My names Alex, better known as gemjars. I ran a Minecraft server by different names from 2020 to 2023. I wanted to document the history of this project for both new and old players. The journey has been turbulent, and I feel the experience is worth sharing.
Leyon started as a small project where I hosted UHCs for a group of friends. At most, these UHCs would get up to 20 players, we’d do a game every few months and have regular faces coming back. The idea was to do Mindcrack style UHCs for a small community.
After one of these events, one of the members suggested we host bigger public games. I let him set up a public discord and do advertising, and I developed the game mode.
The initial server was named Legion. I developed the game mode using just datapacks, and our first few games were for around 20-40 players. Feedback was generally quite good, but the main point was this wasn’t a recipe to grow a server, and we needed more support.
Screenshot of the very first public game I hosted, in 2020.
After a few weeks of hosting Legion UHCs, I was introduced to an experienced developer who could work on the server and the game mode.
The pre requisite of this developer was we renamed the server “Zutile”, the name of the company owner by the developer. I was fine with the name change, Zutile was a much more unique and interesting name than Legion.
We started hosting UHC tournaments alongside the PVP network, and were the first to do large scale UHC tournaments. This directly resulted in UHC Communities being established as part of the 1.9 PVP network
The original Zutile logo
In the early period, we were looking for creators to help us promote the server. Hosthan, who was an admin on Zutile at the time, introduced me to Eryn - a streamer who primarily did Minecraft PvP and later joined the Dream SMP. Hostan was close with him as they played Apollo together, a North American UHC server.
Eryn was keen to stream on the server, an EU option for hosted UHC games was a big ask by the community. Eryn later joined Leyon as an Admin.