GunColony
A modern first-person shooter in Minecraft
Update 1.24.2: The Three Quarters Update
Update 1.24.1: Mob-Arena Map Update
Update 1.24: Jumbo PVP Map Update
Update 1.23.3: USA Update
BlogPlace #1: Setting Our Goal
Update 1.23.2: 9th Anniversary Update Part 2
Game Modes
PVP
Fight against other players in this exhilarating fast-paced PVP mode inspired by Call of Duty. Play for victory in staple modes such as Team Deathmatch, Free For All, Kill Confirmed, Domination, and King of the Hill, place and break blocks in Mine-Spades, or play as authentic historical armies or sci-fi troopers in the Scenario Mode.
Build your own loadouts containing over 150 primary and secondary weapons, explosives, armor, and Perks. Accumulate killstreaks to unlock bonus grenades, air support, and even the Mini-Nuke. Experience nearly 100 community-built maps including classic remakes like Shipment, Raid, and Shoot House as well as dozens of GunColony originals, and play with any server population through our adaptive map vote.
Mob-Arena
A staple of GunColony since its very beginning, Mob-Arena is a cooperative gamemode that exists to answer one question: what if you could fend off Minecraft mobs with guns?
Team up with friends in over 25 arenas with custom monsters and bosses. Earn rewarding loot from defeated mobs, including grenades, healing items or even the Minigun. Earn cash in-game to resupply ammo, upgrade your weapons and armor, and purchase powerful air support. Finally, compete to top the leaderboards in the weekly rotating Endless mode made for advanced players!
Competitive
Inspired by Counter-Strike 2, our Competitive Mode places players in high-stakes one life game modes including Defusal and Elimination. With sprinting disabled and increased movement speed, milliseconds can be the difference between a round won or lost.
Ever wondered how Counter-Strike would play with many more guns and the ability to modify them? In GunColony, you can choose any weapon from our massive arsenal to add to your personal in-game shop. Experience authentic gameplay with bullets and grenades temporarily dissipating smoke, shotgun spread patterns, and a refined economy system with modifications impacting your weapon’s price and kill award.
Special Gamemodes
GunColony also features numerous special game modes to give players an occasional bonus treat! Soar through the skies in the Elytra mode, throw rocks at enemies in the Gulag scenario, or use full-auto grenade launchers, miniguns and ultra-fast-movement P90’s in the Overpowered scenario.
Furthermore, all game modes can be further adjusted by Mutators, with effects ranging from adjusted health and movement to full-on insanity such as receiving airstrikes on every kill!
Server Features
Unparalleled Gunplay
Powered by several custom plugins, GunColony offers simply the most fun gunplay in any Minecraft gun server, period. Score satisfying collaterals with bullet penetration and custom hitboxes, experience real long-range sniping with realistic bullet trajectory and drop, switch between multiple firing modes with real gameplay tradeoffs, and learn to tame advanced weapon sway and recoil that other games get wrong.
Realistic Balancing
We allow authentic weapons to coexist with balanced gameplay through careful tuning to reflect real-life weapon strengths, caliber-based damage, as well as a Supply-based loadout system inspired by Insurgency. an old, rusty rifle like the STG-44 may not perform as well as a modern one, but frees up Supply to equip better sidearms, explosives, armor, and Perks.
Weapon Modifications
Inspired by COD: Modern Warfare, GunColony allows you to equip up to 5 modifications on your weapon from a pool of over 100 options. Explore realistic ammo types for each bullet caliber, guide your hipfire aim with actual working laser sights, upgrade your magazine size or downsize for better mobility, equip unique Weapon Perks, or simply enjoy stacking bonuses to truly tune your weapon for your desired playstyle.
Player-Friendly Progression
Get the kick of progressing and upgrading your account over the long term, but without any of the greed of other games or getting locked out of your favorite items. All weapons and modifications are unlockable through earning XP, or by purchasing them early using gameplay-earned Tokens. There is no Pay-2-Win and no battle passes. Our formidable arsenal of over 150 weapons, with one or more unlocked every level, ensures that you never run out of content.
Keep Your Progress
GunColony is the only Minecraft FPS server that has continuously maintained your player progression for the past 9 years. Your progress and unlocks in GunColony are never deleted by server wipes, nor pushed into irrelevance by future game releases. You will even bring your current progress beyond Minecraft and into our upcoming standalone browser shooter game, GunCraft.
Made by the Community
GunColony is committed to being a community-centered game. 100% of our weapon models and maps are lovingly made by our community. We embrace the fun of Minecraft building and operate the most powerful custom building system in Minecraft history, allowing our builders to configure and launch maps completely in-game. In return, we keep GunColony free for everyone. We do not and promise never to unfairly make money from community content.
Message From the Server Owner
GunColony is a community project to bring a fully-featured modern first-person shooter experience into Minecraft. We are the oldest and most dedicated project of our kind. It was first created by its owner Hky as his middle school hobby project, but has since attracted a dedicated following and grown into a cornerstone of the Minecraft FPS community over the last 9 years.
GunColony’s claim to fame was its technical excellence. “The First 3D Gun Server in the World” was our proud slogan at our launch on May 31st, 2015. Since then, we continued to innovate and push boundaries in advanced weapon mechanics, becoming the golden standard that every other Minecraft gun server has sought to replicate. GunColony is now powered by over 200,000 lines of custom code and we are only widening our technical lead with the introduction of the Place game engine, making us the first and only Minecraft server to be powered by a custom game engine.
However, as time went on, it became clear that technical prowess isn’t the most important part of GunColony or what makes it fun. GunColony’s real claim to fame has been its community, which has contributed to the game and its success since day one. Every map and weapon you see in GunColony has been lovingly made by community creators rather than being licensed from commercial teams. The result has been a content pool that excels in both quantity and quality, with a great variety of maps and weapons which provide a level of gameplay diversity and replayability that is not only unmatched by other Minecraft servers, but also any other first-person shooter games on the entire market. Meanwhile, our community moderators have worked tirelessly to keep GunColony cheat-free, and only through player feedback has the game been improved over the course of nine years to reach its current level of weapon balancing and polish.
Of course, temptation is great that community contributions for GunColony could be exploited or used disingenuously to extract profits. I have received six-figure investment offers despite not having actively reached out to anyone about (non-grant) funding. But I have decided that this was not the path I should lead GunColony into. I believe that goodwill from the community deserves to be reciprocated with goodwill to the community. It took a few business discussions with potential partners that went nowhere to realize that this is a value I will never compromise on. The world does not need another VC-funded gaming platform that aims to expand only in the name of profit, human decency be damned. Instead, I believe that there is an alternative way forward by building a game where everyone truly wins.
Imagine a game that is free, multiplayer, and available right on your web browser. A game that does not aim to monetize as much as possible, but rather as little as possible. A game that you can fully enjoy for years – heck, even decades – while never spending a single cent. A game with all of the tried-and-true gameplay features and content for GunColony, but upgraded even further. A game with no investors, no publishers, and a developer you can trust. A game which gets better thanks to community contributions. A game that anyone can contribute to without their work being used unfairly for profit.
That game is GunCraft. The standalone game based on GunColony that I have worked on since 2022 and am planning to launch in the next few years.
Perhaps such a game is hard to imagine, because as far as I know, no one has ever done anything remotely similar in the entire world. But all real disruption in the world started with an idea that no one thought was possible, until it happened. And I have ran the numbers many, many times over the last two years: this may be the very first time anyone in the world has had all of the components needed to pull it off. As a low-poly voxel game with an in-house game engine and 9 years of history, we uniquely have the components needed to minimize key costs such as server hosting, labor, and software and game engine licensing. That in turn means that we can stay afloat indefinitely without ever milking our players.
I am not 100% altruistic and my dream is to work on the game full-time, which needs money. But there are ways to make money while still making a net-positive impact on everyone in the community. Creative features like name-tags are naturally best gated with a price tag to ease moderation, while other perks benefit from being rare among the playerbase, such as the ability to create mutated modes. We can also sell cosmetic items and operate an in-game marketplace with zero paid gambling elements, and share our revenue with community creators in a way where everyone wins. We plan to exclusively rely on such ethical ways of monetization in GunCraft. We may make a profit, but we will never profit-maximize, and this is something 99% of game publishers can’t say.
I am not naive and I do realize that GunCraft will need to compete on the free market. We will have fewer resources than many other games out there. But we also have unique strengths that are an impossibility for for-profit game studios: time, and trust. With our scrappy operation and the low-cost Place game engine, we are not at risk of running out of funding and going bankrupt; and as we are not beholden to shareholders, it is possible for us to grow while never betraying the community. Having time means time for long-term technical decisions to pay dividends, and time to wait for market opportunities that signal our chance to shine. Having trust means that we can create expansive and uniquely fun games as a community of gamers that no modern, profit-maximizing game company will ever create for us.
So join us on the journey towards GunCraft. It’s going to be a long haul, but there is so much more to come.
—
If you want to play on our fun Minecraft server today, join GunColony today and take a look! You can play with the latest version of Minecraft: Java Edition, no mods required!
Server Address: guncolony.com