manual rotation |
#Related Documents
- System architecture →
01_system_architecture.md - Runbooks for TPS issues →
14_backup_recovery.md