About BillySMP

BillySMP started as a small survival world running since December 2025 — no resets, no seasons, just one continuous world that a real community has been building on ever since. It's grown into two connected servers under the same roof: the original Survival SMP, and a newer, rougher Anarchy Mode for anyone who wants less structure. Both run Java + Bedrock crossplay, both are free to join, and both are run out of one guy's living room, not a rented box farm.

Everything here is self-hosted and managed through a custom-built Discord bot — server start/stop, crash recovery, backups, moderation, even a rules-verification system that walks new players through reading the rules before they can play. There's no support team, no ticket queue with a 48-hour SLA. If something breaks, it usually gets fixed within the hour because the person who built the whole thing is the one running it.

BillySMP exists because paying a monthly fee for a Bedrock realm got old fast. The first version ran straight off a personal gaming PC — which worked, until people got tired of the server vanishing every time that PC was needed for literally anything else.

Around the same time, an unrelated side project — buying a stack of old HP EliteDesks to flip for cash — flopped completely; the machines were just too old to be worth anything. Rather than let them go to waste, the best of the bunch (a 4th-gen Intel i5, with whatever spare RAM could be scavenged: 2x4GB and 2x2GB) got pulled aside and became BillySMP v2, the first dedicated host.

Not long after, an unrelated equipment auction — some business liquidating its stuff — turned up a Lenovo ThinkStation E35, bought on pure impulse. It didn't even boot. That was fine at the time; it was roughly the same age and spec as the EliteDesk already running the show, so it just sat there.

The upgrade motivation eventually showed up the hard way: BillySMP got hacked, kicking off a full security-hardening pass, right around when the EliteDesk was clearly starting to show its age. Cracking open the dead ThinkStation turned up good news — standard ATX power supply, standard mATX motherboard, nothing proprietary hiding under the OEM shell. A new motherboard, a Ryzen 5 7600, some spare RAM, and a spare PSU later, it powered on. The front-panel button and LEDs got manually re-pinned to match; the front USB and the CF/SD/MicroSD card reader (plus a couple of still-unidentified mystery ports) got left disconnected rather than risk depinning those solo.

Months later, the missing front USB got annoying enough to actually look into — turns out that whole panel just runs off a standard USB header. The connector on it was just the wrong physical size for the new motherboard's pins. The fix a reasonable person would've made felt like more effort than it was worth, so the plug ends got snipped off outright instead. It's worked fine ever since — front USB and the card reader included, which is exactly what's used today to update the CF/SD disaster-recovery backups.

There's no data center behind any of this — the whole thing runs on a real tower PC (a Lenovo ThinkStation) sitting in a bedroom. It's plugged into a CyberPower UPS, so a brief power blip or a full blackout doesn't just yank the server offline mid-build. The battery backup either rides out the outage or gives the box enough time to shut down cleanly. Video out is handled by a basic NVIDIA Quadro 410 — it's there to drive a monitor, not to do any heavy lifting.

New here? Read the rules for whichever server you're joining, verify your username, and you're in. Everything — status, join links, rules, FAQ — is one click from the homepage. Questions that aren't covered anywhere? The Discord is the fastest way to actually reach someone.