I hosted a brief Minecraft server during the holiday season of 2024, where I tasked my friends with building the coziest homes they could think of, while listening to holiday classics arranged via noteblocks! The event went from December 15th through January 1st.

The invitation I sent to my friends.

This particular project's theme was inspired by several years prior, where my friend trickr and I built a 'holiday village' map (picture above), which served as the spawn for Dystopia SMP 2.0 (my personal SMP server which has had several iterations). Unfortunately, that server never ended up going live because I had too many ideas for it, and the scope got out of hand.

We built it at around the same time of year as I hosted this event (several years prior, of course), and I remember feeling so cozy and warm in the little village houses we made, all covered in snow and pretty lights. My favorite memory was watching a Doctor Who Christmas special episode while building out the basement of one of the houses, feeling so cozy and happy. I wanted to capture that feeling again in a fun little event for all of my friends.

Before and after pictures of the 300x300 grid.

Beside configuring plugins, the most time consuming part of getting the server set up was building the map. It was 300x300 blocks, with mountains created as borders (using the old 'br sphere sand 3' trick). I made all of the terrain by hand (with the help of WorldEdit and my beautiful partner of course), even including making a big mountain. The grinch has a mountain, Nepal has a mountain, I said I deserve one too.

I wanted to make sure the most cliché winter locations were available as 'build-ops' for everyone to enjoy. Sure enough, the very first build was made in the valley of the mountain! In the end, I don't think the locations were too important - I even built an abandoned mineshaft 40 blocks below the surface, bored one day.

Several player builds.

When you have guests over for the holidays, you can make them feel cozy with a fireplace or warm cookies, but unfortunately the internet only allows so many of the senses to be stimulated. I wanted to make everyone feel cozy and happy, and the best way I thought I could do this was through music! One of my favorite gaming experiences ever is playing Fallout 4 and just running around shooting shit and listening to the Diamond City Radio. That was my inspiration for what I decided to do on this server.

By far the most time consuming part of getting the server running was setting up the plugins. I had a very specific goal in mind, which was to replicate the Fallout 4 radio but with holiday music arranged on noteblocks. There are very few noteblock plugins out there, and I simply didn't possess the coding knowledge at the time to write my own, so we ended up using a Jukebox plugin, which had a global radio set up in it.

This decision came after I spent a good two weeks trying to learn Java on the fly and create my own plugin... Yeah, that didn't happen. Maybe next year lol. The jukebox plugin we used had several commands for opting in and out of the radio, and I used those with CommandPanels to let people, in a custom UI I made, join and leave the radio as they pleased.

The spawn NPCs, who open the UIs when clicked.

For arranging the holiday songs into the radio, I used NBS (Noteblock Studio) and ProTools. I looked online for decent .midi files of holiday songs, and brought them in to ProTools to adjust velocities and pitches (noteblocks infamously have a small octave range). Then, I brought the new midi files into NBS and saved them as .nbs files. It took a lot of time to find decent arrangements, and make sure they sounded good on note blocks. After hours and hours of editing, they sounded fantastic and I ended up with exactly what I wanted for my cozy server!

The Holiday Radio's official track list.

As this server is mostly about building, I wanted to cover some of my favorite builds that we made.

In terms of making cozy builds, everyone really did a great job. We had several cabins, several large houses, some huts, some snowmen, even a cool snow globe!

Some of the coziest builds!

My most unexpected favorite builds were actually the opposite of cozy, as it turned out, though: One of the first builds my friend trickr made was atop the big mountain, where he made a state of the art prison for ...the grinch! From this point onward, he and I made some more mysterious, dark builds all around the map

One of the plugins I had on the server was a blackjack game, and so I felt it necessary to make a gambling den in the basement of one of the 'suburban homes', if you will. Maybe that's fine on its own, but then in the back, we had the 'debtor's hole', presumably where any cheapskates went if they took out a loan they couldn't handle.

After that, I made a cult hangout in the attic of another house, trickr made a fake alcoholic's anonymous with drinks in the back, he made an endless maze which was pretty scary, an abandoned mineshaft (I also happened to make one at the exact same time as him, by chance), and I even commissioned him to build the grinch's second home, which was under the stairs of another one of the large houses.

I love being cozy, but I also love a good mystery. Who knows what other dark secrets the little holiday map holds...?

Some mysterious and spooky builds.

Besides the builds, plugins, radio, and atmosphere, I want to thank every one of my good pals for joining the server and spending time with me over the holidays. This project went perfectly, and I felt I was able to capture that feeling of warmth and coziness that I was looking for. I look forward to hosting even more fun events in the future, and this was a great learning experience for that. Much love to everyone!

My friends <3