ABOUT

SoftSlayer has been around for over 14 years now (est. June 2011), with a dedicated community that still plays a bunch of games together (obviously including Minecraft). Our server is small and pretty simple — it’s a mostly vanilla atmosphere with a few convenience and quality of life additions. Everyone is friendly and helpful!

• Survival game mode

• No land claim

• No world resets

• No grief/stealing

• KeepInventory enabled only in the overworld

Points of Interest

• Player-run market district with individual shops (diamond-based economy)

• Death Valley: PvP arena with contested, first-come first-served loot and custom stronger mobs

• Custom ClassPvP, Hide & Seek and Parkour minigames

• Library full of books written by our players since 2012 (a lot of history in there!)

• AFK park in spawn that rewards players in it with money and materials every 15 minutes

• Post Office building with P.O. boxes to send and receive letters and packages with other players

Plugins

• Convenience commands: /home, /warp, /tpa, /wild

• Live map: SoftSlayer Map

• Leveling system with skills

• AcuteLoot: custom names to items you enchant, with a chance of giving swords and bows custom particles. /reroll to reroll the name and particle effect, costs 15 diamonds

• Consent PvP, toggleable with /pvp

• Support the server by voting with /vote to earn custom rewards, voting streaks and rewards per milestone

• SimpleClans (no land-claim or gameplay affecting elements)

• Head drops from mobs and players

• Ender Dragon drops Elytra on death

• Discord & Minecraft chat integration

• Share the item in your hand with [i], or your inventory with [inv] in chat

• Customize armor stands using a piece of Flint

• Improved sleeping mechanics to be multiplayer-friendly

• Feeling lazy? /sit on a chair or /lay on the floor

Our Admins

MrMatt

Hello & Bonjour! I am the Canadian admin that pretends he’s Thor. I stumbled upon Minecraft looking for a train game 12 years ago, and found SoftSlayer about a year later. You can always find me popping around looking at players’ builds.

JHodges

Hi, yes, it’s an Oompa Loompa skin. I started playing on SoftSlayer thirteen years ago and became owner a few years after. My favorite thing to do is build and also aimlessly run around spawn contemplating my existence.

Perovskite

Hey I’m Kit! I’m the builder and designer person of the admins. Like right now you’re looking at my pixel art on this website. I joined over 12 years ago and played for around 5 years before working my way up the ranks and becoming admin!

Server History

With over 14 years of being online, SoftSlayer’s history is almost impossible to summarize in a few short paragraphs, but here goes:

In its inception in 2011, SoftSlayer emerged as a hardcore PvP server with strict rules against griefing but allowed stealing. This era, fondly remembered by the oldies as the Golden PvP years, saw dominant PvP clans like NoD, OJs, TOA, COMP, FBI and Defem reigning supreme. Only the very brave or very foolish would ever attempt to make a base aboveground. The map would reset with every major update. One can go for a history scroll through our old PHP forums, before we switched to Discord. The basement floor of the Library, the Archive, contains a lot of books written during that era.

Following Minecraft’s controversial 1.9 Combat update, interest in PvP and raiding began to dwindle. SoftSlayer entered an experimental phase, integrating regular survival worlds with creative worlds and modpacks like Terrafirmacraft, RLCraft, Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons, and Pixelmon. (And a short Unturned experiment, which we do not talk about.)

Around the release of 1.16 in 2020, we decided to fully embrace the no PvP/raiding playstyle, disabling PvP and adding the no stealing rule, as well as lockable chests. The whitelist was enabled to enhance player vetting and encourage the formation of towns near Spawn, marking the beginning of the Builder era. The addition of the ClassPvP arena catered to the last remnants of hardcore PvPers.

However, the yearly map resets were affecting player motivation for large projects. With the release of 1.20, the following pivotal changes were made on SoftSlayer: a final map reset on June 7th, 2023, marked the end of map resets forever. Keep-inventory was enabled in the overworld, and PvP was made toggleable to accommodate both playstyles. The PvP arena Death Valley was created, with no keep-inventory and always-on PvP, for those who enjoy living life on the edge.

As we step into this new era of SoftSlayer, you’re invited to join us by connecting to our server!

Map Downloads

Google Docs list of all old maps available for download.