(Featured image art created by nemibud)
Hello everyone! After nearly two and a half years of Parallel’s existence, we are finally on the World Wide Web! Here, you can check out essential info about our server, such as our server rules, our update & event blogs, and a little bit about the Parallel Team! Below, we’ll give you a bit of starter info about who we are and what Parallel has to offer.
Who Are We?
Parallel is a semi-vanilla SMP (survival multiplayer) server for Minecraft: Java Edition that looks to expand the bounds of vanilla gameplay and to let players experience the open-world nature of the game like never before. Players can travel through rifts between worlds in order to face great dangers, traverse uncharted territory, and collect gleaming treasure. They can also build massive civilizations, trade with other players, and do everything that you can already do in Minecraft!
Parallel officially released on April 1, 2020 (no joke!), but the server actually existed about a week prior to that. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Diamondback88 and his friends from college created a server called “Craft + Bells” that was meant to be a private place for them to hang out and reconnect with a game that a lot of them hadn’t touched in a while.
The activity on this server didn’t last very long, though, so Diamondback then decided that—since he now had a lot of time on his hands—he wanted to try his hand at creating a public server again. The concept of parallel worlds came right from the get-go; you can even watch the original (albeit funny) teaser trailer for the server here! Much of the server backend was overhauled to prepare for the server becoming public, but you can still find some of the original builds on the server from the “Craft + Bells” age of players.
Now, over two years later, Parallel has grown into one of the most tight-knit and brilliant communities ever seen in the survival server genre, coupled with an extensive history of fascinating lore and a host of exciting new features unique to this server. The Parallel Team has grown to over a dozen members, ranging from staff to community managers to builders to writers to wiki managers to texture artists (whew), all with the common goal of creating the most innovative vanilla-based, open-world Minecraft sandbox experience you’ve ever seen. Meet them here!
What Can You Do on Parallel?
Parallel allows players to explore a multiverse riddled with untold secrets and great treasures. Float around space with an astronaut helmet, check out the Kingdom of the Sky, or venture down into the Deep Dark to face off against the Warden! There are even dozens of custom structures across all of the different worlds featuring custom loot and custom challenges; bring a friend or squad to fight through some of these difficult dungeon layouts! You can also visit a vibrant spawn town to meet up with friends, interact with many different characters and buy from their shops, or use a portal pad to warp to a different location instantly!
The most important thing to us, however, is that Parallel maintains and enhances the core aspects and vibe of vanilla Minecraft; anything you can do in vanilla Minecraft is possible on Parallel! Many of our custom features expand on vanilla game mechanics or ambience, such as the custom Shopping District with dozens of player-built shops, cosmetically customizing your items with charms (the sibling to enchantments), and shooting stars streaking across the night sky!
We also host regular lore events that allow the playerbase to come together and play a critical role in unlocking more of the server’s ever-progressing storyline; for a complete timeline of the server’s lore history, click here! On top of that, we host gamenight events where we compete against each other in a whole slew of minigames (including our custom-built Capture the Flag!) and have a ton of fun.
What’s Next?
Now that we have a website, we’ll be making regular blog posts here about server updates, events, and behind-the-scenes development. We’ll also be bringing back the “Feature of the Week” post, except it’ll be on here!
We can’t wait to see what the future of Parallel has in store. Feel free to explore around on this website and we guarantee you’ll uncover some stuff that you didn’t even know about! Also, be sure to join our Discord to say hi and to stay up-to-date with everything that’s happening in and around the server.
See you later,
The Parallel Team
More Cool Stuff
Check out some of our other posts for more Parallel news!
