CivWiki Monday Newsletter

A (mostly) weekly newsletter for Civ servers supported by the CivWiki

CivWiki Newsletter for October 6, 2025

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Hello and welcome from the Pacific Northwest!

For those new players reading this for the first time, welcome to Civ! This is the CivWiki Newsletter which I aim to update players on all the happenings across CivMC and sometimes the wider Civ community (although mostly focusing on CivMC).

I used to run these nearly every week, but in 2025 I took a step back to only do it monthly or so. If you’re interested, you can take a look at the nearly four years of backarchives of the newsletter up to this point to see what happened in the past, if you’re curious. (Of course, there’s also CivWiki, which I also help run.)

I try to highlight not only the news that’s been happening around Civ but also give a look into the genre’s rich, nearly 13 year history through highlighting wiki articles, builds, and community highlights, because not everything is about the news on Civ!

Are you ready for the news?

This week’s featured image is of Suramir City, in Estalia — basked in the light of the sunset, making it a little more orange tinted than normal. Many folks might have seen the other side of Estalia through the central market where Gmall is housed (not to mention the thumbnail of Joyfuul’s video). Suramir is the more residential side of Estalia where the area is way more vertical, built of mud and jungle wood, and much more built into the landscape. In all honesty, this shows the incredible range Suramir and Estalia have within their builds, and it’s really great to see.

Featured Article

This featured article is a repeat from May 20, 2024.

Civcraft was a Civ server that is widely regarded as the pioneer of the Civ genre. Self-described as an “experiment for communities, political ideologies, debate and discussion”, it focused player-driven civilizations with minimal admin intervention, a wildly experimental format for its time. Launching its first iteration in 2012, its admin, ttk2, introduced many mechanics and design decisions that modern Civ takes for granted today, including Citadel, Bastions, FactoryMod and NameLayer, amongst a whole host of different plugins.

Civcraft’s main policy was to never interfere in in-game policies unless in drastic measures, only banning when breaking out of game or hacking rules, and attempted to never reset its world. However, several events forced them to reset the server twice. Civcraft 2.0, launched in 2013, is generally regarded as the most famous Civ server, having a considerable amounts of activity and media coverage and for a time, was the longest-lasting Civ server. Although they launched two further iterations, Civcraft would close in 2016 due to the retirement of its founder, but its mechanics, gameplay, and design would continue to live on in future servers such as CivClassic and today, CivMC.

This week’s featured article image is of the thumbnail to the Civcraft trailer. I can’t remember exactly the city’s name, but this was definitely circa 1.0/2.0. (It’s probably Mount Augusta, all things considered)

Ten (or Eleven) Things to Know

The east coast of the Temporal Empire, around Dubrovnik.

0. What’s the big picture?

For new players; reading this section means there is generally an assumption that you know how Civ works. I usually target the newsletter towards veterans who have a general idea of what’s going on. In general, the news section is supposed to enrich players’ understanding of what’s happening around the server these days.

To give you some background on trends that give some historical background on what’s going on this week:

With that, I think this is the basics of the current political landscape right now?

1. Spreading Joy

Joyfuul's video on CivMC

Joyfuul

What happens when you throw out the rulebook?

On Friday, September 26, Joyfuul released a new video talking about CivMC. Since he’s been a part of the Temporal Empire for a few weeks now, and did a good deep dive on the wiki (ed. note: and hopefully this newsletter!), the video is of excellent quality. While there’s some nitpicks that folks have on how mechanics were explained, many hail it as a great introductory video on how CivMC works. Even I’d link it for introducing anybody into this community.

Joyfuul has implied his viewership is much more mature than some other Civ YouTubers’ viewers we would likely be facing in the same realm, since it’s much more driven for analysis and introspection about the genre, so I think this was secretly a great thing that it got discovered and got a platform this way. It also helps the video is actually pretty good. (ed. note: he did get pearled after initiation day in TE though, but has since been freed)

However, one thing to maybe note for the recruitment heads is that this video definitely underperformed. Unlike many of Joyfuul’s over videos which reach over 100k, this video at the time of writing was sitting at just over 30k. I kind of wonder how that happened; maybe because this is a much different kind of “Civ” server vs. a “Civilization” event, it might not resonate with the same audience? Regardless, it’s hard to tell, but there’s no denying it directed some larger traffic on the server. Speaking of which…

2. That YouTube Invasion

Monkey's Paw

Be careful what you wish for?

Naturally as a result of our server getting way more attention, our server got considerably more players the following weekend once that video came out. This naturally started the queue back up again, frequently reaching an 80 or 90-person length, which is rare for CivMC to hit outside of events. We’ll get to why that was important later.

Although we got a considerable amount of people, it wasn’t the 1000 person deluge promised. One thing I noticed about this video was that it leans much more heavily into anecdotal experiences and history, rather than mechanics overview & theory which Joyfuul’s really known for (there’s little mention of JukeAlert or Citadel than would normally be for an introduction to Civ). I guess to be fair, there is a lot of mechanics that are poorly documented, but maybe a video showing why these mechanics work in concert with others may have blown the video up much bigger than it did. The video performed well below other videos on his channel.

Regardless, once on the server, these new players (affectionately called Joyfriends) would naturally spawn wherever. Temporal Empire, one of the heavy recruiters within global chat, reported ballpark numbers of around 40 new players joining the country — compared to some in the teens in other nations.

3. Now Serving…

Priority Queue announcement

RedDevel

Where's my fastpass^TM?

Last week, I covered the introduction of the very controversial PvP Priority Queue on CivMC. For those unfamiliar, getting into the top 10 Elo on CivMC’s PvP server would allow them to jump the queue to lower numbered slots, incentivizing players to play PvP.

This weekend was the first time it would see any action. From personal experience I don’t think it actually affected queue for the time it was alive, but once longtime players discovered it was a thing, some started pulling their patreon funding. Admins would eventually remove the priority queue feature, but claim the patreon funding was not part of their decision. (ed. note: ArtificialDriver has since reinstated his Patreon.)

While there was discussion on the efficacy, necessity, and morality of the priority queue system, one thing was agreeable among everyone and that it was very poorly communicated and not known by much of the community. My newsletter piece on it last week was likely the only public communication of this, (ed. note: which goes to show how much of these people read these things, I guess). Admins do need to be way more communicative of their own changes, since sometimes these come without warning and tend to be pretty unpopular, which I’ve pointed out in the past.

4. Level Up

Server Upgrade Time!

Okx

No way they actually had money to afford a server upgrade

On the complete opposite note for admin sentiment, a surprise update came on Wednesday when Okx announced they would be migrating the server back to Ashburn, VA for a hardware upgrade. Newer members may notice that the server more recently has been a much smoother experience; an ad-hoc stress test on Wednesday night saw nearly 150 players with only occasional, negligable drops in TPS performance; it was still hanging around 16 to 20 which for this amount of players, which means it’s quite a big increase. The cap was increased from 140 to 160 as a result.

Originally, admins had stated that a bigger server would not make for a notable performance boost a few months ago, but something must have changed. It is also worth noting that the server had originally been located in Ashburn before being moved to Beauharnois in Canada earlier this year. In general, the Virginia has been better for Civ players considering many of its players are US-based, and is located slightly closer to Atlantic internet cables to reduce ping (ed. note: which helps especially for those who care about PvP.)

I personally still find it likely that even with this increase in performance, admins will still look to migrate to Folia for an even further increase in player cap, but for now, this migration was a major success in gaining an increased cap for new players.

5. Frozen Gastropods

I'm Still Held by Icenia

squidhasthebad

Can Squid get released for real

One post from Squidhasthebad has called for Icenia to release his pearl; the short version of this is that when he logged on to watch Operaheimer’s Opera performance, he was pearled by Kallosians while giving chase all the way to Icenia (ed. note: Operaheimer’s a great opera singer by the way). The pearl was handed off to Icenia however much of Icenia publicly condemned the pearling because of it being an illegal bounty hunting. It’s been perceived there has been a total lack of response from Squid’s side; with Icenia’s messaging saying “Chris was on vacation, we haven’t been around to deal with it.”

Within a larger context, Icenia and its other ASN members have also considerably dropped the ball lately because of the lack of communication. The previous war I just talked about had a notable lack of PR posts and outward communication. If the lack of response was because of vacation, I would give some grace, however the fact that nobody else can delegate this decision, nor communicate the situation let alone deal with it is concerning. It is likely some logistics issues are involved.

It is worth noting Squid is currently still pearled, with still no communication as of yet.

6. JustAComrade’s pearling

When Animosity Becomes Harassment

Justacomrade

Is it animosity if there's reasons behind it

Clebonia is a new nation that’s had a couple of times emerging. While I’ve covered this in the past, a second Clebonia has been made to replace the former, with SSG also pearling them in the latest instance that happened at the end of September.

The post is essentially a rundown of events JustaComrade their point of view, but the factual correctness of any of this is not something I want to focus on (ed. note: Even though much of this is also missing some parts…) However, one thing I must point out is closer to the end of the post, where they claim “This behavior falls under out-of-game harassment […] since animosity is not an in-game motivation but a prejudiced personal attack”. Nothing in this post particularly warrants out-of-game harassment charge, “animosity” can happen in game, all grudges stated were in-game, and it feels like this is more of a frustration post than anything.

While hypothetically Civ has become a place where, in theory, any political theory can thrive, Fascism is one that folks do not particularly like. While there are no rules against it, but there’s also no rules against killing off these kinds of nations either.

7. Indirect Rails

The Future of Rails on Civ

varbo

The great debate of how rails should go on Civ lives on

One common problem for players in Minecraft, let alone Civ, is multi-destination rail networks. Over the years Civ has tried to find unique ways to make this work, one especially enabled by RailSwitch, one of the lesser sung plugins that allows players to input a destination via a command. This has enabled systems such as KANI and OneDest, which either generate or define a /dest command directly to automatically route players to their destination.

However, the big debate is over the necessity and complexity of these systems. While both KANI and OneDest are major efforts, there is a general lack of maintenance on the rails that connect these, not to mention sometimes suboptimal routing. After all, the system is community maintained and when the system routes wrongly or a rail is broken, it becomes very annoying. As a result, nations such as Pavia have advocated for Direct Rails, which as the name implies are single-origin and destination rails between two countries.

This article from Varbo argues for somewhat of a middle ground, creating a proof-of-concept for a Hybrid Rail between Heikki and much of the area in Alenarith, which allows any user to attach onto its particular rail and be routed at the correct junction. However, this idea is not new; the Great Overland Rail (another long-standing rail network on Civ) ran on a similar premise for both its iterations, with a single trunk line serving the better half of a continent. While this debate still stokes arguments nowadays, only time will tell what kind of rails prevail. (ed. note: pun intended)

8. Buy High, Sell High

Starboard ETF IPO

BlankestAtlas

Note, this links into Pavia discord. https://discord.gg/civpavia

Starboard ETF Prospectus

BlankestAtlas

Guys, please don't star the private chats!

On September 26, the Starboard ETF was announced, the first Exchange Traded Fund on Civ. The intention is to provide a way to invest in a security without holding shares, as the idea is to return profits from several companies at once. Currently, there are ten companies on the Pavian Stock Exchange currently but all are only available through auctioning like folks do with other goods in #market-trade; Pavia has essentially treated these as commodity goods and prices for an individual share have been prohibitively expensive for new players (~100d at its lowest.) (ed. note: for those who do not know these acronyms, this is 100 diamonds.)

Despite the intention to be a more accessible entry-level stock, prices for this skyrocketed to 240d/share. This once again made it exorbitantly expensive for a new player to enter the stock market, let alone anyone without a large sum of wealth. However, the Starboard heads still plan to release more shares in the future; only 40 of the 160 public shares have been sold so far.

It is worth noting that this portfolio leans heavily towards Lyrean Rail, PVTC, and Zeal Corp, which raises a small amount of concerns. The first company is one Blatlas heads and is a Pavian government company but plan to divest from; the latter two were IPO’d relatively recently. Only time will tell if this will be successful, but it’s interesting to see real life stocks spill into server affairs.

9. Portal Ownership

Regarding the CW Portal

PergySkeel

Look at me, this is my portal now

Late on Sunday night, the Commonwealth reclaimed ownership of the nether portal located closest to them, the Tortuga portal, along with the help of Estalia to enforce as well as mine. The portal had been under contentious ownership and was only reclaimed due to supposed inactivity in the region.

Portal spaces usually didn’t mean politically important things at launch, but late last year an update was introduced to add meteoric iron veins near portals, which made mining rights very important around portals. While Moria stole the portal during 2024, rights were sold back to the Commonwealth by late November, but Moria maintained shared mining rights.

While this would normally be a nothingburger of a post that I wouldn’t comment on, DockerImage posted last weekend that he was auctioning off exclusive* portal mining rights; CW clarified that he had no rights to sell its exclusive rights in the first place; not to mention he was pearled by Kallos. The post is merely voiding this contract due to the lack of use, and reclaiming the entire area for CW.

10. Honorable Mentions

A picture from the marriage of Patt and Buttercat within a glade in Vetranio, Pavia (cr: Roman)

News

Community Highlights

Corrections

Poll of the Week

A render of Ila’Kyavul from afar, (cr: _Sublim3)

Last week, we had 46 responses. So my guess it’s partially because of a shorter writeup, but this section has seen declining numbers for a while. Maybe the questions aren’t interesting?

Ten Things Format?

Last week, I introduced a new format to simplify some writing. What did you all think of it?

It’s interesting that people actually think the newsletter was better anyway, I think it’s a much more rigid format to work with and because of how it’s offered there’s way more writeups involve that take tons of time these days. Once again, I’m kind of doing this experiment this week to see how it works in a normal format, but it’s glad to see at the very least, people will read whatever.

Civ Content Quality

I asked whether you feel Civ content has just degraded in quality over the years. Now, while I admit Reddit posts have massively increased quality to the incredible bar it is today (ed. note: I absolutely feel privileged being able to complain about slop being present on Reddit these days), I asked this mainly because Discord CivMC is a much different story.

It seems to be that I people are very excited about how the server’s content is performing, we’ve gotten really crazy stuff lately between Opera performances, PvP duels on live, coronations, initiations, and way more. So the bar is higher yes, but the content quality is just higher by comparison too.

YouTube Invasion

Let’s see if your predictions were right!!

“solo nation’s” primarily kept alive by 2-3 extremely active people will become a thing of the past as the newfriends will likely increase the permanent active population of CivMC

Everyone knows One-Man Nations will still stick around, they’re never going away.

I think the queue might be done away with for the time being. But there’s a learning curve for civ and I doubt that many people from youtube will stay. We’ll eventually get back to the status quo.

Most likely a fair queue system is implemented, some way to increase limits on player count is established, changes to things like the vault meta, and when a future iteration inevitably enters discussion [major changes to existing gameplay].

Well, neither of that is likely happening until Folia gets implemented. Hypothetically, the upgrade of Civ plugins to Folia will allow a much better distribution of server resources and (hopefully) make it feasible for 200+ player caps on main.

I think it would be difficult for a YouTube invasion to permanently settle here, just because of the massive learning curve civ has. Would it change the culture over time? Probably. But I think it would mostly just result in existing nations having some really good recruiting for a while. Defense infra and server politics are not something you can be taught overnight, and certainly not something you can quickly figure out on your own. So, any new YouTube groups would be an a deep disadvantage to existing power blocs.

It’s still yet to be seen how much retention CivMC got from this last wave, but given that I think much more people are sticking around even for day 2 is pretty promising. Hopefully, high learning curves don’t scare anybody off.

I think a larger playerbase would probably encourage more spin-off servers … result[ing] in major technical advances and gameplay adjustments[…]. I could see an uptick of raiding encouraging oldfriends to form tighter coalitions…

The more interesting one is I think the former. We’re already seeing some interest in other players developing their own Civ servers (with difficulty, may I add). CivRealms & Universe for example, have their fair share of refugees, both spinoff servers during the CivClassic days, which brought massively different gameplay styles close to the mainline. We haven’t seen an effective alternative Civ server in a while, and god knows CivMini isn’t quite cutting it right now.

CivMC is not designed for an invasion. A single mid-tier YouTuber could kill it by making a video on it. […] The server needs a priority queue for veterans and paid players.

Wild response, but this past weekend has shown that’s definitely not the case.

I think we will initially see a divide of people who formed their opinions on how Civ should work from watching and participating in Civ Minecraft Youtube events and original Civcraft origin players.

It’s a thing where I think people from “Civilization” style servers are much different than those on “Civ” servers, because one caters towards events, and others caters towards an SMP, long-term style. To be fair, I likely haven’t seen any “Civilization” players with that mindset here, because like I said, it’s a very different niche than what other people are after.

Vote Now!

Bringing back an old favorite…

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. See the Privacy Policy for more information.
What nation are you from? (answer as detailed as able, up to Town level)

So as typical with these unverified polls, I’ll post something next week but folks should take it with a grain of salt; a poll without identification and able to repeat answers should not be taken seriously.

Catharsis Cry for Help

Hockey at the Danzilona vs. Exyria games at the New Swisston Arena (cr: peakman2).

Thank for reading this week’s newsletter! I hope things were not too long for the new players reading this. I don’t write this with any artificial intelligence, so this is all handcrafted, even if you think it might be. I hope this gives you a nice glimpse into various parts of the world so far!

To be honest, I think one major reason why I’m more amenable to this format is because it’s easier to write, not to mention I know how much progress I have left to go in a “Top Ten” format such as this. Writing this on Sunday night has never been easier, since all the stories are (mostly) lined up before then. A couple things I want to note that has also gotten me through this week:

I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks!

EDIT CIVWIKI