Melontown

Melontown

An aerial view of the entire City of Melontown near its founding. Photo taken September 6, 2020.
Defunct community server
Founded	June 8, 2020 (pre-history Melontown) August 7, 2020 ("modern" Melontown)
Government	Democratic city-state
Legislature	Senate of Melontown
Disbandment	February 7, 2021
Succeeded by	Republic of Melonia Chiefdom of Osolia

Melontown is a defunct community server and online Minecraft nation founded by Michael Webb. Melontown serves as the earliest example of Michael starting an online Minecraft nation, preceeding Melonia and Osolia. The server was open to Michael's friends and Twitch livestream supporters and discussion of the server was hosted on the TRM Community Discord server instead of an independent Discord server. The original server for Melontown was more of a creative server with a loose government. The server ended but it would soon start up again with a different server host. However, this stint of Melontown would be short-lived due to cheats and server hacks, which made Michael Webb reset the world. This third version of Melontown led to the creation of the democratic city-state of the City of Melontown.

Prehistory

Older server (June 8-July 14, 2024)

The original “Melontown” was founded on June 8, 2020, when livestreamer Michael Webb/TheRandomMelon decided to open a Twitch subscriber-only server as a reward for their contribution to his stream, along with inviting some of his close friends to join as well.

An aerial view of pre-Melontown, taken on June 16, 2020.

This pre-modern Melontown server allowed the heavy use of Creative mode for several players, making it more of a city-building expedition than a government-based survival multiplayer (SMP) server. Even with this in mind, however, pre-Melontown still had a loose government, with Samuel, now known as lainuel, serving as the de-facto mayor or president. He established, with Webb's help, the first ever address system in Melontown/Melonian history, in order to establish a postal service. The address book was stored in a Google Docs file, which can be viewed here for reference.

This ended up becoming a plot system that established the first ever currency; the iron ingot. Players would own a plot of land and would pay a small tax on it every so often, just like in the later Melonia. This was done due to griefing incidents that no one admitted to doing. The plots were enforced by a plugin named GriefProtection; this is not in use in Melonia today, and plots are instead enforced manually by the Melonian government.

The pre-Melontown server was officially ended abruptly on July 14, 2020, due to the original owner of the server not being able to afford it anymore.

Older Map (August 6-August 7, 2020)

A month after the abrupt end of the original Melontown, Michael Webb decided, with a unanimous vote from several players of the first Melontown, to bring the subscriber-only server back online, this time paying for it himself using a hosting service called PebbleHost, which Melonia uses today for its server.

When the server officially opened, however, people mostly screwed around using creative mode and even used server hacks that allowed flying using boats. The next day, on August 7, Webb decided to reset the world, institute anti-cheating plugins, and make the server a survival server, ending the official use of creative mode throughout Melontown history.

History of the City of Melontown (August 7, 2020-February 7, 2021)

TBA