Introducing Space Chunks

Until now, the Minecraft community has had few places where talented individuals working on Minecraft servers or other projects could come together. There were only a few platforms for sharing expertise, space for teams to collaborate and exchange tools, and nowhere to truly showcase individual skills. That’s exactly what we aim to change. Space Chunks is a community where developers, designers, and creatives come together to share their knowledge, display their skills, and work hand-in-hand on open-source projects! We’re incredibly excited to give you an in-depth look at Space Chunks — who we are, why we exist, and the future plans we’re working towards!

What we’re doing

The idea for Space Chunks was born in the summer of 2023. We were a team of developers, each managing our own Minecraft servers, and we realized the need to share backend systems and tools. This way, we could streamline our work, share expertise, and dedicate more time to enhancing the actual content of our servers.

As time passed, our objectives shifted. Today, we view ourselves as a hybrid between an open-source organization and a Minecraft Java studio, similar to those seen in the Bedrock Edition. Our mission is to build a community where knowledge flows openly and to provide a stage where developers can prove their expertise. Additionally, we’re excited to realize our own visions for events and minigames, hoping to inspire others along the way. Right now, our work is divided into four main categories.

Open Source Projects

As mentioned earlier, we aim to develop systems and tools that any team might need and make them publicly available as open-source projects. This way, we can collaborate on them together, and everyone can benefit from using them. We categorize these into Core and Community projects.

• Core projects are tools or systems developed and maintained by the Core Team. These are projects that provide significant value, such as enhancing our events or infrastructure, and whose quality we personally deem to be high.
• Community projects are exciting tools and systems that you can also create and maintain with us. These projects are managed and developed by our community, allowing for ongoing contributions and enhancements.

In our community, there are several roles, each with distinct responsibilities and tasks:

• Team Members work on Core projects and have a significant influence on their design and development.
• Maintainers manage, maintain, and work on Community projects.
• Contributors participate in either Core or Community projects by implementing features or fixing bugs.

In recent months, we’ve been actively working on various projects. For instance, we’ve developed our Visual Kit, a tool for creating fully customizable inventories, boss bars, and HUD designs with modular components and texts. We’ve also worked on our Game Kit, a toolkit designed to simplify the development of minigames. Another exciting project has been our open-match implementation, tailored for our Queue System used with Chunks Explorer.

If you want to learn more about upcoming open-source projects, feel free to visit our Community Board.

Sharing Knowledge and Experience

One of our goals is to share our knowledge and experience in development, server management, and other areas. We don’t consider ourselves experts who know everything better than others; rather, we aim to exchange our experiences and create a hub where knowledge and insights are concentrated. We plan to achieve this through three main channels:

• Blog Posts: In addition to articles about our events and competitions, we’ll share our experiences, problem situations, and solutions in development. For example, a blog post coming soon will detail the infrastructure solutions we’ve used, the challenges we faced, and how we’re now building our infrastructure with Kubernetes.
• Stream Events: Occasionally, we’ll stream live programming sessions, have relaxed discussions on various topics, and introduce exciting tools and systems.
• Discord Community: We aim to make our Discord server a go-to place for teams needing help with various issues, sharing their projects with a like-minded community, or simply staying connected.

If you want to be part of our community, feel free to join our Discord server!

Competitions

To provide our community with a platform to showcase their skills and add some excitement, we host competitions through Space Chunks. One of our highlights is the Game Cup! In this event, teams are challenged to develop a minigame with specific requirements within a short timeframe. At the end, winners are determined by a jury and the community.

For more information about the Game Cup, you can find details here.

Our Chunk Explorer: Chunks and Events

The Chunks Explorer isn’t a traditional server network. Our vision for this project is to create a space where everyone can share their Minecraft creations with the world as easily as possible, so you can focus on bringing your ideas to life, while we take care of the rest.

Chunks

You can launch a variety of different Chunks. A Chunk could be anything from a minigame to a private building server — there are no limits. You’ll also find the minigames from our Game Cup available as Chunks. At first Chunks will be developed and maintained either by the Space Chunks team or by our community. In the future when the system has reached the desired stability, you’ll have the opportunity to deploy your own Chunk to run on our infrastructure. This is expected to be completed by 2025. More information about the Chunk Explorer will be provided in a separate blog article.

Events and Competitions

In addition to our Chunks, we will also host seasonal events and competitions. For instance, during the Game Cup seasons, you’ll be able to test and play the minigames created by participants through Chunks Explorer. We also plan to release long-term games and adventure maps on Chunks Explorer in the future.

Future Plans

We will continue to focus on establishing the foundational elements of Space Chunks. This includes:

• The Chunks Explorer with games from Game Cup Season 1, as well as additional minigames and tool servers.
• Tools and systems such as the Visual Kit and Entity Animations.
• Planning and organizing Game Cup Season 2.
• A project being developed by a completely autonomous team from the Space Chunks community. Sneak peeks will be coming soon, so stay tuned!

If you want to support us in our mission as a developer, designer, organizer, or creative mind, reach out to us on our Community Discord or send us a private message on Discord, and we can have a casual chat.

We have big plans for the future. Let’s work together to create a space for talented individuals, exchange knowledge, and showcase our work to each other! Take the first step and join our Community Discord!