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Case Study

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.

Join the Server ↗

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

PaperMC 1.21DockerCloudflare TunnelLuckPermsTownyAureliumSkillsMythicMobsDiscordSRVDynmap

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

Edge
Cloudflare Tunnel (Dynmap web map)
TCP :25565 open (Minecraft clients)
Runtime
Docker + docker-compose
itzg/minecraft-server image
Core
PaperMC 1.21
Vault
LuckPerms
EssentialsX
CoreProtect
Gameplay
Towny
AureliumSkills
ShopGUI+
Quests + Citizens
MythicMobs
Multiverse-Core
Ops
DiscordSRV bridge
Daily backup cron (04:00)
Weekly world reset cron (Mon 05:00)

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 2Move backup storage off-site from day one; local-only archives are a single hardware failure away from a full season loss.
  3. 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.

34 — Scoreboard Sidebar + InteractiveChat + Join Screen

"

UI premium — serverul arată profesional din prima secundă

#34.1 — Scoreboard Sidebar

##De ce e important

Jucătorul vede live pe ecran: banii lui, națiunea, TPS, timp jucat. Nu trebuie să scrie comenzi pentru info de bază. Face serverul să pară premium și bine întreținut.

##Plugin: Sidebar via TAB sau ScoreboardStats

TAB plugin include sidebar built-in — nu instalezi nimic extra
Configurezi în data/plugins/TAB/config.yml

##Config TAB Sidebar

# data/plugins/TAB/config.yml

scoreboard:
  enabled: true
  title: "&2&l⚔ SMP Românesc"

  lines:
    - "&7&m──────────────"
    - "&fJucător: &a%player_name%"
    - "&fNațiune: &6%towny_nation_name%"
    - "&fOraș: &e%towny_town_name%"
    - "&7&m──────────────"
    - "&fBani: &a%vault_eco_balance_formatted%⛃"
    - "&fJob: &b%jobsr_user_jobs%"
    - "&fJob Lvl: &b%jobsr_user_jlevel%"
    - "&7&m──────────────"
    - "&fOnline: &a%online%&f/&7%max_players%"
    - "&fTPS: &a%tps_1%"
    - "&7&m──────────────"
    - "&7map.serverultau.ro"

  # Actualizat la fiecare 1 secundă
  update-interval: 20   # ticks (20 = 1 secundă)

#34.2 — InteractiveChat

##De ce e important

Când cineva scrie "[item]" în chat, toți văd itemul cu hover. Click pe link Discord deschide automat. Face chat-ul mai viu și mai util.

##Download

Sursă:   modrinth.com/plugin/interactivechat
Licență: Gratis
Impact vanilla: zero

##Config

# data/plugins/InteractiveChat/config.yml

# Afișare item în chat — jucătorul scrie [item]
item:
  enabled: true
  alias: "[item]"
  hover: "&7Click pentru detalii item"

# Afișare inventar
inventory:
  enabled: true
  alias: "[inv]"

# Mențiuni cu @NumeJucator
mention:
  enabled: true
  sound: true    # sunet când ești menționat
  format: "&e@{player}"

# Link-uri clickable
url:
  enabled: true
  hover: "&7Click pentru a deschide link-ul"
  # discord.gg/server → clickable automat

##Cum arată în chat

[Matei]: Am găsit asta [item] în dungeonul de ieri!
          ↳ hover pe [item] → vede Sabia Sezonului 1 cu stats

[Ana]: @Matei ai văzut bounty-ul pe tine?
        ↳ Matei primește sunet de notificare

[Bot]: Alătură-te Discord: discord.gg/serverultau
        ↳ link clickable, deschide browser

#34.3 — Custom Join Screen

##De ce e important

Prima impresie contează. Un jucător nou care vede un titlu animat și regulile clare rămâne pe server. Unul care vede un ecran gol pleacă.

##Plugin: Via TAB + EssentialsX + DecentHolograms

# Titlu la join — configurat în TAB plugin
join:
  title:
    enabled: true
    title: "&2&l⚔ SMP Românesc"
    subtitle: "&7Vanilla cu prieteni | Sezon 1"
    fade-in: 20    # ticks
    stay: 80
    fade-out: 20

# Mesaj în chat la join
join-message: |
  &8&m━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  &2&l  Bun venit pe SMP Românesc!
  &7  Vanilla cu prieteni | Sezon 1
  &8&m━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  &f  Regulament: &a/warp spawn &f→ tablă informații
  &f  Discord: &adiscord.gg/serverultau
  &f  Hartă: &amap.serverultau.ro
  &8&m━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

##Mesaj special la PRIMUL join (via EssentialsX)

# Doar la primul join — via plugin de first-join sau EssentialsX
first-join:
  enabled: true
  commands:
    - "title {player} title &2&lBun venit!"
    - "title {player} subtitle &7Prima ta aventură începe acum"
    - "give {player} bread 16"        # kit de supraviețuire
    - "give {player} wooden_sword 1"
    - "eco give {player} 200"         # bonus de start
    - "jobs join {player} Miner"      # sugerează primul job

#Related Documents

  • TAB config → 09_spawn_design.md
  • Discord integration → 10_discord_integration.md
  • Spawn design → 09_spawn_design.md
~ End of Document ~
Kiwi