TNTable History Book

The TNTable group goes back over a decade to when the term was first coined by Michael in his basement while working on a school project.

Inception

Picture this, it's 2011 and some kids in grade 8 are working together on a school project. They have to create a video for a group project in class, and one of them gets the brilliant but crazy idea to do it in Minecraft. It was for a social studies assignment on early settlers to Canada in Nove Scotia. The following happens: we all arrive one day and set up our under-powered laptops in Michael's basement. A LAN world is opened, and we begin building the set for our video. We create a village, the kingdom of France, and a scene of ships crossing the water. This video was terribly inaccurate and wildly off-topic, but we put a lot of effort into it, and we had a ton of fun creating it.

This is the catalyst that created this community. Our teacher ended up liking our project so much because of all the effort we put into it, and we enjoyed creating it. We created many more projects on Minecraft. This sparked David's fascination with hosting servers, and it was a good thing as we needed to be able to play remotely to create our worlds before coming together again to film as the year went on.

It was Michael that came up with the name, since we were the "nerds" in school and we were all sitting around a table for our project. It stuck when we began to host an SMP server to play on together (not for school projects) and has since expanded to fully encapsulate everything we do as a friend-filled gaming community.

Community

We have grown into a large community of friends and friends of friends that all play on the same server. Most of the time separately, but still together. There are ebbs and flows but the community is always here when the Minecraft itch strikes again, or any game where a server can be hosted really.

Early Days

Work in Progress below

Prior to Discord, Skype was the most common way we all chatted while playing the server. We had a group chat and would start calls everyday after school and play on the Minecraft server together.

In 2014, a Blogspot page existed to provide updates on the server. It can be found here.

Prior to Discord, Skype was the most common way we all chatted while playing the server. We had a group chat and would start calls everyday after school and play on the Minecraft server together.

Later we moved towards Teamspeak for chatting since we didn't need to deal with calls starting at the same time. This was a welcome improvement and became possible when the computer started running full time.

In 2014, a Blogspot website existed to provide updates on the server. It can be found here.

The server switched to 24/7 operation on July 4th, 2014 as announced in this blog post.

In the early days we did lots.

There was a TNTable radio station at one point. Streamed to an internet radio station. We could all listen. Ran off my Sony Vaio laptop after I had replaced it with my Toshiba.

Built War Ridden, the map we have is an old version, nowhere near what we had accomplished. We got pretty close to feature complete and had a really cool spawn area. The files may still be out there on a hard drive sitting in a basement. If that happens there will be updates to the map renders and world downloads. We even did public play tests.

We also had a plugin server in the early days, though that world is long gone.

We played Sethbling's Missile Wars too for a while.

We started with a server on my Sony laptop I believe, but then changed it to an old Compaq^? desktop. Then eventually we pooled our money together to bid on a desktop in a charity auction from an office. We raised $230^? to bid for it and won the second best. It served us very well for the next few years.

There was also a world where we replaced all the water with lava one time. It lasted less than 48 hours. We did give everyone elytra but it was not very fun.

The Minecraft server used to run with the Minecraft game and LogMeIn. Then It moved to the server jar, then to MineMC^? which was an early days Minecraft server admin dashboard. Then switching to Pterodactyl Panel in sometime.

Renaissance

There was a renaissance in summer 2017 as our lives were changing and some of us were moving away. We kept in touch via the server.

We also started using plugins to make the playing experience more enjoyable in the early 2020s.

Server History

The TNTable Community servers have been run by David for over 10 years. It began with running servers on a Sony Vaio Laptop for school projects and eventually one that was up for certain hours of the day.

Once an old computer was acquired, the server began to gain more functionality. The connection was still Wi-Fi based but now it could run for longer and unattended. This computer had 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and an 80GB ATA hard drive. It was slow, but it got the job done enough for us to still have a good time.

Eventually the server gained an Ethernet connection, though it was through powerline adapters so not ideal but an improvement. Then the server was upgraded through a computer auction and fundraising within the group. This marked the first real performance uplift the server got.

Computer History

The Beginning

What started it all was a Sony Vaio laptop that could barely get by, but we made it work.

Then an old Compaq desktop.

Then the Dell SFF

Now the current custom built-server.

Software

Vanilla jar, to MineMC or whatever that panel was called. Then Pterodactyl Panel. Soon to be Pelican Panel

The TNTable Community servers have been run by David for over 10 years. It began with running servers on a Sony Vaio Laptop for school projects and eventually one that was up for certain hours of the day.

Once an old computer was acquired, the server began to gain more functionality. The connection was still Wi-Fi based but now it could run for longer and unattended. This computer had 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and an 80GB ATA hard drive. It was slow, but it got the job done enough for us to still have a good time.

Eventually the server gained an Ethernet connection, though it was through powerline adapters so not ideal but an improvement. Then the server was upgraded through a computer auction and fundraising within the group. This marked the first real performance uplift the server got.

Eventually we pooled the money together to get a more powerful machine in an office auction. It ran the TNTable server faithfully until January 2021 when a new server was built to host the server. The old server computer was still in use as a general purpose server for David for another number of years. Then, in spring 2025 that server was finally decommissioned from use. It served for over a decade quietly working away. The fate of that computer is yet to be determined. As of July 2025 is is sitting in David's apartment.

Server Maps

Started with Minecraft World Map (minecraftworldmap.com). This was a website that you would upload your map to and it would render. Then I found out they used Minecraft Overviewer to generate the maps, and thought that I could just generate them on the server computer and host them myself and so I did. Every past server was rendered. At the time I only rendered servers when they finished as I did not have the means to continually render updates.

Now we use BlueMap to view past server maps and even the current one. The current server map gets rendered every 2 days as of October 1, 2025. The goal is to have it run on the server to provide real-time updates.

Wiki History

The wiki has been running since September 11, 2022 and started because Jack suggested something about memorializing Edgar Allan Bro somehow. The first iteration was with Mediawiki. The same software that powers Wikipedia.

In late July 2025 the first steps to migrate Mediawiki to Bookstack were taken. This was because MediaWiki as a software was becoming too much work to maintain, while BookStack requires less maintenance, and it is friendlier to use.

In October 2025 the decision was made to continue with MediaWiki as it suited our needs the best still. David spent the time to get the wiki working again, clearing the spam pages and users and restoring the wiki to a usable state while taking steps to ensure it's longevity. The wiki is now running the Long Term Support version of MediaWiki, and the database engine as well, to ensure that there are no surprise updates that create issues like what has happened in the past. The wiki subsequently became invite-only at this time in response to the spam and subsequent cleanup required.