History Overview

Origin of PCB

Origin

Project City Build was founded on October 19th, 2010 as a Minecraft Classic server, the day after one of its founders _andy was banned from the Big Build For Fun server for no reason by a power-abusing staff member. It was at that moment when the brothers _andy and _specialk decided to create their own vision of how a Minecraft server should be run; a large active community with friendly staff, and a safe haven for players to build in.

Early History

Classic

In the following months, Project City Build grew to become one of the most active classic servers around. The server had a map that guests could build on named Flat-grass, while the main map was a world for building a city named Big City. 

An emphasis was placed on building realistic-looking cities, and was featured on various Minecraft blogs and gaming websites.

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This first iteration of the server saw the introduction of two new admins: Kyle8910 and TKPenalty.

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Data Loss

In January 2011, PCB's service provider mysteriously lost all data and their offsite data.

Fortunately at the time, Fatso12321 was running a Fallback Server for the community, due to the classic server software being highly unstable and prone to long periods of downtime. He took over running the classic server while _andy and _specialk took a break from Minecraft.

On February 18th, 2011, _andy and _specialk returned with a brand new server. Running on Minecraft Beta 1.2_02, this server marked PCB's transition from classic to survival multiplayer.

Survival Multiplayer

For the first time, the server was a hybrid between survival mode and creative. Players had the resources if they wanted to build structures but also had the opportunity to play a true survival mode. A new version of Big City was built, with many of the classic server's buildings recreated. Notable towns included, Sandy Point, Paradise Falls, Forsyth and Milton.

On September 17th, 2011 in time for the Adventure Update, PCB split from two servers (classic, SMP) to three servers. The SMP server was moved to separate creative and survival servers to enhance the game-play experience. New towns were established in both servers. Big City 2 was also created, improving on the designs of the last two iterations.

On June 17th, 2012, the survival and creative servers were merged together to form a central Minecraft server[1]. Having undergone major hardware upgrades, the server was now capable of serving multiple maps and a larger number of simultaneous online players.

Website History

PCB has had a bespoke website since the server launched, which has undergone several redesigns and rewrites in the server's history.

Version 1

The original PCB website was hastily put together in order to unify the community both off and on the server. Launched several days after the classic server first opened, the website featured only basic information and a forum. 

Pcb_website_v1.jpg

Version 2

Version 2 was scrapped quite early into its life cycle after launch. The website however is notable for integrating with the Minecraft servers, bringing features such as player economy balances, player avatars and real-time maps. 

Pcb_website_v2.jpg

Version 3

Version 3 was the face of PCB between 2011 and April 2018. It brought with it even further integration with the servers, featuring: 

Web-v3.jpg

Version 4

On 15 April 2018, the migration from SMF to Discourse was completed. Planning began as early as late August, 2017 and took a great deal of time and effort due to the need to convert data from SMF's format.

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Version 4.5 Redesign

On 22 June 2021, a new homepage design was launched. The remainder of the site was iteratively upgraded between then and 6 May 2022.

Design v4.5 Homepage.png

Forum Deprecation

Due to the community generally switching to using Discord instead of the forums, they were deprecated on 9 May 2022 along with other services such as the wiki.

Discourse Forums (archived).png

Economy

The economy is a system that revolves around PCB's virtual currency system. It was implemented in late 2011 (?), shortly after the Survival server launched. Over the years there has been a variety of ways to earn and spend currency. Currently, the economy has been removed in PCB due to disinterest and lack of use. There are no plans to revitalize it in the future. 

Economy Stats

At the peak of the Economy's popularity, the website listed detailed statistics of player wealth and item trades.

Economy stats as of 6 October 2014

The Market

The marketplace was the primary method for economic activity since the beginning of the Survival server. Players could purchase a single plot to build their own customizable shop, which could then automatically sell items to other players via chests.

Admin shops were added to allow players to always purchase rare items, even if no players had them in stock. Admin shops were controversial, since they remove money from the economy.

Diamond Price Cap

At various points in the economy's history, the price of diamonds were controlled due to some players having a large surplus and selling them for less than lower-tier resources. It was felt this unbalanced the game, since players could get them more easily than intended.

This was a continuous problem during the history of the economy

Diamond Price chart, posted in a staff thread in March 2014

Attempts to solve this problem included creating an admin shop which bought diamonds, therefore discouraging people from buying and selling them cheaper. In February 2014, this was for $50, which was removed in March 2014. By February 2015, diamonds were again controlled and had to be sold for a minimum of $100.

Other Methods

Money could also be earned through a variety of methods throughout its history.