A couple of years ago I came back to Minecraft and went straight to my old favourite, Factions. I'd forgotten how toxic it was, so I went looking for something calmer and ended up on a random SMP. I played there for over a year.
The community there was great, but over time I realised I wanted something different from the server itself. The updates kept following the same pattern of crates and cosmetic drops, and the players who'd been around the longest didn't have much say in where things went. So I left, tried a bunch of other servers, kept running into the same thing, and quit Minecraft for a while.
How Bamboo started
Then in spring 2026 I started playing on a friend's server, and that got me back into server development and coding. Bamboo began as a practice server, just to figure out how servers actually work. A couple of friends and me, building it for ourselves. We added vote sites, crates and an economy because we loved that stuff, and somewhere along the way it started feeling like a real SMP. We didn't even have a store until August!
Why it's called Bamboo
The name is an inside joke. I kept saying "bamboo" in a VERY Dutch way and that stuck. We all love pandas too, so Bamboo SMP with a panda mascot it was.
Where it is now
In early September people started finding us through the website, the vote sites, and somehow even ChatGPT (no idea how lol).
I'm not trying to be the biggest server or get rich off this. Bamboo was made so my friends and I could have fun, and that's still the whole point. Thanks for being part of it 💚
Mulaiya, owner of BambooSMP