Factions Minecraft Servers for 1.17

Claim land, build a base, expect it to be raided

Factions is the raiding gamemode. You make a faction with friends, claim chunks, fill a base with obsidian and hoppers, and then somebody finds it, breaches the wall with a TNT cannon and takes everything inside. Power is the currency: you lose it when you die, and a faction on negative power can be claimed over by anyone.

Almost every server layers extras on top — custom enchants, envoy drops, king-of-the-hill events, printer mode for building, and a schedule that tells you when the fighting happens. Seasons usually run four to eight weeks, end with a payout, and then the map wipes and everyone starts again from a wooden pickaxe.

Going in solo is rough, because factions rewards organised groups with a rota. Join with people, or join a faction that is recruiting. Read the rules on cannoning, insiding and alt accounts before you build your first base: those three differ wildly between servers and they define what counts as a fair fight.

1.17 is deliberately half an update

Caves & Cliffs Part I shipped in June 2021 with the blocks but not the terrain. Copper, amethyst geodes, deepslate, candles, the spyglass, the lightning rod, powder snow, axolotls, goats and glow squid all arrived. The new cave and mountain generation was held back to 1.18, six months later.

That split is worth knowing before you join. You can mine copper and amethyst, but the world still generates the old way, with a floor at Y=0 and the narrow cave systems of earlier versions. Ore distribution follows the old curve too, so diamonds sit at the depths people learned in 1.16 rather than down near the new bedrock.

Very few servers stay here by choice now. The ones that do are normally running a modpack or a plugin that never got updated, or they are an established world that did not want a visible 1.18 terrain seam through the middle of it. It plays fine — it is just an unusual place to start.