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A Fabric vanilla+ server for friends, with live status from the homelab.
01 / Problem
Friends wanted a survival server that plays like the real game. I picked Fabric with server-side-only mods instead of Paper, because Paper changes redstone and duplication behaviour, and nobody needs a client mod to join.
02 / How it works
A small Python service with no dependencies tails the server log. It posts joins and deaths to a Telegram group, builds the death leaderboard and playtime stats, and checks server status with the game's own list ping, cached for 15 seconds. Failures degrade one feature at a time, and it never crash-loops. BlueMap renders the public map, and the Live page of this site reads the same status and leaderboard.
03 / The hard part
I wrote a server-side mod so zombies always convert villagers and cured villagers give shared discounts. I tested the conversion 10 times out of 10 before trusting it. Because the mod has to be rebuilt for each Minecraft version, upgrades go through a script that checks mod readiness first, and the weekly auto-update skips this stack. Everyone joins from the same local address behind the tunnel, so I turned off login sessions to stop one player taking over another's name.
04 / Result
Backups had grown to 99 GB, because each full archive included the rendered map. I switched to incremental snapshots, left the map render out, and the folder dropped to 4.6 GB. I restored a full world from a snapshot to prove it works, and snapshots now run every 6 hours and are kept for 7 days.
How it works
The server itself stays plain vanilla+. A small sidecar reads what it writes and turns that into a feed, a leaderboard, a status and backups.
The same flow as a list, in order.
Stack, by layer
Live from the serverOffline