b1.7.3

Ok so this is going to be a long one. I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to recreate a beta1.7.3 Minecraft server experience after stumbling upon a video about it and getting hit with a massive wave of nostalgia. Needless to say I was not expecting to end up hunting through internet archive stuff for a while trying to find what I was looking for, but here I am, and this is a document so I can prove my insanity.

Step 1 - Obtain Craftbukkit:

There's a lot of ways to get a b1.7.3 server running and the easiest is to just get a vanilla jar from an archive website, but that's boring. From there, you have several options - if you're running Betacraft you can get Uberbukkit which comes in two forms - ProjectPoseidon and ProjectPoseidonUberbukkit. The normal non-uber version updates Bukkit 1060 (1.7.3) with modern features, and UberBukkit provies 1060's API to b1.0-1.7.3 which is convenient.

The other method, and the one that I chose originally, was finding an original CB1060 jar. Googling around for a bit gave me what I needed in the form of a super old Google Drive link from lukegb (thanks luke). It includes versions 705-1828. I'm not sure what 705 is, but below is a table for versions I do know:

With that information in hand, I grabbed 1060 and, added -Dhttp.proxyHost=betacraft.uk to my startup params (before the -jar mind you) and I was off to the races.

Step 2 - Find plugins

There's no point in using Bukkit if you can't use plugins, so off to the races I went to find my favorite things from ancient times, the first of which is Essentials. Thankfully, BukkitDev is still up (use this link for 1060 plugin browsing) and contains a decent archive of plugins. You can still find the entire Essentials suite there, including Chat, Spawn, Protect, XMPP, and GeoIP.

Up next on my quest was land protection and management, for which I always preferred Towny over Factions (I was shit at PvP). I knew I could probably go back to the old ElgarL Github repo for it and compile it but I'm pretty lazy, so a Google search later, one Reddit thread and then subsequent sketchy Mediafire link and I was set. Thankfully, this really was Towny and not something weird, and I could continue being lazy. Speaking of, the commenter also linked a Towny command reference so I didn't have to do /help 1000 times.

Next up was the sk89q suite - WorldEdit, WorldGuard, and CraftBook. This was way more of a pain in the ass than I thought it would be, but thanks to the folks at WaybackMachine I was able to find WorldEdit fairly easily. Next up was CraftBook which I couldn't find anywhere on my own, and thankfully Reddit once again had the answer with a Dropbox link that contained CraftBook, CraftBook IC, CraftBook Mechanisms, and CraftBook Vehicles. Now the last one on my list was WorldGuard which felt impossible to find, until I stumbled upon another old archive that someone had made that had it included along with a bunch of other plugins.

At this point I'd realized I'd forgotten something - Towny had a dependency at the time called iConomy, specifically iConomy 5. This was a massive pain in my ass to find, but I ended up doing it. Originally I went to the Wayback Machine again, but they only had version 6.0 - not what I needed. Thankfully that old archive DID have iConomy (as well as the SQLite library you need for it to run) so I was able to use that just fine.

A slight detour

Now that I had Essentials, Towny, the sk89q stuff, and iConomy, I wanted a better way to portal my way around the world. I remember early servers I used to play on used a plugin called StarGate which was amusingly created by Dinnerbone for the hMod platform. hMod was the original beta Minecraft server software created by hey0 (you can still find its source here). Dinnerbone dropped the plugin's development, instead helping develop Bukkit (an irony that I don't have time to explain). You can still view the original repo along with Dinnerbone's commits if you want to view old shit code.

Anyway, I knew that Drakia or thedgtl had developed a version of it, so I went to their website and the links are dead. Once again I turned to Google, and didn't find shit. When I was looking around later troubleshooting Essentials, I found another Reddit thread that had a miraculous Stargate mediafire link. After I realized I'd need permission nodes for Stargate in GroupManager (another handy find inside of that one archive) I looked for the original Drakia repo which I was happy to find still had its perms listed in the readme file. There's also Tombstone in there which I'll need to get working at some point as well.

Step 3 - Configuration hell & conclusion

Now that I've got the server running and (most) of the plugins I want in there, I've moved on to configuration. For this, you'll be editing a ton of .yml files. If you haven't worked with them before, be mindful of spaces, and never ever use tabs or you'll go to hell. There are a few more plugins that I didn't mention here like mcMMO (BukkitDev), Multiverse (BukkitDev), and Dynmap (archive) but I consider them to be pretty insignificant to the purpose of this post - they're above the basics of just getting a nice server set up.

I have put up an archive of the jars that I've got going including relevant libraries. To avoid Mojang's wrath I will not be linking to any method of obtaining old Craftbukkit or providing server jars - like I said I don't have time for that writeup - but plugin jars I'm happy to provide. Data hoarders help nostalgia seekers out, right?