History of Bityard

Bityard has been around in one form or another for years. This page serves to recount the significant happenings in the community's past.

PurePhun Era
Where it all began. PurePhun was a small vanilla minecraft server mostly like any other. The server's owner, UberGeek, was reputed for taking an active interest in the community's projects. One such project was the city of Afterlight, a welcoming settlement full of creative and cute abodes that became a popular play at. This is where epolixa, 8bitchap, Natsirk, Docsin, and others met each other for the first time.

One day, Afterlight was attacked - griefers found their way onto the server and did their best to ruin the city with TNT and lava. It was a sad day for many players. Fortunately, UberGeek was also notorious for his excellency in managing the server with his homebrew auditing tools. Although UberGeek was able to rollback the damage and purge the culprits, the incident left a lasting impression that seemed to mark a stagnation for PurePhun. UberGeek began to make fewer appearances and the community as a whole dwindled until PurePhun eventually was closed.

MineSmash Era


Some time after PurePhun closed, one of its players - 8bitChap - decided that he wanted to start his own server: Minesmash. This server ran for several years and was the most formative for the community that eventually became Bityard.

5by5
5by5craft was a community of fans of the 5by5 tech podcast that played Minecraft together. At some point, their host was unable to continue supporting them and they decided to look for a new server to migrate to together. That ended up being Minesmash. Lonnie_Mack, one of the original staff of 5by5, became a moderator of Minesmash under Para.

MCAnaethesia
Another community of players that migrated to Minesmash together.

Lords of Minecraft
LoM, as it was commonly called, was a popular Minecraft role-play plot server surrounding the YouTube personalities, characters and lore from URealms. A portion of the Minesmash community, including epo, Harpy, and Natsirk, discovered LoM sometime during Para's ownership of Minesmash and, for a while, split their time between the two servers.

Quirky Survival


A brief twitch series including epo, Harpy, Needle_Archer and others in which the goal each stream was to deal with an additional layer of challenge in survival Minecraft (such as, vegetarianism, toxic water, etc). The challenges were provided through a custom plugin developed by epo.

Skityard Era
After Minesmash closed, Skit started his own Realms server under the name of "Bityard", one of the favored suggestions for a potential rename of Minesmash.

Bityard Era - World 1


Moving off of Realms, epolixa took up ownership of a new Bityard server. Temporarily, it was hosted on epo's personal laptop while he was going to school. Eventually, the server was supported to the extent that it could afford a space on a hosting platform and CubedHost was chosen to host Bityard as it was popularized by the prolific Hermitcraft server at the time. CubedHost continues to host Bityard to this day.

Bityard Era - World 2
Although Bityard was created with the optimistic intent of never resetting its world, updates to Minecraft and to the Bityard community itself gradually made a World 2 into an appealing option. This reset opened the door for a diversion from a pure vanilla format, with a resource pack, loot table changes, command blocks, and spigot plugins.

Bityard Era - World 3
World 3 was more of an experimental reset as the vanilla-born community became increasingly curious about modded Minecraft. Rather than use any popular modpack that already existed, the community created its own light modpack, including not only vanilla-considerate mods, but also a Bityard mod with features imagined and developed by the players.

Bityard Era - World 4
It was a fun experiment, but fully-modded Minecraft proved to be a strain on the server after some time. It was decided that from then on out, Bityard would be a semi-vanilla Minecraft server with some custom features provided by a datapack and plugins. The world reset again, this time with a seed selected with a Mushroom Island spawn.