One Year Eisvana

It's been one year already, that's crazy.

I've said it a bunch of times by now, but I'm still impressed what we've been able to do within just one year. 135 discoveries per day, 230 players who discovered something, 86 people who have built at least one base, 192 bases in total. 50 registered citizens, Hub-R status, one of the biggest civs in Eissentam. 8 custom web apps, some of them are also used by other civs.

We also moved some of the administrative workload from the small leadership team to the broader community: Votes were a key component of the civ from the beginning. A year and some experiments later, we have found a good format for posting them that's accessible for everyone.

Not only decisions were democratised, but also some more niche-mechanics of the community, like our photo of the month. Instead of doing the monthly photo contest and having to choose a winner, we instead just gave the community the power to upvote cool pictures. Any picture with enough upvotes gets automatically reposted to our #top-photos channel.

We (and Discord) also successfully fought the overwhelming bot wave that we faced at the beginning. There haven't been any bots in months.

And I haven't even started about the colonies and other building projects. The Capital City Build was a huge success. Then we had the halloween colony, the western planet, a research system... And now there's a fishing colony planned. Really more projects than time.

I've already heard people talk about repeating the capital city project on the new capital planet, so I'm definitely excited about that.

We will also hopefully have some time to tackle the medal project in the coming year, which has been a concept for a long time now.

The themed regions have found their way out of the concept phase by now though: Originally proposed by YucaFrita as "Regional Capitals", they have evolved into whole themed regions with regional capitals that are specific to their region.

One big goal of mine was to discover all star systems. We also achieved that. The discovery data app needed some adjustments to work with all discovery types instead of only planets, but now it works wonderfully and is also very performant!

The next programming project will be to re-write the wiki page creator with a proper framework instead of the homebrewed-version that it currently runs on. That new version will also use some pre-made components like searchable select elements or expandable sections. That should hopefully contribute to the development speed. I'm currently struggling with some code architecture decisions there. These are the hardest, since decisions now will impact the whole code base in the long run. That's basically why we already had an entire re-write once, and now again. If a solution doesn't scale, it leads to headaches later.

I really hope Worlds Part II doesn't mess with planets again. If it does, then hopefully the capital and embassy system are both safe, since they're below index 7A.

There's, lots of stuff planned for the coming year. I'm really excited for all the things that are still on the horizon!