When you die, you get locked in spectator mode. Our custom bot, The Arbiter, instantly puts a poll in the Graveyard where the rest of the server votes on whether you get to come back. If you want to skip the vote, you can use Vote Points. You earn Vote Points just by voting for the server, and you can spend them to buy out a friend's poll and revive them immediately.
Understandably, not everyone wants to leave their account up to a community vote, so you can use your Vote Points to buy a Life Insurance policy while you're still alive (type !insurance in game). The basic tier costs less than one vote a week. Cover starts 24 hours after you buy; when you die, your insurer pays for the revive: at once, after a short review, or after you file a statement on the forum, depending on who you chose. Suspicious deaths go to a community vote right here in the Graveyard.
This map has been around since Beta 1.8. To make the hardcore experience much more difficult, the spawn point is in the middle of a massive ocean, up to 50,000 blocks across in some places. Land is out there, but you have to figure out how to survive the water. The world is also filled with 15 years worth of abandoned bases and ruins left by old players, which you can scavenge for gear.
Surviving the initial ocean spawn is the hardest part of playing on this server. But there's a trick to it: just look down. Sometimes, you'll see faint lights on the ocean floor. Those are exposed, flooded mineshafts from 15 years ago. Swim down there. Break the wood planks and grab cobwebs so you can craft your first fishing rod, and a bed. On the way towards an actual continent, you'll find lots of small islands. Don't settle in these places, because your base will be unsafe; if you can find it that easy, imagine how easily someone else will be able to find you if they're specifically looking for people to grief or kill! You should keep lookout for old, abandoned bases because there are tons of them. Scavenging ruins is the fastest way to get basic resources (the other is by voting!). Good luck!
If you die on hardcore.tj your account is locked in spectator mode. Our custom bot, The Arbiter, will automatically detect your death and generate a poll in the Graveyard. Your fate is left up to the community! Players can vote YAY to bring you back, or NAY to keep you buried. The poll runs for 72 hours. Anyone can vote in chat on any of our servers (the others are not hardcore), with the buttons on our Discord (once your Discord is linked), or here in the Graveyard. It passes with at least 2 YAY votes and at least twice as many YAY as NAY (2:1), and your death-ban (which isn't really a ban) is lifted at once. If it doesn't pass, you stay in spectator mode until the 72 hours are up. Every vote makes your buyout cheaper: each YAY takes 10% off the price, and each NAY takes 15% off. Voting pays: 15 Vote Points for YAY, 10 for NAY, 5 for ABSTAIN (up to 5 paid votes a day, for accounts at least 3 days old), and every vote raises your trust score and earns a discount on life insurance. Abstaining means you stay out of it: you can no longer buy that player out, each abstain adds 3% to your own future buyouts (up to 30%), and abstaining on a close friend earns nothing and costs you trust. Players who mostly abstain are marked Neutral on their profile. New players get 3 free instant respawns during the first 24 hours of real time after their first join; each one used makes later buyouts 25% dearer. There is absolutely no pay-2-win here, you can't spend money to free yourself. Our server economy runs entirely on Vote Points. When you vote for the server, you get 200 points at a time (400 on weekends). Use these points in the hardcore.tj store to buy a Life Insurance policy, bail yourself out with an immediate respawn (or bail out a friend), or place bounties on other players' heads!
I've been playing on this map since I was 11 years old. It was originally hosted on the very first Minecraft server I joined, named "Swim." The server IP is galacticaactual.dyndns.org, and it's still active today (although it's running on a different map). A few years ago, I managed to track down Swim's owner, inertia186, and I got a copy of the map. This map holds a ton of sentimental value to me, and it will never be wiped. This map contains over a decade of Minecraft history.