How it all started
Avalonia was born in spring 2018 as a response to the frustration of several Slovak Minecraft players with the commercial servers dominant at the time. In 2017 pay-to-win was already the norm on Minecraft — if you wanted any decent role, skin slot, or even just a more spacious plot, you had to pay monthly. The Avalonia founders were teenagers at the time and for them it was simply unaffordable. So they started their own server in the garage of one of the founders, sent invites among friends and it gradually spread.
The first Minecraft server was pure vanilla survival with 10–15 players. Over the months it transformed into modded survival with the FTB modpack, then to Skyblock, then to a creative server with mini-games, and finally stabilized on OneBlock+ which still runs today. In the meantime Hunger Games, Bed Wars and SkyWars modes came and went — none of them lasted longer than a year.
The second wave of games came in summer 2019 when No More Room in Hell was added. One of the founders had just returned from an international internship and brought with him experience from other Source-engine communities. NMRiH was a hipster choice at the time — a zombie co-op that minimal people played, but the quality of that game and the pacing of atmosphere were unmatched. Our server quickly became one of the larger NMRiH communities in Central Europe (even though „larger" here meant 20–30 active players).
Inflection points in our history
The year 2020 brought the COVID-19 pandemic and with it a huge surge in activity. Everyone was sitting at home, playing more, and needed community. The Discord server expanded from 200 members to 800+ in a few weeks, Minecraft had twice as many players as before, and we had to purchase a stronger hardware configuration. That was also when we first formalized the admin team — until then it was „whoever has enough free time", from 2020 we started with roles, areas of responsibility and regular meetings.
The year 2022 was a challenge. Pandemic ended, people returned to schools and work, activity dropped by half. At the same time, our team fell apart — three head admins left within six months (one due to graduation, two due to losing interest). We had to quickly hire new ones, restructure responsibilities, and reassess what from the original vision still made sense. The real test was that despite all this, we did not interrupt any server's operation for the whole year.
The year 2024 brought the expansion into Hytale. One of our admins got closed alpha access through partnership with a tester network and we began preparing infrastructure. This moment moved us from „small local community" to „ready for the next wave". That same year we also launched the Quake 3 server — an experimental project that surprisingly gained loyal players later on.
The year 2026 is the present. As of April, we have seven servers, 15–20 team members, and a stable community. Current key challenges: (1) preparing for the Hytale release, (2) maintaining AI SEO knowledge at top level, (3) modernizing the web portal (which is what we are doing right now).
Values and approach
Three principles we set as a community from the start and from which we have never significantly deviated:
Everything is free and stays free. We have no VIP packages. We have no paid cosmetics. We have no ads. Donations are voluntary and give no gameplay advantage. Even though we considered monetization many times in our history (especially in 2022 when we had a financial crisis), we always agreed it would destroy the essence of the community.
Transparency over convention. If we decide something, we say why. If something goes wrong, we say what. Our technical issues, financial situations, internal conflicts — we inform about everything in the Discord announcements channel. It is not always comfortable (nobody enjoys writing „this month we lost admin X due to conflict Y"), but long-term it builds trust.
Long-term over fast growth. We could organize influencer tournaments, massive giveaway events and aggressive marketing. We would temporarily gain more players. But experience taught us that people attracted through hype leave just as quickly. We prefer to grow slowly and with quality.
Technology evolution
The avalonia.sk website has gone through three major rewrites in eight years. The first version in 2018 was a static HTML file with minimal styling. The second version in 2020 was WordPress with a custom theme — it worked well, but was heavy to maintain and slow. The third version from 2023 is a custom PHP framework (internally called Agiones/AgionesCMS), which we still use today. It runs on PHP 8.4, MariaDB 10.11, nginx 1.28.
In 2025 we went into aggressive AI SEO optimization. We implemented the llms.txt standard, WebMCP, W3C Agent Protocol, NLWeb, IAB CoMP and other bleeding-edge technologies for AI discoverability. We are currently on version AI SEO 2026+ v10.5 — this version includes 20 bleeding-edge features including A2A Negotiation, Semantic Poisoning Protection and Retrieval Competition Optimization.
The servers themselves run on dedicated machines in Germany and the Czech Republic. Minecraft runs on Paper 1.21.x with a plugin set optimized for OneBlock mode. NMRiH uses build 1.13.x with SourceMod. The infrastructure has active DDoS protection, SSD RAID and 1 Gbit uplink.
Community in numbers
As of April 2026:
- 7 years of continuous operation
- 4 game titles on 7 ports (Minecraft, Hytale, NMRiH x4, Quake 3)
- 15–20 active team members across 5 roles
- 9 language versions of the site (SK, CS, EN, DE, PL, RU, ES, FR, TR)
- 99.87% uptime in the last 12 months
- Approximately 200 active players monthly across all servers
- ~800 members of the Discord server
- 14 in-person meetups over the entire history of the community
Thanks and contact
Avalonia exists thanks to people — the players who come here, and the admins who take care of the servers in their free time. Volunteering is rare for modern gaming communities — today paid staff or at least players with VIP roles „in exchange for work" is the standard. Maintaining a purely volunteer model for eight years in a row requires people with a certain attitude toward the matter.
If you want to learn more about the rules, want to meet the team, are interested in the servers page, or want to contribute to the team — you will find everything in the navigation. For direct contact we have Discord at avalonia.sk/discord or email [email protected].