Sam's Minecraft Server - Skyblock Forum - announcements

Sam's Minecraft Server turns 7 today!

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:01:19 +0000

Sam's Minecraft Server is 7 years old today.

The oldest server log is from 9 November 2019. Thank you to everyone who has played, built, voted and argued with an insurance adjuster since then.

Join any of the servers today (sams.tj, hardcore.tj, skyblock.tj, superflat.tj, earth.tj) for 500 Vote Points and an anniversary cake.

New radio stations: Christmas, Roaring Twenties, Old-Time Radio and more

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:23:42 +0000

Six new stations on the TJ Radio

The radio is getting a big update tonight, starting on sams.tj. The other servers switch over by midnight Eastern time.

New stations

Christmas Radio 89.5 - carols from the very first records ever made (1900s to 1920s), the Nutcracker and more. On air until January 6.
Roaring Twenties 92.3 - jazz, dance bands and crooners: King Oliver, Kid Ory, Fletcher Henderson, the Wolverines and friends.
Sea Songs & Shanties 96.7 - hornpipes, sea songs and sailors' marches.
Classical 98.1 - Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Wagner and friends.
Ambient 102.5 - calm, slow music for building and exploring.
Old-Time Radio 105.5 - complete 1940s radio dramas from The Weird Circle: Frankenstein, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado. Episodes are never interrupted.

Seasonal station on 106.3
Winter Fireside (gentle piano) from November 7, then Spring, Summer Island (Hawaiian steel guitar) and Halloween Radio in turn through the year. At Christmas and Halloween, the radio starts on the holiday station by default.

Leaving the radio
Yacht Rock and Classic Hits are retired. Everything on the radio is now music we are allowed to share: public-domain recordings and Creative Commons music, credited on the radio page. Player requests from YouTube stay as they are.

How to listen
Type !radio list in game and click a station, or listen in your browser at sams.tj/radio. !radio credits shows who made the music. The music needs the optional radio resource pack: say yes when the server offers it.

mods.tj: new modpack (Better MC) and a fresh world

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:48:23 +0000

mods.tj has a new modpack and a fresh world!

The modded server now runs Better MC [FABRIC] BMC2 v40 on Minecraft 1.20.1: about 290 mods with new biomes, seasons, bigger dungeons and structures, the Aether, the Otherside, and a new Nether and End. The whitelist is off, so anyone can join.

How to join

Install the free CurseForge app: curseforge.com/download/app
Install Better MC [FABRIC] BMC2, version v40: BMC2 on CurseForge
Press Play, then add the server mods.tj

Full guide: mods.tj/modpack
Use the CurseForge version: the Modrinth copy is missing some libraries and won't start.

New Radio Stations

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:51:06 +0000

Hello all!

I'm interested in creating new radio stations to expand the server's in-game radio functionality. If you're not familiar with the server radio, turn on server resource packs, join the server (any of my servers), and type !radio on

Additionally you can visit the radio's page and queue / skip songs below:

https://sams.tj/radio

Currently there's only one track list. I'd like to eventually get it to the point that approved resource packs, whether custom-made by players or by myself, can be played in-game to people who choose to install them (download links for the resource packs will be conveniently located on the radio page of the servers' websites).

So to this end, if you have any songs you'd like to see incorporated into a "radio station" in-game, meaning just a looping track list like an album, please let me know below in a reply to this post. If you want to suggest an entire track list, feel free!
I'm open also to incorporating recordings made by players themselves, like if you create music and want to have it played in-game on my servers I would totally be game for that.

I'm interested in keeping replies organized so that I can revisit this project intermittently between other things, like IRL stuff and setup for my earth.tj server. So, if you would like your work or your track list to be considered, please keep it within the comments of this post.

Thanks guys

Birthday Celebrations

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:50:41 +0000

Hello all!

This week my 27th birthday is coming up. So to celebrate, everyone gets a cake every time they login for this whole week (til Sunday September 27th). Enjoy!

Thanks

26.3

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:12:10 +0000

Hello all!
Version 26.3 was finally released today, and all of the servers have been updated. Here's the full changelog for this update:

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/...ition-26-3

Enjoy guys! Thanks!

Custom YT Songs on the Server Radio

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:09:04 +0000

Hello everyone!

I'm rolling out an experimental feature for the server radio, which you can find here:

https://sams.tj/radio
I'm testing a new method for adding YouTube links to the server resource pack. This is a complicated endeavor with a lot of moving parts, so please bare with me as we debug and test this feature out. Let me know if you encounter any problems or notice anything that needs tweaking, I'll be happy to fix it! This is something I've wanted to get working for a long time. Here's how it works:

1. Find a song you like and paste the link in this box in the image below. It must be <10 minutes long.

2. Wait for the song to finish converting into a .ogg file and added to the server resource pack.

3. Success! Your song will be added to the queue. You'll see this message:

Please note that if you see the message below, I'm aware of this issue. I'm working to fix it, but I've spent hours on this today and I've chosen to address it at a later time - sorry for the inconvenience! If you get this pop-up while trying to submit a song, come back in a few hours and try again.

Server resource packs do not support dynamic updates, they require a server restart to work, and so unfortunately I cannot have songs added to the queue right away after someone adds a new one. The servers will restart at midnight Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) each night to ensure that songs added the previous day will be available as quickly as possible without disrupting gameplay for users by constantly restarting the server each time a song is added.

Thanks

Homes Script Changes: Multiple, server-specific home limits & skyblock.tj patch

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:48:54 +0000

Hello all,

I've fixed the homes script such that when you buy additional homes via the Vote Store, you can now teleport to them. Please note that homes must be numbered sequentially (for example, you can't set home 3 before setting home 2, even if your homes limit is 4) and the command only accepts integers as home names.

Additionally, the homes command on skyblock.tj has been fixed.

Thanks

Rebalanced Server Economy & Gambling Scripts

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:00:46 +0000

Hello all!
I've spent my morning performing a huge overhaul of the server's gambling scripts. As pointed out by Funzen a little bit ago and again yesterday by Gimli_Rabbit, the scripts I wrote were pretty unbalanced and allowed players to gamble repeatedly to accrue points in enormous quantities, without needing to vote for the server (which is the whole point!). Alongside a bunch of new mini-games, the "infinite money" exploits have been officially patched out (I hope) meaning the house finally has a real edge in all of the gambling commands.
First and foremost, there's a new hard cap of 100,000 vote points per player. If a winning bet pushes a balance over that limit, the extra points simply vanish.
Second and perhaps equally as important, to prevent players from camping the casino all day each user is now capped at 15 winning bets per 24-hour window before getting locked out. The system also tracks betting streaks. If you hit 3 wins in a row, you receive a prefix that reads "[HIGH ROLLER]". Lose 5 bets in a row and the server will publicly shame you with a "[DIVORCED GAMBLING ADDICT & ALCOHOLIC]" prefix before your name.
Third, I've implemented some new commands to play with:

You can now play Plinko: !plinko e.g. "!plinko 1234"
There's a crash game: !crash e.g. "!crash 100 2.5"
Try to survive a gladiator fight against a mob using the brawl command: !brawl

Two other additions are !dungeon and !heist, which actually pull your live in-game stats to calculate your odds.

!dungeon checks your lifetime mob kills to deaths ratio to boost survival chances: !dungeon
!heist looks at your total time spent sneaking and sprinting to grant a stealth bonus against police and guards at the bank: !heist

That's all I've changed today as far as gambling and vote points go. Please let me know if you encounter any more issues! Thanks

Welcome!

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:56:28 +0000

Welcome to the forum! The plan is to eventually replace our Discord server with this place. Feel free to register an account, and please let me know if you encounter any bugs or difficulty posting.

Sam