What is a Minecraft prison server?

Why it is called prison

The name comes from the setting. Every player starts as an inmate in the same jail, and ranking up through the mines is the climb toward freedom. On Fractured Skies the theme shows in small things, such as the free [INMATE] chat tag every account can claim.

What most prison servers have

• A ladder of mines, usually lettered A to Z, each opened by buying the next rank.
• Mines that refill on a timer, so they never run out.
• An economy built on selling what you mine, to a server shop or to other players.
• Prestige: a voluntary return to the first mine with a permanent bonus.
• Gangs, teams that share storage and progress.
• A second currency, usually called tokens, that buys upgrades rather than ranks.
• Custom enchantments, crates, events and an opt-in PvP area.

Which of those a server runs, and how far it takes each one, is what separates one prison server from the next.

How the prison works on Fractured Skies

1. Mine. You start in Mine A, cobblestone and coal, with a stone pickaxe and no money.
2. Sell. /sell all sells to the shop at a guaranteed price; the auction house sells to other players, who may pay more.
3. Rank up. /rankup buys the next letter and opens the next mine. There are 26, from A to Z, and each pays more than the last.
4. Prestige. At Z, /prestige takes you back to A and keeps a permanent sell bonus. There are 100 prestiges.

Blocks drop tokens as well as cash, and tokens buy the upgrades that make the next run faster: custom enchants for your pickaxe, sell multipliers, chat tags and nukes. Gangs of up to eight players share a vault and a gang level along the way. The getting started guide walks new players through the first hour.

Everything in the prison

The ladder is the spine. This is what hangs off it:

• 26 mines, A to Z, refilled on a timer, plus nukes that clear one in a single go.
• 100 prestiges, each one a permanent sell bonus, for players who want a grind that lasts.
• Tokens, multipliers and tags, mined out of the blocks and spent in the token shop.
• Custom enchants on pickaxes and weapons, bought a level at a time.
• Plot mines and plot miners, a private mine that works while you are elsewhere.
• An auction house, coin flips and item flips for everything worth more than the shop price.
• Crates and seasonal crates, opened with keys earned at events, off bosses and in the vote shop.
• Gangs of up to eight, with a shared vault and a level everyone feeds.
• A PvP warp with a PvP mine that opens with an activator and stays open until it is mined out, and KOTH on top of it.
• Bosses and boss pills, which turn a player into the boss everyone else has to beat.
• Custom events, including a space mine that opens in the End.
• Premium ranks in the store, which are cosmetics and convenience and never touch any of the above. What the store sells.