Constantiam
Constantiam is a "semi-vanilla" Minecraft anarchy server created and inhabited by previous 2b2t players on February 14, 2016 at the height of the conflict with the Tyranny/Nerds Inc. It is one of the oldest 2b2t clone servers to still exist, operated by a user with the name PhantomCaptain.[1]
The initial playerbase first came from this drama, then slowly began to expand with several pieces of media, most notably the YouTube community, mentioning the server alongside 2b2t. The server was seen by some as an appeasing alternative to 2b2t and would develop its own secluded culture. It would go through periods of being whitelisted until updating to 1.19.2 on December 23, 2022.
Currently, between 30 and 100 players occupy the server for most of the given time, with the majority of the players being from Europe.
History[edit | edit source]
Constantiam was created sometime in April 2016, presumably April 16th, the day James_Rustles joined. Since 2016 James_Rustles has claimed that around April 22, 2016, he found Constantiam while on 4chan. He logged in and told about the newly founded server to two of his friends — Spartan512 and ftsqr. Two days later, he informed other members of La Rosa about his find. However, this is not true. James_Rustles created Constantiam with Spartan512 to try and replicate 2b2ts environment prior to The Tyranny backdooring the server. He claimed a player name PhantomCaptain created Constantiam, and he had found out about it through 4chan so other 2b2t players would not be hesitant on joining a server run by a fellow player, as they may have feared the server would not truly be anarchy. James_Rustles edited the playerdata on the accounts PhantomCaptain and SpectreCaptain to add to the illusion. PhantomCaptain supposedly joined Constantiam in February of 2016, however, the Minecraft account PhantomCaptain was not created until May 2016, as shown by the Mojang API. Coincidentally, the only players with a joindate before April 23rd, 2016 are James_Rustles and Spartan512's main accounts and alts. April 23rd was the day James invited his friends to Constantiam, it is also the day the constantiam.net domain was registered.
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The people who abandoned this server before you started showing up in droves were mostly quiet. When they did talk it was small talk. they didn't seem to do much but walk around. A few joined in march, then most left. One or two stayed around. In April I advertised on 4chan to try and get more players as there was no one on." - Phantom describing that time period to mrx.
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In the meantime, on 2b2t (mid-April 2016), a group of friends that were basing at a base called La Rosa (which was found five months later in September) were getting sick and tired of all the 2b2t drama that was going on with Nerds Inc, backdoors and much more, and decided to leave the server and find a new place to call home.
Original Constantiam crew: James_Rustles (VWEmissions/MurdockMatt), mrx, Aryvas, Sharpie, UBERSLUGCAKE, Mbash, Victor96, Thrax_Keyholder, Spartan512
Then: OreMonger, LoliLicker, NatInTheHat8, ftsqr
Mid May 2016. The server was alive and gaining speed. Both of the groups had a few members constantly online. Word started spreading in the 2b2t oldfag community and solo players started joining, like Jazukai and Legato.
Early June 2016. The server finally started getting "newfags" from the Minecraft Forum, who decided to keep playing instead of logging off after a few hours. Despite this, most of the players online were still friends from 2b2t bases.
Late June/All of July 2016 "newfags" finally outnumbered the original crew. Around this time the server started to grow much faster. It was being advertised more and more by new, freshly-joined players. A post on the 2b2t subreddit was made July 5, 2016 which caused a lot of players (including iTristan, jared2013, BenitoTortellini, c1yd3i, SirLeonidas, Sage_Mathias, and many others) to join.
2017-2018 The server consisted of many players both from 2b and new to the scene itself, with many bases such as Nexus and Aurora Seas being founded by such contingents. This was also the time where the chunk dupe was prevalent, and many stashes were made that would continue to be the largest to this day. In late 2018, Phantom announced the intention to upgrade the server to 1.13 in February 2019, which led to the meme of asking when February 2019 would be. This time would also see Elytra be disabled as flight exploits were causing lag.
2019-2020 Since 2018, the server had gained more and more traction, and this came to a precipice in 2019. Not all was well, however, as the server suffered from bot attacks, chunk corruption, and a flood of new players, leading to the implementation of a whitelist system in September 2019. The server administrator PhantomCaptain hoped in this time to work on the stability of the server and improve performance but had to step away for a period of time. In 2020, the server went onto a temp map to fix the lag issues and would not return to the main map until April 12th. The majority of these issues would be solved but still be present into 2021.
2021-2022 The server had entered a state of relative decline alongside the popularity of anarchy and with Covid restrictions lessening. In December of 2021, Phantom took down and kept down the server as soon as Log4j was announced, and the server was spared from the worst of it. However, during this time was arguably Const's lowest player count since its inception, with some of the dead hours having single digit player counts. Around this time, members of the community, led by KiwiSlider, successfully held a raffle with in game goods such as mapart to spur donations to the server which would amount to $700. In January, Const upgraded to a new hard drive, and it seemed Phantom had returned with intent to rekindle the server. In April, Elytra were re-enabled, the whitelist was disabled, and work was announced on updating the server to 1.17. This would later be changed to 1.19.2 as Phantom believed it would be more stable. In November of 2022, Constantiam entered a 1.19.2 test map and the main map began being transferred over. On December 23, Constantiam was fully upgraded to 1.19.2 and saw a revival in its playerbase, reaching 70-80 players daily again.
2023 With the 1.19.2 update, many players returned, and some came to Constantiam to play seriously for the first time. Some noticeable among these being AlphaComputer and Jacktherippa. During the 1.19 update drama on 2b2t in August of 2023, many players from 2b2t would migrate to Constantiam at this time in protest of the actions taken by the server's admin Hausemaster. After the changes were reverted, many of them would return to 2b2t, but some would stay on and continue to play full-time on Constantiam.
2024 The server celebrated 8 years of activity, with many old and new players coming together to celebrate. 400 Base was reconstructed out of Obsidian at spawn, The Water Cube at spawn was removed, and a large Community End Base was constructed. In June 2024, PhantomCaptain re-enabled the Chunk Dupe for specific players on the server, allowing for large stashes to be created very quickly. A by-product of this was chunks with excess data being reset, most of these being stashes around the server. Many players complained about these stashes being lost, and chunk resetting. This resulted in the server being taken offline for a month, and the hardware being upgraded to allow for greater stability on the server. Phantom began work on updating the server to 1.21 after the server was brought back online, and on August 13th, Constantiam became the first Anarchy Server to update to 1.21.
References[edit | edit source]
https://www.reddit.com/r/constantiam/comments/5jkth2/history_of_constantiam_first_year_from_its/
https://www.reddit.com/r/constantiam/comments/7kby7i/history_of_constantiam_second_year/
https://www.reddit.com/r/constantiam/comments/aa3xkg/history_of_constantiam_third_year/
