A World of Warcraft-style MMO — classes, quests, zones, reputation, professions, dungeons, a flight network — written from scratch inside Minecraft, on a hand-built map. One person is building it. It is not finished, and this page is not pretending otherwise.
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The Royal Castle — the map, seen at ground level
What this is
Not a Minecraft server with a few RPG plugins bolted on. Vanilla combat is replaced rather than extended, and every system underneath it — the classes, the quest engine, the economy, the loot tables, the zone bands, the flight graph — is written by hand for this project.
There are no third-party gameplay plugins. Items, quests, spells, vendors, zones and dungeons are all data files that get validated at load, so the world can be rewritten without touching a line of Java. Characters, regions, marks, mail and reputation live in Postgres behind a migration history. It is one plugin JAR made of modules that resolve each other by interface, which is what makes it possible for one person to keep adding systems without the previous ones falling over.
The world
The map was bought, not generated — three thousand blocks by two and a half thousand, with thirteen biomes, twelve villages, castles, temples, mines and dungeons, all of it placed by a builder rather than by an algorithm. That is the fixed input everything else is fitted to. No terrain here was made by code, and none of it is disposable.
Places are not decoration. A zone is a named level band with a shape, and crossing into one puts its name on your screen tinted by how it rates against you — red for deadly down to grey for trivial. Zones nest, so walking through a village gate names the village without losing the province around it. The land is cut into tiers that decide what you may do to it: sanctuary where nothing can be touched, wilderness where ore and trees come back on their own timers, mines you may dig out properly, and dungeons. There is no free building anywhere on it. A gathered ore node is written to the database with its exact block state and put back later, because a hole nobody can fill is permanent damage to a map that was made by hand.
The classes
Abilities fire from right-click on whatever is in your hand — a sword, an axe, or a casting focus. Vanilla does nothing when you right-click a weapon, so it is a free input on the thing you are already fighting with: no hotbar slots spent, no spellbook window, nothing to learn beyond right-click. Two slots, and each fires the newest ability you know in it, so levelling up genuinely changes what you press.
Fury · Tank, DPS
Fury starts empty, builds by hitting and by being hit, and drains away out of combat — so a warrior is weakest at the pull and cannot bank rage between fights. Spends it making one swing count.
Armour plate, mail, leather, cloth Weapons sword, axe, mace, trident, bow, crossbow
Mana · Tank, DPS, Healer
Strikes at range, and can pull somebody back from the edge once a fight. Mana is attrition: it starts full, comes back slowly, and a long fight is a budget.
Armour plate, mail, leather, cloth Weapons sword, axe, mace, trident
Focus · DPS
Focus returns fast, so the rhythm is the resource rather than the budget — the poison is almost always ready. The only class with two companions, and the only one whose companions fight.
Armour mail, leather, cloth Weapons bow, crossbow, sword, axe, trident
Mana · DPS
Bolts that arrive now, and a floor of ice for whatever got close. Frostbolt at one, frost nova at five, fireball at ten, cone of cold at twenty, frostfire bolt at thirty — each replacement beats the thing it replaces at that slot's job.
Armour cloth Weapons sword, casting focus
Mana · DPS
Damage that arrives late and stays, and takes some of it back. Corruption, drain life, rain of fire, drain soul — a warlock wins fights that have already been going on for a while.
Armour cloth Weapons sword, casting focus
There is no equip step. Wearing something is putting it in the slot — drag a helmet onto your head, hold a sword, and that is the whole gesture. Your stats are read off the live slots every time they change, never from a record of an equip action, so the sheet cannot disagree with what you are wearing. Proficiency is enforced: armour a class may not wear comes off, and a weapon a class may not wield stays in the hand and gives nothing at all — no stats, and fist damage.
Where it actually is
A long list of things work. A longer list does not exist yet. Both belong on the same page — a project this size is mostly the second list, and pretending otherwise would waste the time of anyone who turned up to help.
Help wanted
An MMO is not a one-person job, and it is showing. If any of the below sounds like something you would enjoy doing on a Tuesday evening, there is a place for it here. You do not need to have made a game before, and you do not need to know how Minecraft works underneath. Most of this work never touches Java at all.
The map was bought; the insides of it were not. A shop needs to look like a shop before somebody can be put behind the counter, a keep needs a throne room, and a dungeon needs to read as a dungeon before anything is spawned in it. If you build, there is more work here than one person will ever get through.
Quests are data files, not code — an objective, a chain, a line of dialogue, and a reason a farmer wants ten eggs. If you can write a person who sounds like a person, you can write content for this without ever opening the source.
Almost nothing here has been played by anyone except the person who wrote it, which is the worst possible test. Finding the thing that falls over and describing exactly what you did is genuinely the most useful contribution available right now.
Paper API, one JAR of Gradle modules, Postgres behind Flyway and HikariCP. Modules resolve each other by interface, so a new system is a new module and one line in a list — you can own crafting, or talents, or boss scripting, without standing on anybody's toes.
Item icons, class crests, a resource pack, an interface that is not text in a chat window. There are 944 items in the catalogue and not one of them has a picture. This is the single biggest visible gap in the project.
There is a damage curve, a spell curve, an experience curve and a level cap, and all of them were fitted by one person arguing with himself. Loot tables, class balance and zone pacing would all be better for a second opinion.
Get in touch
Discord is where the work happens and the only place to find it. There is no application and no commitment — turn up, say which of the above sounds like you, or just watch it get built. Questions about how any of it works are welcome; most of this was figured out the hard way and none of it is a secret.