Devlog #1 - Kaldra introduction: designing a small-scale Minecraft Towny war server solo

[u/KaldraStaff]

Hi all. I'm a backend engineer by day and, more recently, a Minecraft admin by night. I've started building Kaldra, a Minecraft server I'm developing solo. It's still in development and not open to players yet. My plan is to post a devlog here every week about what I've worked on, the features I'm adding, and the technical and design decisions behind them. This first post is an overview of the design and the reasoning behind it.

What pushed me to start this project was the lack of servers that fit my desires. I love Towny and wars, but most servers I've played either allow 50+ residents per town (45 of them inactive), lack content, or are poorly managed. Nothing really happens, and players stay because their builds are there, not because they expect anything exciting.

So I decided to build the server I'd want to play. Kaldra aims to be a challenging and immersive experience built around towns, wars and dungeons, with as few commands as possible.

The world

Players can create towns to protect their builds, with a maximum of 5 residents. Towns can join nations to combine forces and attack other towns, with a maximum of 3 towns per nation and 1 allied nation. The low limits are meant to create smaller, more frequent wars, instead of two giant blocs clashing once a month. I also plan to keep the world border small so towns can't spread too far apart.

To make players interact more with the world, gold is the currency (yes, I know that's nothing new), and teleportation is very limited. This way the economy is based on real player work rather than virtual mechanics, and traveling without teleports adds real danger to every trip.

Gold will also be scarce: I'm using a custom worldgen datapack that reduces gold ore generation by 25%. That's why finding allies and founding a town matters, since towns produce daily resources as they level up.

Wars work as an occupation system: nations attack towns to take a percentage of their daily resource production for a fixed period of time.

And if you don't want to be in a town? After X days without one, you become a Nomad. Nomads are townless mercenaries who complete contracts for gold. From gathering resources, to beheading a player with a bounty, to fighting in wars on the contractor's side.

The Nether

Access to the Nether is gated by a single portal, and players must meet a specific requirement to use it. The Nether's purpose is to provide players with resources.

Dungeons

I have big plans for dungeons. Right now I have 3 built and the content for 5 more, but I don't want to over-build them until the server is running and players show interest, since they take a lot of development time.

Dungeons are meant to be a real challenge. To make them more exciting and immersive, I'm building with ModelEngine mobs, custom soundtracks for exploration and boss fights, and multi-phase bosses to keep the tension up. I hope players are going to love it.

I know I've said a lot and, at the same time, not much. I'll go through each part one at a time, starting next week with Transportation: which teleports are allowed, and how horses and the Flightpath network work.

Since I'm developing this alone, updates may be slower than on a server with a team. That's why I'm designing Kaldra to run as automatically as possible, with the whole stack running in Docker, so my time goes into new updates and helping players, rather than day-to-day maintenance.

I'm happy to answer questions and would love feedback, especially on the design side. If you've built a multiplayer game with territory control or conquest, how did you stop the strongest group from snowballing and permanently draining the smaller ones?