History of Hardcore Factions
Hardcore Factions (HCF) is a competitive Minecraft format built on the Factions land-claiming system, distinguished by a deathban and a map that ends and resets rather than running indefinitely. This page traces it across five periods.
The stretch from roughly 2013 to 2018 is widely described by the community as the golden era, the point at which player counts, competitive faction play and outside attention all peaked at once.
Parts of this article need sources. Player counts and closure dates in particular require citations. Forum archives, VODs and server-list history are all acceptable. Please do not add claims from memory alone.
Timeline at a glance
| 2011–2013 Origins |
2014–2015 Expansion |
2016–2018 Peak |
2019–2021 Lunar era |
2021–2024 Later |
Origins (2011–2013)
HCF was created by HighlifeTTU, who had previously administrated the KKMC hardcore server. His stated reason for adding Factions to a deathban server, quoted from the original hcfactions.net about page, was that hardcore SMP ran out of things to do once players had diamond gear:
"I found that once players obtained diamond, the only real things left to do were explore the nether to get potion ingredients or head to spawn to try to kill new players... Factions gives a late game purpose, and will add new challenges."s
The format's relationship to Shotbow runs the opposite way to how it is often described. According to HighlifeTTU's own closure announcement in July 2015, HCF came first and the network grew around it: "It is the server that started it all. It is why MineZ came to be, and why Shotbow is now going on three years old."s That dates Shotbow's founding to roughly 2012, after HCF was already running.
The same announcement claims several firsts for the format:
"HCF was the first to bring team based game play together with the death ban. It was the first to integrate KOTH, classes, palace, and more."
The subreddit was active from at least February 2012.
An earlier version of this page stated HCF was created on a server called HCGaming and became official on Shotbow in November 2013. Neither claim appears anywhere in the 2012–2016 subreddit archive, and "HCGaming" is not mentioned once across 4,985 posts and comments from that period. If a source exists it should be added; otherwise the KKMC account above supersedes it.
The first crisis, October 2012
HCF's population was already in decline by late 2012, three years before it closed. In a post titled State of the Server, HighlifeTTU wrote that "without new players and life in the server, this server will be no more".s
The post is notable for what it blames. Not mechanics, but community hostility: the developer lazertester, who built the faction arena, had stopped working on the server entirely because of the abuse. Rafiki had replaced him and recoded the factions plugin, and HighlifeTTU warned that "if we keep ripping apart the hard work of developers, we won't have developers anymore."
He also diagnosed the structural problem that never went away: "It is not growing because it is a hardcore, ruthless experience that is not friendly to new players."
The post proposed moving the deathban to 24 hours with a scaling ramp for new players, and doubling new-player protection to two hours.
HCFactions and the unsettled ruleset
HCFactions ran at least twenty-seven maps and is where most of the format's conventions were worked out. Its maps show a ruleset being tested rather than a standard being followed.
The deathban shrank over time. It originally ran to five days, was reduced to three, and was shortened further once purchasable "lives" were introduced. Contemporary players treated the lives system as the point the server stopped being hardcore, one writing that it "really changed the hardcore in the server name."
Events were KOTH and Palace only. Citadel and Conquest are not mentioned once in the 2012–2016 archive. Both arrived later, on Kohi and HCTeams.
Map length was not fixed. Map 6 ran about three weeks; Map 14 was announced as two weeks and ran for eight.
Kits and enchantment caps changed map to map. Map 11 ran as a kit map, Map 15 with no enchantments at all, Map 16 on a Protection IV kit. Enchantments were removed entirely at one point, splitting the community. Map 12's kit was so tanky that "palaces would last for 9 hours almost every week... because hardly anyone ever died."
Alliances were unrestricted and enormous. During one Palace on Map 12, the Strawhats and Desonide alliances merged into a combined group of over forty to fight nineteen from Badlion, brought them to 2 DTR, then arranged a betrayal from inside. A 2014 post complained of "70 man alliances" and "70v5's".s Alliance caps and no-ally rulesets on later networks were a direct response.
Subfactions were used to defend valuables. On Map 13, ReCharge went raidable but lost nothing, having moved everything into a second faction beforehand. Later banned across most networks as a "stash faction"; see Rules and punishments.
Factions were also less permanent than they later became. Names were recreated repeatedly by the same players across maps, with RankXI rebuilt at least three times by ApacheBlitz, who handed leadership to UnPhair on Map 12 and to Johnzeh on Map 17.
Playstyles the format later lost
HCFactions supported faction types that have no equivalent on later networks, and the argument over whether to protect them was one of the era's defining disputes.
Trading factions bought and sold resources across the map. Platypus was the best known, running on spreadsheets and logging at least 287 trades during Map 6 alone. Others included King's Own and ShadowTrade on Map 16. They were killed off gradually as spawn began selling the resources they traded — creeper spawners, slime balls, sand — after players complained the goods were too hard to get.
Banking factions held other factions' valuables. Spike, run by dividuum, kept a redstone deposit-and-withdrawal system so clients could access their items unattended, and traded on a record of not going raidable across fifteen consecutive maps. Factions had stored valuables with them since Map 13.
The catcat wall on Map 17 was the most ambitious experiment. A faction led by deeznueces mined diamonds worth at least 1.5 million to claim land halfway around the warzone, planning toll booths. Staff removed it because it blocked the route to Palace.
In January 2015, dividuum published This server has an identity crisis, arguing that staff were systematically dismantling every non-PvP playstyle in response to complaints from power factions:
"Doing interesting new things is not rewarded but punished and new rules are made up on the spot... So what's left? Not too much. Basically the only thing you can do safely is setting up a base, brewing pots, going to KOTH/Palace, hanging around spawn or killing new players."s
He noted that by three weeks into a map, most power faction members only logged on for KOTH and Palace.
The Ohana lineage
One faction line runs from HCFactions into HCTeams. Waterboys was created by Liftie on Map 17, renamed Mallcops after his ban, and became Ohana on Map 18, where it dominated. On Map 19 the same roster played as MegaMilk alongside Desolate, Cyanide and SoupSkidz.
Ohana reappears years later on HCTeams Map 9 as one half of the Amerinide split, opposite NoLimit.
Recruitment and reputation
Recruitment ran through the subreddit in a standard application format that says a good deal about what the era valued:
IGN: PvP/10: Base/10: HCF Player page: Activity: Past factions (by map): Betrayals if any:
Two things stand out. hcfactions.net hosted official player statistics pages at ?action=playerinfo&player=NAME, which applicants linked as evidence. And "Betrayals if any" was a standard field, making a player's record of insiding a tracked reputational asset rather than an accusation.
By May 2015 the server was running a leader draft, with StabbdNtheTumy compiling and vetting a list of faction leaders before a map. The published list included Maihn, Johnzeh, Jarl_Heisenberg, Mymmeykos, Irish_Wreckage, Jermin8or, m0xy and around twenty others.s
Expansion (2014–2015)
The format spread beyond its origin server. itsjhalt, an HCFactions player, launched MineHQ after becoming dissatisfied with how HCF was run, building the new server explicitly around staff quality. In 2014 he opened HCTeams there. Alongside Kohi, it became one of the two servers that defined the competitive scene.
HCTeams ran its Alpha map on 26 October 2014 and Map 1 on 15 November, then settled into a cycle of roughly four to six weeks per map through to the end of 2016. On Kohi, EOTW was not held at all for the first six maps.
At the EOTW of HCTeams Map 6 in 2015, itsjhalt issued a wave of blacklists that removed a large part of the Amerinide roster from the network at once. Several did not return until Map X, and some played the intervening maps on alt accounts.
- MineHQ founded; HCTeams opens in 2014
- Standardisation of the class system across networks
- KOTH, Citadel and Conquest as scheduled events
- Growth of organised, roster-based factions
- YouTube and streaming as the main driver of new players
Needs: exact MineHQ founding date, peak concurrent figures per network, and when Kohi launched.
=== The closure of HCFactions, 2015