Decide what carries
Reset design is a data question before it's an event. Write the table first:
- Carries: purchased cosmetics and ranks — that's paid value, and losing it refunds you a customer.
- Resets on purpose: economy, blocks placed, islands, claims, stats. That's the point of the reset.
- Archives read-only: player stats, season leaderboard, first-kills. Players love looking back at the season they ground through.
Every row gets argued about once, in private. Then it's law.
The checklist
- T-7: announce with a fixed date, time and the kept/lost table. Never a "soon".
- T-2: full backup — world, plugins, database — zipped and copied offsite.
- T-1: freeze shop purchases, run the refund window, close trading.
- T-0: new world and configs, run the carry-import script, restart, staff smoke test before the doors open.
- T+1: bug triage with the restore plan still warm for two weeks.
What players actually feel
Players forgive resets. They don't forgive surprises. The kept/lost table posted in Discord a week early does more morale work than any launch event. Give high ranks a small day-zero head start, run one event in the first week to give the fresh map a story, and keep the archive of last season's top boards somewhere players can still reach it. A reset with a receipt is nostalgia; a reset without one is a betrayal.
RnK is a Minecraft developer with six years in the game — plugins, server setups and performance work across Paper, Spigot and Folia backends. Three networks run day to day; the rest of the time is client work. The bench is open on Discord.