Hermitcraft: The 30-Person Server That Has Been Running for Over a Decade

Think of how many huge Minecraft servers have been born and have died over the last ten years. Giants with tens of thousands of players online at once, gleaming lobbies, game modes for every taste. Many no longer exist. Others are shadows of what they were. Scale, which seemed a guarantee of eternity, turned out to guarantee nothing.

And meanwhile, a tiny server — barely a few dozen people, all hand-picked by invitation — was still there. Season after season. More than a decade. It had nobody's size, and yet it had something the colossi never quite managed: an unmistakable personality, a soul. It is called Hermitcraft, and its story dismantles one of the most widespread beliefs about digital communities.

What it is, exactly

Hermitcraft isn't a server you connect to. It is a private survival server — an SMP, survival multiplayer — that you can only enter by invitation. Its members, a group of content creators, call themselves "Hermits".

The idea is deceptively simple: a handful of people share a normal Minecraft world, with no exotic rules, and simply… live in it. They build, trade, set up elaborate pranks, raise mega-builds, tell each other stories. There is no imposed goal and no central competition. The content — the videos each Hermit publishes from their own point of view — springs from living together itself. It is, at heart, a neighbourhood. One where, as it happens, everyone knows how to build astonishing things.

A founding, a departure, a survival

Here is the part that is most misunderstood, and the most interesting.

Hermitcraft was founded by GenerikB on 13 April 2012, inspired by Mindcrack, another popular SMP of the time. The name came from his own nickname, "the Gaming Hermit". The first members included names such as BDoubleO100, Keralis, Xisumavoid and JoeHills. It was a small, homemade project with no pretensions to eternity.

And then something happened that should have killed it: its founder left. GenerikB left the server in April 2013, barely a year after creating it. In most projects tied to one person, that departure is the end. Here it wasn't. The server outlived him, kept growing, and today it is run by Xisumavoid, one of its longest-standing members.

It is worth underlining, because it is easy to tell the story wrongly: Hermitcraft isn't the work of a single genius. It is a collective work that turned out to be stronger than any of its members, including the one who started it. Even its most famous names today — Grian, Mumbo Jumbo — aren't founders: they joined in later seasons, when the server was already an institution. What keeps Hermitcraft alive isn't a person. It is the community itself.

More than ten years, counted in seasons

Hermitcraft doesn't work as an eternal, unchanging server. It works in seasons: every so often — typically several months — the group starts a new map, from scratch, and with it a new stage of stories. It has been going like this for around ten seasons over more than ten years.

That structure is part of its secret. Each season is a clean restart, a blank page that avoids the stagnation and endless accumulation that wear out other worlds. The community grows older, but the world is always young. And the players, far from tiring of it, come back to each season like someone starting a good book again already knowing the characters.

More than a decade later, it is still one of the best-loved and most-watched SMPs in Minecraft. With a few dozen people.

The principle: the small and well-cared-for outlasts the big

Step out of Minecraft for a moment, because this holds for almost any community humans build.

We live surrounded by the myth of growth: that bigger is better, that adding people is adding value, that scale protects. Hermitcraft tells the opposite story, and it isn't the only one: small, curated communities — where people know each other, where getting in means something, where care goes into who is part of it — tend to survive longer and feel more alive than massive ones, which grow fast and dilute just as fast. Size brings numbers; curation brings identity. And identity is what makes someone come back for ten years in a row.

That is the principle: what truly endures is not usually the biggest, but the best cared for; and a community that survives its founder's departure has stopped being a personal project and become everyone's place — which is precisely what makes it indestructible. The most enduring human institutions aren't the ones that depend on a person or a size, but those that have managed to make their soul live in the group. That is why a neighbourhood of thirty people can beat more strongly than a metropolis of a hundred thousand.

It is no coincidence that the projects that truly aspire to last — including what some of us are attempting with KobiiCraft — look more to Hermitcraft than to the giants: because the hard part isn't gathering crowds, it's building a place people feel is theirs and want to come back to.

What a thirty-person server teaches

Go back to the beginning: to all those giants that were born and died while a tiny server kept standing. The lesson isn't that big is doomed or that small is always better. The lesson is that scale was never what mattered.

What mattered was something else, harder to measure and harder to build: that people know each other, that the place has character, that it survives the person who started it. For more than a decade, season after season, Hermitcraft has been showing that a handful of people who care for their world can create something more alive and more lasting than any crowd.

In the end, servers aren't remembered for how many people fitted in them, but for how much soul fitted in them. And soul, it turns out, doesn't need to be big to be immense.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hermitcraft? Hermitcraft is a private, invite-only Minecraft survival server (SMP) made up of a group of content creators called "Hermits". They share a relatively normal Minecraft world where they build, trade and play pranks, and each of them publishes videos from their own perspective. It is one of the longest-running and best-loved SMPs in the game's history.

Who founded Hermitcraft and when? It was founded by GenerikB on 13 April 2012, inspired by the Mindcrack SMP. The original members included BDoubleO100, Keralis, Xisumavoid and JoeHills. Curiously, GenerikB left the server in April 2013, barely a year later; the server outlived him and today it is run by Xisumavoid, one of its longest-standing members.

Why does such a small server last so long? Because its strength lies not in size but in curation and identity. Being small and invite-only, everyone knows each other and the place has a character of its own. It also works in seasons (a new map every several months), which prevents stagnation. Small, well-cared-for communities tend to last longer than massive ones, which grow and dilute quickly.

Did Grian and Mumbo Jumbo found Hermitcraft? No. Although today they are two of its most famous names, Grian and Mumbo Jumbo joined in later seasons, not at the 2012 founding. It is an important nuance: Hermitcraft isn't the work of a single creator, but a collective community that survived even the departure of its own founder.