SwornHero

I’m SwornHero, the owner and administrator behind StoneHaven, the community that connects our survival server, StoneHavenSMP, and our Create-focused server, IndustryHaven.

I’ve been playing Minecraft for more than ten years. My name goes back even further, to my first Xbox 360 gamertag. The name stuck, Minecraft stuck, and somewhere along the way, building farms turned into running servers, maintaining modpacks, developing tools, and helping a community find its home.

At heart, I’m still a survival player who enjoys building, redstone, and projects that are probably larger than they need to be.

Why I created StoneHaven

I started StoneHaven because I wanted a small, long-term Vanilla+ SMP inspired by the community-driven spirit of servers like Hermitcraft. I wanted to provide a dependable foundation and give players the freedom to decide what the world would become.

Build a town. Open a shop. Construct an enormous farm. Disappear into the wilderness and start something entirely your own.

The players shape StoneHaven.

That belief guides how I run the community. Our servers have grown to include more mods, features, and supporting systems, but each addition should serve the experience we’re building together.

What makes me proudest is seeing the world develop a history. Shops appear, roads connect bases, someone improves a shared space, and another player leaves a gift at the post office. Over time, those contributions turn a Minecraft world into a place people recognize, care about, and return to.

My role as Owner

I oversee StoneHaven’s technical operations and long-term direction, working alongside our staff team to support players and maintain a welcoming, trustworthy community.

Behind the scenes, that involves server configuration, modpack maintenance, compatibility testing, permissions, performance reviews, crash troubleshooting, updates, and documentation. It also includes the human side: welcoming members, listening to suggestions, communicating changes, supporting staff, and handling concerns fairly.

I’ve developed our website and custom systems that connect Minecraft with Discord, including tools that allow staff to carry out allowlist and moderation actions without needing to be in the game. Our guides, wiki, onboarding process, and Discord organization are all part of making StoneHaven easier to navigate and enjoy.

I believe good server administration is a form of hospitality. When the systems work well and communication is clear, players can focus on their builds, their friends, and their next adventure.

The player behind the admin role

When I’m playing survival, I want to experience the same progression as everyone else: gathering resources, building farms, running shops, and slowly turning ambitious ideas into finished builds.

My home on StoneHavenSMP is Hero’s Reach, a developing settlement along a mountainous taiga coastline surrounded by spruce and dark oak forests. With its wooded peninsula, lowland valley, and overlooking mountain, it felt like the right place to build almost immediately.

The style combines rustic medieval construction with northern mountain lodges and fortified frontier towns. Dark oak, spruce, and stone brick form the foundation for a future settlement of timber-framed buildings, roads, bridges, a harbor, and functional infrastructure.

For now, much of that work involves farms and the systems beneath the settlement. My projects include a multilevel iron farm, villager breeder, unfinished trading hall, cooked chicken farm, and witch farm.

Previous slideNext slide

1/7

I like builds that look like they belong in the world and serve a purpose. Finding a way to fit a useful machine into a believable settlement is a large part of the fun.

Finishing everything is another matter. Owning a Minecraft server is surprisingly effective at keeping you from actually playing on it.

Building for the Community

Some of my most meaningful work has been in shared spaces.

I helped establish the Market District, building much of its original road infrastructure and contributing the community post office, iron and chicken shops, Nether portal, community mine, and Waystone gazebo. Watching those early roads and empty plots grow into a district filled with shops, decorations, games, and player builds has been one of my favorite parts of running the server.

I also built the five locations in our Global Waystone Network: the Market District hub, North Watch, South Reach, East Watch, and West Hold. The four outer locations sit roughly 10,000 blocks from the Market District in their respective directions, giving players access to distant terrain while allowing our existing world to keep growing.

My hope is that those routes eventually lead to new settlements with their own identities and histories.

Previous slideNext slide

1/6

On IndustryHaven, I’ve helped develop spawn and built a factory there. Create offers another outlet for my interest in technical builds: machinery, production chains, automation, and engineering. There are plenty of ideas waiting for me to find time for them.

Previous slideNext slide

1/2

Learning through development

Running servers led me naturally toward software and mod development. Real community needs give me practical problems to work on and a reason to keep learning.

My projects include Dynamic Join Greetings, a released Fabric mod for configurable player greetings; Trowel Continued, a maintained fork of a randomized building tool; and in-progress community tools such as Steward. I also build websites, documentation, Discord integrations, and utilities that support our community.

Previous slideNext slide

1/4

I describe myself as a mod developer in progress. I’m learning through implementation, testing, documentation, mistakes, and maintenance. My focus is producing useful work that I understand, can explain, and can support as it evolves.

What makes an SMP special to me

I can be something of a hermit in Minecraft. I’m perfectly happy disappearing to my base and working alone for hours.

But knowing that other people are out there building changes the experience completely. There might be a new shop when I visit the Market District, a new road to follow, or someone online who has exactly the resource I need.

Our first Ender Dragon fight together remains one of my favorite StoneHaven memories. Gathering, preparing, and reaching that milestone as a group made the world feel shared in a way no individual build could.

That’s why I value the contributions of our players and staff so much. TitanicBoss, Domin0, and Krynne have each helped shape the community through development, coordination, moderation, building, and their presence. Suggestions, conversations, and the projects members choose to pursue continue to influence where StoneHaven goes.

Everyone who spends time here has the opportunity to leave something behind—a build, a shop, a connection, or a story.

Previous slideNext slide

1/9

Looking ahead

My plans include continuing work on Hero’s Reach, the Market District, IndustryHaven’s spawn, and shared infrastructure such as the Nether hub and future gaming spaces. There may also be a massive slime farm somewhere on the list, despite several unfinished projects already competing for attention.

More broadly, I want to become a better administrator and developer while keeping StoneHaven dependable enough for people to invest their time in.

I measure its success through the experiences people choose to have here: spending an evening building, helping a neighbor, opening a ridiculous shop, or creating their own corner of the world.

I created StoneHaven because I enjoy Minecraft, and I wanted people to enjoy playing it with me.

There is still plenty left to build. That’s part of what makes it worth coming back to.

Explore my development projects at SwornHero.com(opens in a new tab).

-- SwornHero