"It's time now, after 10 years, to really focus on the endgame," jokes Francis, the lead dev and original founder of Minecraft's biggest MMO, Wynncraft. It looks and plays like a total conversion mod with remarkably deep systems and a huge variety of content, but amazingly it's all server-side, with no mods required from players. All it takes is Minecraft Java and the server IP: play.wynncraft.com. The game-within-a-game private server has been going strong since 2013, and has grown big enough to fund and require a team of paid developers working alongside a group of volunteers, with contributors from both sides generally starting simply as Wynncraft fans.
Francis got into Minecraft through YouTube content, and even after deciding to open his own private server with some friends, didn't expect Wynncraft "to last that long." The RuneScape-influenced MMO ended up becoming one of the mega-hit crafting game's biggest private servers, and still notches well over 1,000 concurrent players daily, with upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 unique players a month. There are 1,380 folks online as I write this, per the official website, which carries the same blurb I wrote in PC Gamer what feels like a million years ago after I first discovered and tried Wynncraft for myself and called it a full-fat Minecraft MMO.
