01 Where it started
Feudline started as mine, by hand, with no AI involved at all. The idea, the world, the factions design, the lore, the rules the server runs on, all of it came out of my own head and a lot of hours.
I could have built the whole thing that way. I want to be clear about that, because the usual version of this story is someone admitting they were never capable of it on their own, and that is not what happened here. Capability was not the problem.
Time was. A full custom factions server written by hand, the economy, the skill trees, the custom enchants, the world generation, the events, is years of work at the pace I could realistically manage around the rest of my life. I would have gotten there. It would have taken a very long time, and most of that time would have gone into things nobody playing would ever notice.
So now Claude, Anthropic's AI, writes most of the code. That is the honest description. Not "with a little help", not "AI enhanced". It writes most of the code. What it gave me was not the ability to build Feudline. It gave me the speed.
02 What I do, and what it does not
I direct every single decision. Every feature, every balance number, every design call, whether something ships or gets thrown out, that is me. Not the AI.
- Nothing goes live that I have not reviewed and approved myself.
- I read the changes, I test them, and I check them for correctness before they reach the server you play on.
- Every balance decision on this server is a decision I made. If a rank costs 900 points, that number is mine.
- When something in game is wrong, I am the one who finds it, and most of the debugging is me sitting there working out what is actually happening.
- The lore is entirely mine. The world, the Vein, the Magistrates, all of it.
I am not blindly shipping whatever the AI hands me. When it produces something I disagree with, it does not go in. That happens often.
The no pay to win rule is not something the AI decided, and it is not a marketing angle. It is mine, and it is the reason this server has no revenue at all.
03 The part I am not comfortable with
I will be honest about the other side of this too.
I do not support AI. I actually loathe it. All of the data centers being built, ruining communities, ruining environments, ruining lives. I do not stand for it, and I genuinely hope we are able to fight for what is right and shut most of them down, even if that means I cannot keep updating Feudline for a while.
Then there is the thing itself. Calling it intelligence is generous. It is a system that will state something completely made up with exactly the same confidence it states something true, and it does that regularly, including about this server. That is a large part of why I check everything before it goes near the live box. Reviewing its work is not a formality I do to feel better about using it.
I have not made peace with how AI has affected people, and I do not expect to. I use it because it is the difference between this server existing now and existing in several years, assuming I stuck with it that long. That is the whole trade, and knowing exactly what I am trading does not make the discomfort go away.
Where I want to end up
The direction I want to go is running the model myself. My own small server, my own hardware, running off solar, so the thing helping me write this server is not pulling from a data center or the grid to do it.
That is not where I am today. It costs money I do not have right now, and I am not going to tell you I have solved this when I have not. It is what I am working toward, and when I get there I will say so on this page.
04 What this means for you as a player
Feudline is whitelist only and it does not collect anything about you beyond what a Minecraft server needs to function: your username, your UUID, your playtime, your faction, your stats and your inventory. There is no account system, no email, no payment data, because there is nothing to buy. No analytics, no tracking, nothing sold to anyone.
There is no separate production database full of personal information here, because there is nothing to put in one. The most sensitive thing this server knows about you is how many hours you have played and what is in your ender chest.
I am not going to tell you the AI is walled off from the machine, because that would be a lie. It deploys the plugin to the server, so it touches the box. What I will tell you is that there is essentially nothing personal on that box to expose, and that I check what goes on it.
If that answer is not good enough for you, that is completely fair, and I would rather you know and decide for yourself than find out later.
05 Why it is free, and staying free
I know how well pay to win works, because it worked on me.
I played Performium's classic factions for years, back before they dropped the gamemode. I made it to Obsidian, near the top of their ladder, and I did not get there by playing. I got there by spending hundreds of dollars I did not have, a bit at a time, buying my way up rank by rank. What I was actually paying for was a black prefix in chat and a kit strong enough that most fights were decided before they started. At the time it felt like progress.
That is the thing I do not want to build.
Minecraft is full of kids. When a twelve year old buys a rank, that money came off a parent's card or out of an allowance, and every server selling ranks knows exactly that. I am not interested in taking it.
I am also not going to put a slot machine in front of them. That is what a paid crate is. You pay, something spins, you usually lose, and the near miss is the part that makes you buy another key. It is gambling with the word taken off the label, pointed at children. There will never be one here.
The one exception
The only crate that will ever exist on Feudline is the vote crate, and there is no way to buy it or buy keys for it. You get a key for voting for the server on a server list, which is free, takes a few seconds, and is the main way new players find us at all.
What is inside it is deliberately unexciting. A small temporary boost, a bit of in game money, occasionally a cheap spawner, and mostly cosmetics. Nothing in it wins you a fight, takes a base, or moves you up the rank ladder.
That is on purpose, and it is the whole difference. The moment a reward is good enough that missing a day feels bad, it has stopped being a thank you and turned into a hook, and the hook is the thing I am trying to keep off this server. A crate you cannot pay for, full of things you would not miss, is not a slot machine. It is just a nice way to say thanks for voting.
So everything is earned instead. Ranks come from playtime and points. Items come from in game currency you made by playing. There is no store, nothing to buy, and no payment code anywhere in the plugin.
That means Feudline makes no money. The server bill is real and it arrives every month regardless. If you ever want to help with that, there are two links on the home page, and neither one gives you anything in game. That is deliberate. The second donating gets you something, the whole point of the server is gone.
Back to The server itself →If you want to talk about any of this, find me in game or reach out however you got here. My heart is in this server either way.