SERVER ROADMAP

Survive the first nights and lay the groundwork. Speed matters less than not losing your stuff.

• Punch trees → wood tools → stone tools

  Full stone kit within the first 10 minutes.
• Beds for every player

  Kill sheep or shear wool. Set spawns immediately — and sleeping skips phantoms.
• Communal starter shelter

  Near spawn, with a shared chest and a couple of furnaces.
• 🚜 FARM #1: Basic crop farm

  Till near water; plant every seed, carrot, and potato you find. Food security first.
• 🚜 FARM #2: Animal pens

  2+ each of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs. Leather → books later. Egg + lava = classic first auto cooked-chicken farm.
• Full iron tools + shield + bucket + flint & steel

  Cheap stopgap while you mine: copper tools/armor (added 1.21.9) don't compete with your iron needs.
• Carry a water bucket at all times

  MLG saves, lava-to-obsidian, and it never stops being useful.
• Locate a village — write down the coords

  Free food, beds, and your future villager workforce. Don't burn it down.
• Set up a shared coordinates system

  Signs at spawn, a book & quill, or a pinned Discord message. Future-you says thanks.

The industrial revolution. The iron farm and trading hall are the two biggest unlocks in the entire game — everything after this gets easier.

• Mine diamonds (Y = -53 to -59)

  Diamond pickaxe minimum — you need it for obsidian.
• 🚜 FARM #3: Iron farm

  THE early-game unlock: infinite hoppers, rails, anvils, buckets, armor. 3+ villagers with beds + a zombie scare = golem spawns. Build one, share it.
• 🚜 FARM #4: Villager breeder + trading hall

  Cure zombie villagers for 1-emerald trades. Priorities: librarian (Mending!), farmer (emerald printer), armorer, toolsmith, cleric.
• 🚜 FARM #5: Sugarcane farm

  Paper → books → bookshelves, plus emeralds via librarians. Observer-piston designs are the standard.
• 🚜 FARM #6: Tree farm + bamboo farm

  Even a manual bonemeal grid counts. Bamboo = best renewable furnace fuel + scaffolding.
• Enchanting table + 15 bookshelves

  Get Mending, Efficiency, Unbreaking, and Protection books from your librarians.
• 🚜 FARM #7: Mob/XP farm

  Spawner-based (easy) or dark room (medium). XP, string, bones, arrows. Build far from where people AFK — mob caps are shared.
• Raid a Trial Chamber as a group

  Trial keys, wind charges, breeze rods — and a shot at the Heavy Core for the Mace.

Blaze rods, gold, pearls, and the fastest travel in the game. Bring fire resistance and don't look the piglins in the eye without gold armor.

• Build the portal — then secure BOTH sides

  Cobblestone-proof the portal room before anything else. Ghast fireballs open portals to chaos.
• Find a Nether fortress → 🚜 FARM #8: Blaze farm

  Blaze rods power brewing and eyes of ender. A spawner-based blaze farm is safe and future-proof.
• Brewing stand + core potions

  Fire Resistance (mandatory for nether farms), Strength, Healing.
• Loot a bastion

  Netherite upgrade smithing template, snout armor trim, Pigstep.
• Barter with piglins for ender pearls

  Wear at least one gold armor piece or they attack on sight.
• 🚜 FARM #9: Gold/XP farm

  The bartering engine of the mid-game: gold → pearls, string, fire res potions. Best XP before the End. Portal-based or nether-roof designs.
• Nether hub network (roof or ice roads)

  8:1 travel — connect every player's base through the Nether.
• Grow Happy Ghasts 🎈

  Dried ghasts spawn in Soul Sand Valley fossils (or craft: 8 ghast tears + soul sand); rehydrate in water ~20 min. A flying platform that carries 4 players — the best SMP build tool in years.
• Start collecting wither skeleton skulls

  Skull-hunting trips now, or 🚜 FARM #10: wither skeleton farm (hard — fortress crossroads design). You need 3 skulls soon.

Don't fight the dragon in half-enchanted armor. Kit everyone out, then triangulate.

• Full enchanted diamond armor + tools for EVERY player

  Protection IV, Mending, Unbreaking III across the board.
• Ancient debris (Y = 15) → netherite weapon + pickaxe

  Bed-mining or TNT. Needs the upgrade template from a bastion (duplicate it: 7 diamonds + netherrack).
• Craft eyes of ender → triangulate the stronghold

  Blaze powder + ender pearls. Throw, walk, repeat.
• Forward base at the stronghold

  Beds, a chest of backup gear, and a secured portal room.
• Stock the dragon kit

  Golden apples, Slow Falling + Healing potions, bow + arrows (for perching), building blocks, water bucket.

Make it a server event — the dragon is dramatically easier (and more fun) with everyone there.

• ⚔️ Defeat the Ender Dragon together

  The headline server event. Screenshot it.
• Collect the dragon egg

  Piston or torch trick. Decide who keeps it BEFORE the fight.
• End city + End ship → Elytra

  Enter an End gateway (pearl or build through). Eventually one elytra per player, plus shulker shells.
• 🚜 FARM #11: Enderman farm

  Endermite-on-a-leash design, 128+ blocks off the main island. Fastest XP in the game — 0 to 30 levels in about a minute — plus infinite pearls.
• 🚜 FARM #12: Shulker shell farm

  Shulkers duplicate when hit by shulker projectiles. Infinite shulker boxes change everything about server logistics.

The dragon was the midpoint, not the end. Now you build the machines that make everything else trivial.

• ⚔️ Kill the Wither → Nether Star → beacon

  3 skulls + 4 soul sand. Fight it underground or at bedrock; bring the whole server.
• Full-power beacon pyramid (164 blocks)

  Your iron farm makes this trivial. Classic move: Haste II beacon at the shared quarry.
• 🚜 FARM #13: Raid farm

  ⚠️ Reworked in 1.21: Bad Omen now comes from drinking ominous bottles, dropped only by outpost captains outside a raid. Pre-1.21 tutorials are obsolete — use a current design. Still the best emerald + totem source.
• 🚜 FARM #14: Guardian farm

  Ocean monument, modern nether-portal designs skip the drain. XP rivaling the enderman farm + bulk prismarine and sea lanterns.
• Activate a conduit

  8 nautilus shells + Heart of the Sea. Pairs with the guardian farm project. Nautilus mounts (1.21.11) make ocean work easier too.
• Finish the wither skeleton farm

  Skulls for more beacons; wither roses from Wither kills feed rose-based killing chambers.

Everything from here is optional — and it's the part people play for years.

• 🚜 FARM #15: Automatic tree farm + crafter super smelter

  The Crafter (1.21) turns raw farms into finished-product factories: auto sticks, auto TNT, auto bread.
• 🚜 FARM #16: Copper golem sorting hall

  New in 1.21.9: dump items into copper chests, golems sort into matching wooden chests. A storage room with zero redstone.
• 🚜 FARM #17: Copper farm (drowned)

  Copper golems, chests, lanterns, and building demand make copper real again. Tridents + nautilus shells as a bonus.
• 🚜 FARM #18: Honey/bee farm

  Honey blocks for redstone, honeycomb to wax all that copper. Campfire under the hive keeps the bees calm.
• 🚜 FARM #19: Froglight farm

  Frogs eat small magma cubes → froglights. Frog variant sets the color: temperate = ochre, cold = verdant, warm = pearlescent. Build at a bastion magma cube spawner.
• Sniffer side quest 🐢

  Brush suspicious blocks in warm ocean ruins for sniffer eggs → torchflowers & pitcher plants. Fun, not a power farm.
• Explore the Sulfur Caves (new in 26.2)

  Sulfur cubes are passive, bucketable, and grow with slimeballs; potent sulfur geysers launch you upward. No farm meta yet — invent one.
• 🚜 FARM #20: Creeper/gunpowder farm

  If you haven't already: elytra rockets forever. Trapdoor-ceiling design with cats, unchanged for years. (Build earlier if rockets run low!)
• Megabuilds

  Shopping district, diamond economy, mob museum, perimeter farms. Happy Ghast highly recommended as the group scaffold.

What "finishing Minecraft" actually means on a Java SMP. The trophy wall.

• Elytra + full netherite for every player
• Max beacon at every major base ("Beaconator")
• Mace + Heavy Core ("Over-Overkill": 50 hearts in one hit)

  Heavy Core from Trial Chamber ominous vaults.
• Loot an Ancient City (Swift Sneak, Silence trim)

  Beating the Warden = bragging rights. Sneaking past = wisdom.
• All 18 armor trims ("Smithing with Style")

  The rare ones: Spire, Snout, Rib, Ward, Silence, Vex, Tide, Wayfinder.
• Every music disc

  Now includes Creator, Precipice, Tears, Lava Chicken, and Bounce (26.2).
• "Adventuring Time" — visit every biome

  Elytra + a stack of rockets. Sulfur Caves count now.
• "Two by Two" — breed every breedable mob

  Includes armadillo, sniffer, and camel these days.
• "How Did We Get Here?" — every status effect at once

  The definitive end-game party trick. Harder than ever with the 1.21 effects added.
• 💯 100% advancements

  The true "we finished the game" flag. Re-summon the dragon (4 end crystals) so latecomers get theirs too.

All the farms in one place, in build order. Difficulty assumes you follow a current tutorial for Java 1.21+ / 26.x.