This post will give some suggestions for how you can run ingame events for your Minecraft server to keep your community engaged with you!
Why Should You Run Events?
You need to keep your players engaged with your server, let them enjoy taking part in your community events and you can reward them with gift cards to your store as an easy and convenient reward. It might sound like a lot of effort, and this can be true, but the joy you'll bring to your community by running consistent and fun events will really make up for time spent organising and building your events. Because Minecraft is so versatile, you can completely build custom mazes and puzzles for your players to compete in!
Not forgetting, players who take part in your events are more likely to stay around in your community. If you want those new players who wandered into your server to stay and become a long-term player, then an event where they can win ingame prizes or Tebex gift cards can make the difference!
Let's take a look at some great ideas for ingame events below.
Maze Competitions
A custom maze doesn't have to be gorgeous or a work of art to keep your players happy (but it definitely doesn't hurt!). You don't need to build everything yourself, it is a great idea to delegate maze builds to your admin or build team, so you can focus on running your server. Because of the huge number of materials that can be used you can absolutely make your mazes completely different to experience each time you build one.
Here's a great example of a chaotic and fun maze competition by MrBeast:
You don't need to give away yoghurt as a prize! We'd recommend gift cards for your store, special ranks for winning, and ingame rewards as these are always very popular. This video is a great example of a complex maze event with multiple stages
For more tips on maze building, we recommend checking out EISEL2's video here for some great advice on building your mazes while making it fun for you and the players. We love the idea of using levers to make walls appear/disappear to create a challenging labyrinth. For a guide on how to create something like this, you might find MinetheFab's guide very helpful, you can watch that here.
Sprinkling some chests in the maze is a really fun reward for players who take part but don't necessarily win the whole challenge. You could also add little mob rooms that players can accidentally stumble across, this adds danger and more excitement! If you want to have pvp enabled, it could add an extra level of danger and risk (do you know who your friends are?!), but it is really up to you and how you want to design your event.
Build Competitions
These competitions are very popular on survival servers. Give all entrants some chests of materials and set them a time limit and let them get creative! You can also set a theme, such as Halloween, space, wild wild west, valentines, or hot air balloons! etc. These competitions are fantastic because they are long events that you can leave running in the background while other short competitions are done, such as pvp brawls, mazes, or treasure hunts.
It doesn't need to be anything spectacular like ChrisDaCow's build of van Gogh's Starry Night, or Varuna's Kingdom of Hamlyn, just a simple 25x25 or 50x50 plot and let the creatives get to work.
PvP Brawls and Arenas
Some Minecraft players LOVE PvP, and some hate it, but in any case, a PvP competition will help to cover another base of your community. Let the blood thirsty players at each others throats! If you want simple PvP, here's a fun example from RKY:
If you want to build PvP arenas though, you might find some inspiration from TheChocolateOre's video here. You might also enjoy TeeBlitz video on building an arena here.
PvP events are fun, can be easy to set up and are either really quick or as long as your tournament stages are set up.
Treasure Hunts
Another fun and cute event you can hold in Minecraft is a treasure hunt! This is really simple to set up. Build some 'markers' so that your players can easily identify when they've found a lost treasure. Maybe, you want to build a plane crash, a pirate ship (that can also be on land!), a teddy bear, a creeper statue, the list goes on...
You would spread out these markers in the world, in caves, on mountains, in deserts and tundra, wherever you feel like placing them. Inside the marker, you would place the treasure, a chest filled with rewards and loot, and finders keepers! Though, if you have PvP enabled then this could get interesting!
For this type of event, it would be good to let your players know exactly how many treasures they are looking for. Let them know ahead of time that there are 10 treasures to find, and they all look like a teddy bear statue; to make it easy, put a picture of the statue on your forums so everyone knows what to look for!
Parkour
Parkour is always popular, and can also be a stage in your maze competition or a stand-alone game for your players. Parkour can be a very fun (and frustrating!) event for many players. It can take some time to build the parkour event but with some creativity (and no-fly and no special speed boosts etc) these events can be incredibly fun to play and watch. Check out this video from Dream Team Streams:
There are of course many other Minecraft events you could run, but we'll leave it here for now.
Rewards
Let's quickly talk about rewards. When your players compete in your events you want them to feel rewarded for taking part, so, you should make sure your players leave your event feeling like they had fun and it was worth their time. Perhaps, everyone who turns up and competes in your event will receive a coupon for their username. Will the top 3 winners receive a free product on your store? A super-easy way to issue your free product is to use a manual payment, it's really convenient. The most popular reward is a free gift card to your store! To see how to make a gift card, watch Ted's video here. If you keep your rewards ingame or via the store (such as gift cards), you not only keep your costs low, but you also encourage your player to return to your server to keep using their reward.
There's really a lot of freedom when it comes to making server events for Minecraft, and this post only suggests a few, there's also a lot of freedom for the rewards you can give your players. We hope this post gave you some ideas and good luck running your server events!