From nine blocks of dirt to a gate of your own.

01 Getting in

Your first ten minutes

The impatient version: apply in the Discord, connect, walk into one of the four gateways, and read what the world says back. The gate does the rest.

1. Get on the whitelist

   Post your Java name, or your Bedrock gamertag, in the ZGMC Discord. A person reads every application, usually the same day. Sixteen slots, sixteen pads — the smallness is the point, not a queue.

2. Connect to the right edition

   Java players type play.zgmc.online — no port, the name carries it. Bedrock players need two fields: host play.zgmc.online, port 19132. Both editions share one world, one set of pads and one set of crates.

   Java Edition

   play.zgmc.online Copy

   Bedrock Edition

   play.zgmc.online:19132 Copy

3. Walk into a gateway

   The lobby is a machine: a dais, four causeways, and a gateway at the end of each — north, east, south and west. Stand in the middle of one (they are three blocks wide) and it sends you to a free pad in that quadrant. You do not choose the plot; the gate chooses the zone, and the first one you enter is the only choice that matters.

4. Read the greeting

   You arrive on a 3×3 pad with a sign on one corner. The chat says “this pad is yours: site 02 (north). The gateways bring you back here.” That is literal. From that moment every gateway — all four of them — returns you to this pad, not to a new one.

5. Take stock of the kit

   It arrives with the greeting, once per player. Five items, no tools. The next section is what each one is for, because the kit is a budget rather than a gift.

02 The kit

What you arrive with

Five items. Deliberately one tree short of comfortable, and with nothing that lets you skip the first axe. The pad's centre is grass and the rest is dirt for a reason: a sapling in stone is a dead end.

There are no tools in the kit on purpose. Punch the tree; the first axe is something you earn. Everything after that — cobblestone, charcoal, an actual pickaxe — comes from the five items above and the eight blocks under your feet.

03 Your ground

Your pad

Your pad is nine blocks: eight dirt and one grass centre, with a solid layer of deepslate under it, standing in the void. It is not decoration and it is not a spawn point you respawn on. It is the entire dirt budget of your run, and it is yours permanently.

What “yours” means

The pad is claimed the moment you arrive and is never released by dying, logging out or a server reload. The world records it as your home, so every gateway brings you back. There is no rent, no upkeep and no way to lose it short of a wipe.

Ownership also beats occupancy: if somebody is standing on your pad when you come through a gate, you still land on it. The reverse is not true — you cannot take a pad that already has an owner, and a pad counts as “in use” for new arrivals while anyone is within 24 blocks of it.

The sign

A sign on one corner reads ZGM SITE 02 and the quadrant name. That number is your address and your home record. If you ever need to tell an admin which pad is yours, that is the number to quote.

Build out from the pad, not down through it. Bridging is the intended way to reach a deposit island, and the world border is 2048 blocks across, centred on the origin — far more room than sixteen players need. There is no claim plugin and no lock on your chests: on this server, etiquette is the protection.

04 Survival

Living with the void

Gravity is the whole hazard. There is no ground anywhere except what you place, and a fall is a real death — there is no catch-teleport. The one mercy is that the void keeps your things.

Getting back to the lobby

Type /lobby. The gates run one way — lobby to pad — and there is no return arch on the islands, so the trip back is a command: it puts you on the dais, where a join and a death already put you, and the gateways are one walk away. Nothing is taken from you and your pad is unchanged. Dying still returns you to the lobby as it always did; it is simply no longer the only way.

PvP is off in both worlds. Mobs can spawn where there is a floor to spawn on, so a lit pad is not automatically a safe one; the lobby is the safe room. The dragon is in the lobby and is not interested in the void.

05 The way home

The four gateways

Four round gateways at the ends of the lobby's causeways. Each is three blocks wide, and the trigger is the opening itself — walk in, and you are sent. Each carries its name above the ring and a live caption underneath: PADS CLAIMED: 1/4 for that gate's own quadrant.

First arrival, and every arrival after

For a player with no home, a gate draws a free pad in its quadrant and sends you there. If all four are claimed or occupied, it says so and leaves you standing in the lobby. For a player with a home, the gate you use does not matter at all: all four go to your pad, with a quieter “back on your pad” message.

Reading the crowd

The caption's colour is the room left: cyan while more than one pad is free, amber when one is left, red when none. The same counts live on a boss bar that follows you into the void: PADS CLAIMED  N 1/4  E 0/4  S 2/4  W 0/4. Its text is claimed over total for each zone; its fill is the number of free pads, so a full bar is an empty world and a bare bar is a full one.

The count is ownership, not who is online: a claimed pad stays counted whether its owner is in the world or asleep. Bedrock players see the captions too — they are floating text, not signs, and read a little smaller through Geyser.

06 Ore

The deposit islands

The void has no coal, no iron and no diamond in its rock. Twelve deposit islands are the only source: three per quadrant, each anchored to a pad at 96–180 blocks, never closer than 96 to any pad and 152 to another island. You reach them by bridging from the nearest pad — in the current layout that is 101 to 156 blocks of bridge, so bring more than you think you need.

What is on one

Eight layered discs of grass, stone and deepslate, with shelves that overhang the layers below and stalactites under the keel — it reads as a floating rock, not a stack of plates. A column of three sea lanterns marks the centre, a sign stands on the rim and the island's name floats above it in violet: ZGM DEPOSIT 05.

Each island carries two ores. Across the twelve, all eight overworld ores appear — coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond, emerald — in 370 ore blocks. The veins start on the outside wall and crawl along it, so a quarter to five sixths of each island's ore is visible from outside. Diamond is capped at 12 blocks and emerald at 8 per island: the point is a renewable trickle, not a quarry that makes the crate ladder meaningless.

The timer

Every island refills, on its own clock, set by its rarest ore. The sign on the rim states it as RESETS 5 MIN.

The timer is not a wall clock. An island refills when its cooldown is done and a player is within 96 blocks (so its chunks are loaded) and nobody is within 24 (so no block appears inside a player, and a miner standing on it is not fighting the reset). A stripped island you walk away from may still be stripped when you come back. If you want it back, stay nearby — inside 96, outside 24 — and it will rebuild.

What a refill looks like

The whole 21×14×21 box is cleared, then the rock is rebuilt from the keel up in four bands, then the veins, then the lanterns, sign and marker — about three seconds, with a sound cue at each step and a beacon at the end. It is a small event rather than a silent swap, so a player who triggered it sees the island come back.

If a refill is interrupted — a restart or a /reload in the middle of the chain — a watchdog rebuilds the island a few seconds later. That repair announces itself differently on purpose: the beacon switches off instead of on, the message is bold amber [REPAIR] A deposit was repaired instead of cyan, there is a conduit cue instead of a beacon, and a burst of end-rod sparks. If you see that, the island had to be rebuilt; nothing of yours is involved unless you built inside the box.

Etiquette that follows from the mechanics: do not strip an island while somebody is mining it, and do not bridge through its box. The reset is shared by everyone in the quadrant, and the timer starts from the refill, not from when you arrive.

07 The ladder

Crates and keys

Four barrels on plinths south of the dais — copper, silver, gold, diamond — and four kinds of key. There is no menu and no right-click to hook: stand against the crate's front face and drop the key. It is consumed, and the payout lands on the barrel's top.

A key only works at its own crate. Drop a silver key at the copper crate and nothing happens; you can pick it back up. Each key is a named trial key with its crate written in the lore, so the item itself tells you where it goes.

Keys are paid from vanilla statistics, not from a shop: ore mined, debris broken, dragons killed, advancements completed. The world decides what you have earned. The silver one counts ore rather than keys, so three diamond ore and a fourth is one key and the remainder is kept — nothing is lost to rounding.

Every key also carries materials — a guaranteed draw of the tier's own stock, not a chance: a copper crate always gives coal, copper or iron, silver gives iron, gold or lapis, gold gives gold, diamond or emerald, and a diamond crate always gives diamonds, emeralds or netherite scrap. The counts step up with the tier, so the roll is the lottery and this is the supply run underneath it.

Advancements pay copper keys. Every advancement in the game's tree — 121 of them, leaving out the chapter headers and the recipe unlocks — pays one copper key the first time you complete it, on top of your welcome key. Same crate, same key, whether it arrived from a pad or from killing a Wither.

The Exchanger trades keys up. A villager stands at the east end of the row, name and rates floating above it: 3 copper → 1 silver, 3 silver → 1 gold, 2 gold → 1 diamond. Right-click it — or type /exchange — and the three rungs appear in a menu; click the one you can afford. A key is spent the moment you click and the next tier arrives in your inventory.

Trading up is deliberately a little lossy. A silver crate is worth roughly 2.7 copper crates, so three copper keys are worth more than the silver key they buy — you are paying a small premium for certainty instead of a roll. That keeps opening crates the better play, which is the whole point of the row. There is no way back down the ladder, and keys are never bought or sold for items: the only way into the Exchanger is keys you earned.

The copper key arrives when your pad is recorded, so a new player has one opening waiting without mining anything. If your inventory was full at that exact moment, tell us in the Discord with your site number and we will sort it out.

08 The end of the ladder

The dragon

The lobby is built around an arena, and a dragon is held above it every tick so it cannot land on the walkway. You can see it from the gate causeways. The fight itself — the phases, a dragon you can actually damage, a drop that would make a diamond key mean something — is not built.

The lobby is adventure mode inside a barrier shell, so the arena is a thing to look at rather than a thing to try. When the fight ships, the diamond crate opens with it, and this page will say so before the Discord does.

09 Every platform

Bedrock and phones

Bedrock clients reach the same world through Geyser. Same pads, same gateways, same crates, same timers — it is one server, not a second one.

• Two fields, no name lookup. On a phone or console, the server address is play.zgmc.online and the port is 19132. Bedrock cannot read a port from a name the way Java can.
• Your name arrives with a dot. Floodgate prefixes Bedrock accounts, so the whitelist sees .YourName. Apply with the gamertag you actually play on; the prefix is added server-side.
• The first join is often refused. That failed attempt is how the server learns your account. Try again before assuming you were not added.
• Chat shows [Not Secure]. That is Geyser, not a warning about your account, and it is the same for everybody on Bedrock.
• Floating text reads smaller. The gate names, captions, island names and the dragon banner are text displays; they render, but a phone will make you squint. The signs still work.

10 The alpha

House rules

Sixteen slots, sixteen pads, one shared map. The alpha exists to find out whether the loop is fun, which means it is allowed to change under you.

• There is no economy. No shop, no ranks, no vote, no cosmetics, and nothing bought or sold between players. The one trade on the server is the Exchanger's — keys for keys, walked up the ladder. Crates are paid for with things you do in the world.
• There is no claim protection. Your pad is recorded as yours for gateways and allocation; the blocks are not locked. Do not take from somebody's pad or chest, and do not build through a gateway.
• Deposits are public. Do not build on one, and do not strip one somebody is mining. The island comes back; your chest does not.
• The world is disposable. Growing from 16 pads to 32 is a wipe and a regenerate, announced in advance — your home is a site number, so renumbering would strand people. Nothing in the alpha is promised to survive into beta.
• Bugs go to the Discord. A screenshot and the site number solve most reports before anybody logs in.

11 Fixes

When something goes wrong

Anything not on this page is worth asking about — the alpha's rules are few, but they are specific, and “is this a bug or is this the game” is the most useful question you can bring.