Torrent Network Blog
Where escapism goes to die.-
New Torrent Website
On my Discord profile, my status has been “Building a website” for like 3 months now. Turns out, I was prophesizing my IRL digital marketing business the whole time, and I just finished the first iteration of the landing page. It’s quite nice but I would have to doxx myself to share it, so I’ll table that for now. Anyway, during this excursion I have been diving down the rabbit hole of React + Typescript and running the development server on Oracle Cloud. At a certain point during this project, I realized this framework would be absolutely fantastic for the new Torrent Website.
I set up a new project on my home PC using Vite + React and Typescript with an Express.js and MySQL backend. If you’re tech savvy, you might already have an idea of what I’m planning to do. My ultimate dream is to have a full-fledged Minecraft server website and utilize SEO to greatly drive traffic to the server, as well as have an amazing portal for all things Torrent Network on the web. The current Torrent website is honestly crap; the redirects don’t work and it is really just a bland website template. It’s ugly and I hate it. The new site will have a ton of improvements and new features. The roadmap looks something like the following.
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XEH Hosting Scam
Minecraft Scam Artists
This post is the result of an extremely thorough deep-dive into XEH, a “free” Minecraft server host with abused infra and a litany of scams. Fortunately, Torrent Network is not affected by this in any way. We begin with a report alleging that a user by the name of CoolDragon12346 was scammed out of $127.70 in Litecoin by a hosting provider known as Ether, the director of XEH. Seemed like a pretty small potatoes scam, but upon further exploration, it goes miles deeper than that.
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Bad Hosting Providers
The Downfall of RAVNIX
As mentioned in another post I wrote, dedicated server hosting providers in the United States SUCK! I am tired of losing money, players, and trust. When I transfered my data to my last dedicated server, I was very excited. I had used a new system for running servers in docker containers, that was very secure and a fun challenge. I was hopeful about this provider, since they at the time had a great track record and good reviews. I had not heard many negative things about them, save for some drama in Admincraft. That being said, the colloquial name for that server is Dramacraft, so I didn’t hold it against them.
On 11/20/2024, I reserved a dedicated server from RAVNIX, LLC so I could transfer all my files from Netcup DE to them. To be completely fair to RAVNIX, they aren’t as bad as the complete sham that was Netcup. In fact, my 1 star review of Netcup got removed from Trustpilot due to “not being a genuine experience.” Great. Proof:
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The Failure of Lifesteal Season 2
A Toxic Feedback Loop
Lifesteal Season 2 was a failure. Now, before you get your pitchforks out and march down to Torrent HQ, let me explain. I had put my 100% effort into creating the server, from delegating tasks building spawn, commissioning custom plugins, configuring in-game systems, and much more. As I put my all into developing the season, I watched Survival just… die. I would log into the server that I had spent a year and a half dedicating myself to just to see nobody online. Everyone seemed burnt out. I wanted to give the players a new experience.
Torrent had very little activity and advertising on social media and Minehut seemed like a fruitless endeavor, because we were running one major gamemode with a lack of cohesive features. It seemed impossible to come up with an elevator pitch for the survival server, considering none of the features meshed together very well. Lifesteal Season 1 was coming to a close. As many of you may know, Lifesteal Season 1 was a pure disaster. For the release of this season, Torrent hired a “developer” called Ian. He called himself a developer, but he was really a configurator, meaning he pseudocoded configuration files created by existing plugins on the market.
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Server Migration
Our History With Providers
Due to a combination of bad luck and false advertising, our entire history of working with providers has been poor. Our first provider in 2020 was Apex. At the time, they had bad hardware and the information about the CPUs they used was not publicized. Their panel, Multicraft, is extremely slow and poorly optimized. We had many prevalent issues with them, and due to a billing issue my server ended up being wiped from existence.
2 years later, I opened a server with Shockbyte, another low tier provider with many issues. They also use Multicraft, have low tier CPUs, bad routing, and have some ridiculous policies in their ToS. For some reason, they actually have a policy against using high resolution map software, which is a very strange thing to prohibit. This was another really low quality provider I would never recommend to anyone, though they seem to dominate Google search results.
In mid-2023, we moved to a completely unregistered business that was basically just a guy in his basement. He claimed to be an experienced system administrator, and in some senses he was, but knew absolutely nothing about game servers. My server was poorly optimized, laggy, on very old hardware, and was a mess. About a month after we moved to this provider, he transferred my server to a new SSD and it corrupted all of my files. I restored from an old backup, and immediately started looking for a new host. That was when we moved to Bloom.host.
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Lifesteal Season 2
New Season Coming Soon!
I am happy to go over our current plans for Lifesteal Season 2! We have a ton of awesome ideas to flesh out, and would love to hear your input. Much of the content of this server will be based off of your suggestions and feedback. Whether you were a Lifesteal Season 1 player or not, please let us know how we can do better and make a quality server you want to play on. Please let us know your thoughts in our Discord.
Lifesteal Season 1 was a blast, and we learned a ton from the experience of developing and hosting this server for thousands of players over the last few months. Special thanks to some of our top players:
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Lixery Earned the legendary God of War rank by having the best kill/death ratio of the season! -
OcularFool68 The most helpful and integral player on the server, holding it together and helping new players as a fantastic moderator. -
Vipertwo & Bumble_Bean The best team that lasted the longest on the server. -
GlodGlodsonGG Our first overpowered player on the server; racked up a ton of kills in the first week. -
TheHitmanHusky The richest player on the server, with over $48 million in the bank. However, PsYcHo8185 is fast approaching with over $44 million.
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Cosmetic Update Part 1
New Cosmetics
I present to you, the good people of Torrent, part 1 of the cosmetic update. This includes many new particle effects, gadgets, chat colors, and much more! To view the cosmetics menu, use
/cosmetics. Particle effects are cosmetic features that summon particles around your player avatar, showing off your swagger. Gadgets are items used for pranking, or just being silly and having fun. Summoning a particle effect or gadget has no in-game advantage. From the menu, there are a few free cosmetics you can use on all gamemodes, including the lobby:- Particle effects
- Snow cloud - summon a cloud of snow above your head
- Raid cloud - I hope you’re not too sad!
- Frost lord - gain a frosty aura
- Notes - spawn music notes above your head
- Hearts - show your love for the server (or your friends)
- Particle effects
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The People of Torrent vs. Nout11
Yes another court case took place on Torrent SMP. The players Nout11 and Oerfi engaged in a conversation that quickly turned inflammatory. Oerfi referred to Nout11 as a mispelling of his name that could be interpreted as graphic. This led to a full-scale indendiary conversation that quickly led to moderators getting involved. During this time, Oerfi asked a moderator a bigoted question, but was drowned out by Nout11 dragging the conversation even further into the territory of toxicity. In response, the moderator ZephyrZymbol muted Nout11 on Discord, where he was communicating from with our Discord -> Minecraft integration. Nout11 then continued to drag out the conversation in-game.
This led to a mute in-game and thus, a ticket in our Discord. Nout11 had requested a court hearing as an appeal. Hilarity ensued. After a chaotic miscommunication about where and when the proceeding would take place, court was in session! As always, players screamed in chat asking for help getting to the courthouse. We hit a new record for the attendance of this session, 16 players in one room! Michael, the Divine Pig of Justice, was of course present for this hearing.
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SkyFactions
Introducing Torrent SkyFactions
A new completely original gamemode developed by us, for you. Grind on your own skyblock island or… Join a faction with your friends
Imagine a server where skyblock and factions are combined.. what would you do? Grind for resources on your own island or join a faction (or nation) to collaborate on an island. Become the Lord of a faction or serve as a valiant knight, baron, or duke. But wait… there’s a twist: You can raid other islands
With custom 3D modeled blocks and items, a beautiful lobby, epic cinematic gameplay rivaling Hoplite and Hypixel, this will be the server of the century.
Drops June 15th, 2025
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Linux Pain
A great Linux quote I heard once was “It is not Linux’s job to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. It is Linux’s job to deliver Mr. Bullet to Mr. Foot in the most efficient way possible.” I experienced that over the last few days.
Context: I have an Oracle Cloud virtual machine running, where I host this blog, the SkyFactions-web interface, and Kish’s modded server, as well as a few other small-scale web deployments. It’s an important part of the infrastructure for testing purposes and having access to resources for deploying applications. The instance runs on Ubuntu 22.04 (which is quickly becoming my favorite distro.) I recently installed a GPTs integration written in Go that gives ChatGPT direct access to my machine… scary I know. Surprisingly, ChatGPT doesn’t do anything stupid unless told to, just like the Linux user himself. Here comes me realizing the user accessing the machine via SSH had very limited access (as intended) to the file system without sudo. The GPTs integration runs in docker, so in the containerized environment it didn’t have much access on the machine. I suppose this was intentional for good reason.