2022 - A Year in Review

2022 was quite the year for everyone. For some people, it was a great year, for others, a terrible year, but for us at First Dark Development, it’s been quite an adventure.

We started 2022 on a hard note, with Curseforge payouts being so low, that we couldn’t even afford the two VPS servers we were using at the time, as well as dealing with harassment and targeted attacks.But this blog post is not just to look at all the horrible things, it’s also a chance to show how we as a group has grown.

Let’s start.

January 2022

Our first change in 2022, was switching our Donation platform from Buy Me A Coffee to Ko-fi. This change was mostly due to BMC dropping PayPal as a supported payout method, which is the primary payment method we use to pay for services.

During this month, I also struggled with Modding taking over my life, and influencing both my Personal and Work Life. At the verge of quitting, I decided to stand tall and fight ahead. With better time management, things fell into place and everything went smoothly again.

On January 27, we also crossed our first, Major milestone. Reaching 4.3 million downloads on Curseforge! While this is a small number to most, it was a big milestone for us.

February 2022

The very first event of February, was a FALSE dmca complaint lodged at my at the time server provider, which resulted in ALL our VPS servers being taken offline. After a long investigation from their side, the complaints were declared false and services was restored.

On February 11/12, our Servers and Web Hosting got hit with two massive DDoS attacks. Luckily, both providers have good DDoS protection, and the attacks did nothing other than spike up our traffic usage.

March 2022

Definitely the biggest Milestone for First Dark Dev in 2022, was our infrastructure upgrade. For those that don’t know, FDD had a rough start on running our own Servers. We had accounts deleted, data got lost and nightmares followed. For most of 2021 and the start of 2022 however, we had 2 VPS servers, rented from Contabo.com that powered our entire dev ops operation, as well as the Minecraft servers of some of our group members.

While this was fine for most part, FDD began growing. As we grew, the hardware could not keep up, and just “Upgrading” each time became a hassle. Finally in March of 2022, FDD invested in a Dedicated, Ryzen powered server, rented from Hetzner.

The server allowed us to greatly improve the reliability of our Services, such as Claptrap, Jenkins, Our maven, our hosted MC servers etc. While this mean a lot more expenses each month, it was a much needed, worthy investment.

During the migration from VPS to dedicated, we also took the time to fully protect everything with CloudFlare. A decision which not only added some much needed extra protection, but also saved us a lot in bandwidth transfers.

May 2022

We started publishing “Full-Time” on Modrinth as well. This actually caused an increase in downloads for us, in some cases even more than Curseforge.

March 2022

We released a new Client Side mod called MoreCreativeTabs. A mod that allows the player to completely customize their creative inventory using a resource pack

June 19

We hit our first 1K downloads from Modrinth. At the same time, we were only a couple of downloads away from hitting the 8 Million Downloads mark on Curseforge

October 2022

We hit the 10 Million downloads mark on Curseforge! A milestone I personally never saw coming!

We announced the end of Exploding Creeper Group. A group that was dedicated to supplying free tools, services and Minecraft servers to open-source developers. This decision came after a lack of interest for months, my duties as a father being close and as a chance to provide better services to the existing members.

November 2022

We launched our completely revamped, improved and automated Docs platform, fdd-docs.com.

December 2022

And we wrapped up the year with Minecraft 1.19.3 destroying half of our mods.

Nothing other to report for that month, so instead, we take a look at some stats from our infrastructure and overall project performance.

During 2022, we pushed a total of 970.76GB of traffic through our server. This is a combination of Maven, Jenkins, Docs, Minecraft and internal traffic.

We ended the year with 10,768,170 total downloads on Curseforge! We additionally did 14.9K downloads on Modrinth.

We had a total of 7.5 million unique visitors across all our websites.

Claptrap is tracking a total of 194 Curseforge projects and 259 Modrinth projects, across 42 Servers.

And that’s a wrap!

Thank you so much to every single user, contributor, donator and bug reporter for your support during 2022! We couldn’t have done it without any of you! Our milestone for this year is to become twice as big and push out more quality content!