I predicted in the Year One Retrospective that Year 2 would be just as disastrous and I was mostly right. The server did gain 5685 new players compared to 4033 in Year 1 and reached 9718 in total by 30th September 2026. Very few of them stayed and the main source of new players disappeared halfway through the year.
That source was YouTube Shorts posted by my automated channels. By 15th March 2026 every one of those channels had been taken down. New players then more than halved from an average of 683 per month between October and February to 316 per month between April and September.
Retention is as bad as ever. Most new players realise the server is dead or simply get bored and leave. More than half (55%) of this year's new players spent less than ten minutes on the server and only 113 played for more than ten hours.
The two biggest changes this year both happened in February. On 16th February 2026 I moved the server to a new dedicated machine because it was running out of storage. Last year I admitted the old machine was overspecced which made a drop in performance less of a concern. The new one has an Intel Core i7-8700 with 64GB of RAM and two 6TB hard drives. The CPU is slightly weaker than the old Xeon and the RAM is no longer ECC. The hard drives are also much slower than the old NVMe SSDs but they give the server far more room.
The second change came twelve days later on 28th February 2026 when I removed unban purchases for EULA compliance. Banned players can now only return through the Blood Shrine which spawns at a random location and needs someone to travel there and sacrifice hearts for them. Only seven players have been freed that way against 251 bans this year. In total 472 players are still banned (the graph shows 471 because it stops at 30th September and another player was banned on 2nd October).
I made £50 in Year 2 from five £5 unbans and two token purchases in December. The server cost me £480 to run which means I lost £430 this year and £895 in total (the screenshot shows £935 because the home page already counts October).
Year 2 was better than Year 1 at bringing players in but no better at keeping them. Year 3 will bring in fewer new players unless I get the YouTube channels going again. I also have no reason to think the ones who do join will stay.