CivWiki Monday Newsletter

A (mostly) weekly newsletter for Civ servers supported by the CivWiki

CivWiki Newsletter for October 22, 2026

• specificlanguage

Good morning and hello from the Pacific Northwest!

Did something happen in the last couple of months? Probably not, I think I should probably stop writing here.

All jokes aside, this is a very long issue because I sort of have combined some writing fragments I’ve been sitting on since late August. These primarily cover the big events that have happened, which for those in the know are all very complicated topics to talk about. I’ve planned not to put big writeups in this, but at some point this is just unavoidable.

I’m sure many of you are going to gloss over many of these sections, but this has basically been a chronicle of the past couple of months of the server. So if you’re looking for what will likely be the meat & potatoes, here’s the link to the Chiraq stuff. Otherwise, get ready for the news:

This week’s featured image is of Pacem’s downtown, which you’ll realize why I am picking this as a particular topic in a few minutes. It’s been a bit of a while since then, but for oldfriends, the small city is a bit of a nostalgic reminder of when Pacem was at its peak. For long time Civvas, Pacem’s iteration on CivClassic was a fan-favorite tourist spot; imagine the current day Pacem but spread over thousands of blocks of territories and builds. Although the current state of Pacem is not as big, their recognizable build style is still a welcome sight, bringing a solid reminder of their distinctive style. I’m glad it’s back to its original state!

Featured Article

Just a note that this is NOT the same article as on CivWiki’s front page, like I usually do. This week’s featured article is a repeat of, unsurprisingly, September 4th, 2023.

Mount September was a democratic nation on CivClassic, founded as a spiritual successor to Mount Augusta. Created following the latter’s move to CivRealms, the country aimed to preserve the culture of Augusta as a new country. Founded to the east of the original city, the country quickly grew with a new voter tree and mall, and within a year had a thriving political system with a Mayor, Judges, and Cupboard (akin to a Cabinet). The country also participated in the Augustan Federation, a loose alliance of all the nations within Mount Augusta’s sphere of influence in order for better cooperation in the region, as well as maintaining relationships to close allies in Gabon and Lusitania.

Their political system lent itself numerous conflicts; continued spits with South Augusta leader TheOrangeWizard were common. The Mount September Ice Road Conflict sprouted from issues with the UDF, who set off alarms near its bunker. However, the country had a weirder, laidback sense of culture. Although events like the Lunar Near Year occurred in the country, the “septem” currency, the first PacStatue, and pictures of founder Squareblob’s profile image were common areas of foolery. CivMC’s iteration of Mount Augusta was set to be a Septembrian successor, however, its main figureheads were not reelected after its early days. (Full article…)

This week’s featured image is the voter tree plaza within the main area of Mount September.

This Month In Civ

2022: The Temporal Isles territory within Icenia entered a conflict over disagreements with PhysicsGamer and Icenia. The Four Continent Concordat was created between Pavia, the IF, Pridelands, and Venne.

2023: After a string of conflicts involving Gang Shi, Icenia, and Yoahtl, the trio signed a short-lived non-aggression pact.

2024: SPQR’s consul, alberlb96 announced he would be dissolving the Senate, along with passing a law to ban hate speech within the country. Yoahtl formally joined the ASN.

2025: Joyfuul released a video on CivMC on September 26 last year, causing a server-wide influx of players; it heavily advertised Temporal Isles, his eventual nation.

Top 8

The rocket hub launch in Mount Augusta (cr: Jasonbord/CivRenders)

Ideally, all of these would only take a couple of paragraphs. This is not one of those ideal weeks. I remember when I initially wrote this as a Top 5.

I know that for many this is a CivMC-focused newsletter, and today it will be mostly CivMC. However, you will eventually see one non-CivMC thing I would like to talk about.

Rushing a Science Victory

For a very long time, the separate dimension of Zorweth had essentially been a separate server from CivMC. However, due its mechanics and other items, it had been a pretty polarizing experience for those who ended up pioneering when the dimension first opened up in June, a topic I’ve covered previously. To bridge the two dimensions together, two stages of research were required, and at the time of the previous newsletter research had essentially ground to a halt, it was so slow at progression that it became a constant complaint for players to be brought back from Zorweth because it was so hard to play.

At first, there was an end in sight as Salerno first posted on September 3 that they had obtained enough research materials to single-handedly complete research, where they expected to finish within 3 weeks. However several nations also rushed to use their research that they had built up, and within the following days, rocket research completed on September 9, at 10:17pm. Rocket launches, both public and private, began within the next day and Zorweth pioneers were returned to CivMC.

Rockets themselves are interesting since they have a weight limit on what can be carried, although companies like Rise are beginning to offer scheduled services, but operating rockets also enables Zorweth specific resources like Oil and Salt to make their way into the main server. Today, the connection has even enabled inter-shard banking.

They Came from the Sea…

The mass vault break at the Sea Peoples’ vault (cr: Augur)

Invasion of the Sea Peoples

CivWiki editors

This is the CivWiki page, (if it's not down!)

Because the Invasion of the Sea Peoples is pretty old news now, this will be a very glossed over summary, but that shouldn’t discount that I would consider this a major war on Civ. That being said, the CivWiki page is one of the best war pages in recent memory.

On August 22, the Temporal Empire was griefed by a number of raiders, including some previously wanted by Nara. The grief was pretty substantial, covered with Stone-Reinforced Obsidian over much of the capital. Although allies such as CDM, Nara, and even the DGP were alerted to this behavior all chose not to engage due to not knowing enough info and for fear of fighting a losing battle due to the size of the group.

This would later become a problem as the raiding continued to head through DGP and WARDA countries, primarily in Pacem on the 23rd, where Wheaties23 was pearled, as well as raids throughout the area in Pacem, Commonwealth and Micronook. Relatedly, the previously mentioned Okkinok Mercinary Group announced they were joining what they called the “Sea Peoples”. (ed. note: The DGP called them the Sea Peoples as a reference to the Odyssey, but the raider group adopted that moniker themselves!) The Sea Peoples eventually claimed (and raided) a large swath of territory surrounding Pacem; the area had not had defensive infrastructure prior to August 17. In response, Pacem would eventually join Icenia on the 24th, to primarily gain formal protections from the DGP.

OMG announced on August 24 that they would be raiding Lambat in Pavia the next day, this would not materialize as raiders were alerted to a failed raid in Icarus earlier that day. Pavia City would eventually be mildly griefed, along with Fairhill on the 25th with wither-bombings occurred in the Lyrean Commonewalth & Zirakdum on August 26. However, the raiders would be seemingly banned on August 26, presumably due to being alts, a number of nations across server then descended on the Sea Peoples’ vault and disabled it, along with cleaning up the grief within nearby Pacem.

You may realize this is a very played out war scenario I am just writing again. I have definitely heard existing complaints about this repetitive and costly gameplay within the 2 months following this war.

Reeling in More Newfriends

The Opera House statue & bridge within Kaltsburg. It has nothing to do with this upcoming section. (cr: Maytee)

14,000 Players Created a Real Civilization in Minecraft

NeverMyFault

Why is bro putting a laugh emoji in the title

The History of Minecraft's Longest Manhunt

meddleh/Banana_blu

Ah yes, my favorite Civilization Minecraft server

Most people probably know where this particular story is coming from, this story starts a couple weeks prior when CivMC fanboy and local Reddit mod adeadhead posted on r/Minecraft a thinly veiled advertisement for the server on September 7 (which as expected would eventually get locked and removed due to violation of r/Minecraft’s policies). However, a content creator known as NeverMyFault, who frequently reposts content regarding Minecraft picked this up within a few hours and posted his own “summary” of how this server works (ed. note: It is worth noting I do think his content is slop.)

These posts resonated with his audience and brought in hundreds of thousands of views. Although its server was never mentioned in the video, many players in the comments recognized CivMC, and as a result folks in the past few weeks may have noticed a significant uptick in players, resulting in long queue times. CivMC admins have been working on long-term solutions to this, one example resulting in a particularly successful experiment on a dynamic queue system released on September 23 based on TPS. However, you can still consistently see peak queues tick up into the 50s and 60s in recent days (compared to 100s during the Invasion of the Sea Peoples and this initial surge).

While this is not the first incident, these have been happening a lot more often. More recently Banana_Blu’s videos, who has also become the defacto CivMC documentarian, have also had an uptick in attention. His latest video regarding (in)famous Gang Shi leader jbblocker has gotten well over 500k views. (ed. note: This may be due to how YouTube has changed its view system, but I will give it the benefit of the doubt because the video is extremely well made!) Notable incidents like this have been much more prevalent especially as the Civilization event genre has had a lot more attention as of late.

300 player counts have become increasingly more common in the past couple of months due to wars and other players joining the server. I do wonder given these recruitment drives, how many people have stuck around since early September, because retention rate is usually very low on Civ.

Redacted Material

All quiet in Dubrovnik, Temporal Empire (cr: me).

Here and There and Back Again

realmichael, Shadno, Bronnakus, et al.

From the Advocate's October 2026 edition

A note that for this entire section, I have essentially lost all sources — it is obvious Temporal Empire’s discord was deleted, but additionally PhysicsGamer’s account has also been deleted as well.

PhysicsGamer is a very interesting person to talk about with what will go down with a very interesting legacy. If you haven’t read the Advocate’s profile on him in their latest edition, this is a good retrospective on his time on Civ that I won’t bother to reiterate, but it gives good background on his final actions on Civ. This is because he voluntarily abdicated from the Temporal Empire due to personal issues on September 19 and would give his emperorship to DonutMT.

A report would come later of PhysicsGamer knowingly engaging in unsavory behavior among other Civ players, and as a reaction, a group of Meridiem Entente fighters would eventually invade and flood the country’s primary vault in Temporal Empire in the early hours of September 26. Although a couple fighters from the TE side did log in, the vault was practically uncontested, the Meridiem Entente broke defenses within a few hours of breach. DonutMT would turn themselves in to the ME in the late hours of September 26.

As a side note, the incident of PhysicsGamer did also relate to why Yodabird was also removed from power in Cortesia Del Mar, on the same day as the Temporal Empire vault break. Both PhysicsGamer and Yodabird have been banned from the server after TE and CDM were allies and in close contact with each other since May. Icenia who currently have Cortesia as a protectorate, continue to monitor the situation.

Questions & Answers

Pavia’s Throne Room in their town hall. Or, I guess it’s more a palace, but let’s not get into that one. (cr: me)

The Community Town Hall Summary

SpeedyFire10000

from the Civ Standard

On October 9, the CivMC admin team held a town hall, allowing community members to ask questions directly to the admins. There is a comprehensive and unfiltered summary located in the Civ Standard, here are my personal takeaways that I think are important (and aren’t just people complaining about specific bans):

There were however, some questions that I think the forum was incorrect, but is more community focused.

Shrek Forever After

Aquila on Devoted 3.0. This might ring a bell to some oldfriends. (cr: me, from an download)

Devoted Forever - Launch Trailer

kbvs

Get ready for a new Start of the World!

It would be a little remiss to not mention a Civ server carrying on an old(ish) legacy. Oldfriends may remember Devoted, which lasted for 4 iterations, including Devoted Hell, the nether-only server. We even consider it a “mainline” server during 3.0. However, Devoted has always been aligned on the mechanic experimentation side of Civ, and I have personally considered it aligned closer with the PvP side of the community.

It was with great joy (and a little trepidation) when I found that Devoted was returning with a new iteration called Devoted Forever. While all of its previous iterations have been run by ProgrammerDan and Bonkill (ed. note: or Convoy, or Player, or however you know him by), this one is being helmed by kbvs, who I don’t actually know.

There are quite a few ideas being pitched within its recent FAQ, which include a much-requested bot nerf, pearls essentially being bans, a “Civ-lite” tutorial world, a global auction house, and some general slower progressions that are a little reminiscent of Civcraft 3.0. I am at least interested to see how this plays out, because I do think there are some interesting ideas to change the genre’s playstyle. That being said, Civ 3.0 also made enough changes where the server became a slog to play through. We will eventually find out on October 24 when Devoted Forever launches whether there is an consistent audience who want to play this server long term, like the other 5(!) Civ servers we currently list on CivWiki.

I guess to be clear, this headline doesn’t mean I’m actually comparing Devoted to the Shrek franchise.

Lonely Mountain

Zirakdum’s train station (along with its colorful ceiling) (cr: The_Fella7441)

Zirakdum-Yoahtl Treaty of Protection

ifriendiscool, LeafChalice, et al.

The Mountain Provides.

Zirakdum accepted vassalization and became a protectorate of Yoahtl overnight during October 16, and seceded from the Lyrean Commonwealth. Their stated reason was because of a “prolonged series of grievances”. In the post it did state “[We] deeply regret that it has come to this, but understand that this secession will in no way break our familial bonds.” It is worth noting that Pavia did not receive any prior notification to this. Salerno quickly responded saying they stand with Pavia.

In a followup response, Pavia said that this generally did not line up with their perception. The LC had been supportive of the country since their inception, and it seems what broke the camel’s back was a recent border dispute between Amboise and Zirakdum. (ed. note: It’s worth noting Amboise is no longer part of the LC, and ironically has been closer to the side of Yoahtl than Pavia.) Additionally, the secession would cause an international security issue due to geography; Zirakdum’s now foreign military infrastructure lay close or overclaimed a previous LC-owned portal.

The Pavian Coast Guard would quickly spring into action removing bastions from their vault, and label a few primary players as POS, this would later result in Strocraft and ifriendiscool being pearled later that day, who were the primary players behind this incident. Yoahtl also later discovered that Pavia did not receive prior notification, and eventually relinquish their claim later that day, while still welcoming any Zirakdum refugees.

Zirakdum has been hinting that they are planning to move to the previously mentioned Devoted, while Pavia-Griffin are returning the mountain to Mehri and Lambat who previously owned the territory, and laid out arrangements for Zirakdum for residents to return and reclaim materials if needed, and would not be punished.

You Want a War George?

SPQR defending the portal vault from a Chiraqi skybridge (cr: Adelover)

An Empty Chair

PhinkleForb

Is this like an avant-garde play name or something?

The View from the Snow

ArkenX, Swordmaster

...or a view from the skybridge, I guess

…welcome to Chiraq!

Ok, outdated YouTube videos aside, as this is still an active conflict some information may be incorrect, I will try to correct things if something is incorrect.

Chiraq is a new nation made up of a combination of oldfriends, some Sea Peoples, EdenMC players, and other PvP-adjacent players. Originally part of Skandic, the country declared independence on October 12 and subsumed Eryos), a territory near SPQR. A post from them on October 17 claimed SPQR was planning to raid Eryos, and negotiating in bad faith, and in response they launched a skybridge on their portal (ed. note: see picture above). The co-owner of the portal, Vinland was told not to engage, and only a scant number of fighters from the DGP and nearby Westhelm chose to engage, and Chiraq did eventually take the portal. But some claimed that the excuse was relatively manufactured.

The following day, Chiraq found a Naran attack bunker and tunnel on their direct cardinal to the country’s vault, and in response launched a skybridge on the Naran-owned Dalgon Portal. (ed. note: This graph may show this a bit better, where A is the bunker, and B is the Nara portal, where bridges were coming from B->A and the vault->A (thanks Ade for the initial map)) While some groundfighting and counter-skybridging occurred, eventually Chiraq retracted their own skybridge and a fragile ceasefire was reached on this southern front. However, the very next day, a new skybridge was launched from Westhelm, a DGP ally, to Aspasia, another Chiraqi ally. This northern front is still ongoing on this war with the sides trading back and forth between continuing on skybridge, ground game and tunnels. It is hard to understand who is winning at this time.

Backing up a bit, the reasons surrounding this war have been very conflicting. Chiraq’s primary responses claimed Nara and the DGP were taking an aggressive war and Chiraq were acting out of self-defense, only after they claimed evidence that SPQR and Nara were taking aggressive actions against them. Nara’s response, on the other hand, argues that Chiraq were aggressively trying to take land; their primary example was an incident where Chiraq continually refused to remove bastions on Benelux land during early October, and also took aggressive actions to take Benelux land. They had been working with the Meridiem Entente to resolve this dispute, but all talks fell through. Nara did no aggressive actions to this point, and from their perspective they have been playing defense since this point.

Although war fighting is still going on (such as a few interesting pearls like Rammyls and Rantha (among others), the war is mostly at a standstill right now, primarily in Westhelm/Aspasia. DGP also had a campaign within Sonara within recent days. Chiraq have put out some conditional terms to end the war but the DGP are likely not agreeing to these terms. There is one extra thing I noticed while sitting in all of the war PR voice chats in CivMC #general: Chiraq claimed they were taking extreme measures to prevent being banned for illegal reasons, going so far to let admins sit in on secure discord channels.

Around Civ

Groveheart’s glowup with some new buildings and a big tree in the background. (cr: Gidein)

Headlines

Sorry if I’m not mentioning you in this section, it’s not that I don’t care, but that for the sake of reading experience I am only listing relatively important highlights within the last two months. Sorry if your leadership change isn’t highlighted, there was just too much to cover.

Player Creations

On the News

Another iteration of Minas Tirith on Zorweth. (cr: Seldomshock) is well known for these.

The past couple months have seen an explosion in the number of active publications in any point on Civ, including specialized publications for Hockey (shoutout PUCK), and a fully fledged and much more successful newsmagazine (shoutout Advocate) that are really doing a good job carving out their own niches in reporting, I love to see that. That being said, I know many folks have complained about newspaper quality lately, me not withstanding.

There is one thing that came up during the admin Q&A that feel I need to address here: journalists should have a responsibility to report responsibly and deliver trust to the public that we ultimately serve. Readership is all based up on trust. That’s kind of why I’m trying to hold this newsletter to such a high standard to set an example for how others should outline their articles. Media integrity does play a large part in how much your readership trusts you as a journalist, and incidents over the past couple of months have sort of demonstrated why media integrity should be given utmost attention when reporting, and not letting that take the backseat in order to get funny upvotes on something you wrote 15 minutes ago.

Server Happenings

Interesting Ideas

The Fun Stuff

A quaint little cafe in HSM. (cr: lykkelou)

Builds

I didn’t have much time to scrape some good builds, but it’s also saddening not many builds are on the common forums. Although, I think a bigger presence of builds would absolutely help the feed on Reddit and Discord. Do you know how much I had to crawl through to find some decent pictures this time around?

Trailers

From what I understand the Trailer Competition is over, however Zenron has yet to announce the winner(s) so far. That being said, here are all of the trailers that I saw while running through Reddit.

Cool Content

Lythetica/Knightkil Castle on a clear night (cr: TectalKnight)

Memes

Non-Civ Content

I’m going to try to surrender the “goodbye” space to be something less personal, so it’s coming here, where people pay less attention! I’ve been pretty busy lately so that’s why I didn’t write anything in September, and I’m sort of paying the price now. Of note of things to talk about:

Poll of the Month

Highgrove Castle & the Victory Arch on the north shore of Pavia City. (cr: CedarValiant)

Last week, we had 77 responses. That’s way more than I’ve previously gotten, so props to everyone reading this far down and looking at data.

Server Census

The first question was “What server do you play?” Traditionally this newsletter has been CivMC-focused but I try to weave in news from other servers when I have enough context.

A note that this question was posed prior to the current newfriend wave. What I do find interesting a number of players are coming from a bunch of other servers — respondants to the newsletter tend to be very oldfriend-minded, so it’s interesting that this does skew towards other servers where I wouldn’t expect readership to be.

Server Sentiment

The second question was about how you feel about your current server. I didn’t do enough work to correlate questions with the responses to the previous questions, but I can at least point out which server the response is talking about. Answers are edited for length.

First, let’s talk about Zorweth:

Love the community and the grind on zorweth. Hate the lack of politics and large claims.

Zorweth is very lonely im consistently the only player online in my crater and its very sad :(

Zorweth really is an incredible experiment. The first few days were really exciting[…]. But I’ve found that a lot of the cool new features […] are hard to engage with[…] We end up all bottled into arguably the weakest part of the new planet — the craters, which are all single biomes with very little interesting features.

Second, here is CivMC as a whole (although some of this probably could be applied to Eden as well):

I love Pavia and their banking. Pavia is what keeps me playing in spite of my grievances with the server mechanics.

Not well futureproofed for greater expansion of the playerbase. I thought that this was supposed to be the primary purpose of Zorweth, but […] this is clearly not going to be the case.

Awesome community, even though sometimes people take drama too personally which can ruin the vibe.

The admins desperately need to add some catchup mechanics for newer nations […] the amount of grinding required for any newfriend nation to catch up is extreme and likely contributes to a lot of people dropping the server.

The last response is consistently a problem with long-lasting Civ servers, since the early game can be pretty daunting (GregTech anyone?).

For the other servers:

[On Nodes:] The admins were XP nerds on other servers and it shows here. It’s a bit inactive at the moment but that should change once the early game grind is overcome

Civ+ respects players moderating players, and has an extreme amount of polish. It is fun to play for people who want Civ instead of bancraft.

I literally can’t play any other Civ servers anymore. I tried to play nodes when it launched, but I bounced off it because it’s missing so many usability and quality of life features that civplus has.

But, I think this last response kind of shows how big the Civ community has blossomed in recent months, and why I think things feel healthy, despite the community’s rift:

Civ has never been in a better spot for choice of active servers to chose from. There is something for everyone.

Not every server is perfect or everyone’s cup of tea, everyone has criticisms. Although I personally have the most context with CivMC, I am rooting for the success of the genre as a whole. I don’t really like putting down other servers for this purpose, because in reality, every Civ server is working towards the same goal to provide a platform for player-run civilizations. You may disagree with how a certain server’s approach is, but I feel like Civ as a concept, is definitely at its strongest in years, always evolving and continuing to improve.

Vote Now!

I’ve set a number of poll questions here, because it’s been a while. At this point it’s just more fun to report on new poll questions, so I might create a new post outside of this to review polls next time.

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Post-News Bonanza Writeup

Oakham Villa vs. the Lyrean Lions during the Lyrean Invitational Tournament in September (cr: teato)

If you’ve somehow gotten to the end of this newsletter, thank you, so, so, SO much for reading through the whole thing. I really appreciate you reading what probably is an entire novella at this point for something incredibly meaningless for a block game. A huge thanks to Adelover00 for doing some semi-official newsletter reporting and feeding me pictures throughout the Chiraq war, my news tummy is satisfied :) Additionally, thanks to Pavia for allowing me to be a noble with a blank check and pester them with complaints about news writing.

There is a concept in knitting called “Yarn Chicken”, where close to the end of your project, you have to figure out if you have enough yarn to finish the last few sections of your piece. I feel like for this edition, especially with Chiraq, I have been playing “News Chicken” where I have to constantly finish writing headlines, but also cover the war, as the later and later this goes out, the more I have to play catchup. It’s a very weird phenomenon but ideally having more people on staff that I can trust definitely helps.

In order to give myself a little more structure, I’m going to try making new editions around the 3rd week of the month (like this one), that way I can basically just write complete fragments at time of news, and then publish all in bulk. I have been building this one up over time a little bit, but I am a little out of practice of organizing these!

The only thing else to mention is that if you would like to donate to the news fund (mostly will go to philanthropic affairs on CivMC!) then you can contribute to HS-NEWS on Monument Bank, or for some reason if you want support this financially then I am also reopening the ko-fi as well. Of course, neither are obligatory (unless if you would like an Advertisement, I only accept these through HS-NEWS)

Thanks, and until next time…

EDIT CIVWIKI