Why OreBound exists
OreBound is our own server. It's a passion project, and it's where we learn what makes Minecraft content go viral, so we can do the same for the servers we build for clients.
That changes how features get designed. Every mechanic has to work as a ten-second clip, so the TikTok idea is written next to the feature: "You can't drink the ocean." "The storm is the payday." "Your raft works while you're offline."
- 12
- Ocean tiers in Raft, from a 48-block cage of water to 1,024 blocks of open sea
- ~455×
- More water at the last Raft tier than the first
- 30
- Upgrade rungs on every cookie, for clicks and for generators
- 0
- Server entities per cookie. Every cookie, number and hitbox is packets
Source: OBRaft, border_size.yml
Source: OBRaft game design, border tier table
Source: OBClicker, upgrades.yml
Source: OBClicker
Raft
Raft is the game Raft, in Minecraft. You and your crew start on a few planks in your own private ocean, and everything you own comes out of the water: you hook driftwood and barrels as they float past, and set nets, traps and a winch to haul in the rest.
The water wants you dead. Thirst drains while you play, swimming costs stamina, storms push you around, and three kinds of shark get meaner the further out you go. Ten machines on the raft, from a salvage net to a water tank that fills in the rain, keep you alive and show their state in the world.
The ocean grows, not the raft
The raft stays put. What moves is the world border. Each of the twelve ocean tiers pushes it outward in an eight-second animation and brings new debris, new threats and new islands. At the last tier the crew can Set Sail: a fresh ocean, keeping the raft and its machines.
| Radius | |
|---|---|
| T1 | 48 blocks |
| T2 | 96 blocks |
| T3 | 128 blocks |
| T4 | 176 blocks |
| T5 | 232 blocks |
| T6 | 304 blocks |
| T7 | 400 blocks |
| T8 | 520 blocks |
| T9 | 664 blocks |
| T10 | 820 blocks |
| T11 | 920 blocks |
| T12 | 1,024 blocks |
A bounded ocean per crew is also what keeps it fast: there's a fixed budget of entities per ocean, and new chunks are only generated when a crew buys a tier.
Cookie Clicker
Cookie Clicker is a tycoon built around the old-school game. Every island has a cookie, and you click it: thirty upgrade rungs for what a click is worth, a ladder of generators that bake while you're away, combos, crits, golden cookies, frenzies, and prestige once you've climbed far enough.
The cookie isn't the whole game. At spawn you harvest crops on the farm, mine ores in the cave and fish at the pond, with one tool that grows with you, and quests and a season pass tie it all together.
The balance is on purpose: a player who sits and clicks should never out-earn one who leaves the cookie baking and goes to the farm, the mine or the pond.
| Hours | |
|---|---|
| Clicking 4 times a second | 47 hours |
| Clicking 2 times a second | 73 hours |
| Only harvesting and idling | 160 hours |
Everything is packets
There's no cookie entity on the server. Each cookie's skin and hitbox are packets, sent only to the players standing on that island, and so are the numbers that burst off it when you click. A thousand islands cost no entities, no chunk tickets and no entity ticks, and an island nobody is standing on costs nothing at all.
The crops and ores at spawn work the same way: everyone harvests in their own view, so the world itself never changes and no two players fight over the same block.
The platform behind it
OreBound is where our platform started. Every plugin on it is built on OBCore, our shared core for items, menus, animations, bosses and leaderboards, and runs region-safe on Canvas. The networks we run today are built on the same core.