HearthCraft, a 40,000-player Minecraft server turned into an online archive
- Project
- Web Development
Some projects start as a hobby and end up as a record of a community. HearthCraft is one of them. This post features a website by Simonee Mariquit that archives the server Simonee founded and ran for seven years.
The server
The first iteration of HearthCraft SMP went up in October 2018 on Minecraft version 1.12. It gained some early traction, but the server only started to grow steadily in April 2019. From July 2019 onward, the world was never reset, so the builds players made stayed in place for years.
HearthCraft was a survival multiplayer server with a no-griefing rule and an in-game economy. Its store was 0 percent pay-to-win. Resource worlds, mcMMO, and other features kept the game varied. The stated goal from the start was to build a place people could call home, which is where the name comes from.
Through the pandemic the server stayed active and became a regular online space for thousands of people. Over its life, about 40,000 players joined. The team behind it credits its staff and the community’s conduct for keeping it going in a crowded field of Minecraft servers.
The archive
HearthCraft officially shut down in 2025. Rather than let the history disappear with the server, Simonee built a website that works as a museum of it: a gallery of screenshots of builds, landscapes, and player creations, along with pages about the server, links to its Discord and Instagram, and its listing on PlanetMinecraft. Anyone who played can revisit it, and anyone who did not can see what a long-running community server looked like from the inside.
The site is at hearthcraft.stimmie.dev.