Oblivion Buddy

Oblivion Buddy is the Discord bot for Oblivion SMP, a modded Minecraft server with over a hundred members. It is the first real piece of software I built, and the only one of my early projects with public source code.

What it does

The bot lives in the server’s Discord and connects to the Minecraft server through RCON, the remote console protocol Minecraft uses for administration. That link lets people do things from Discord that would otherwise need someone logged in to the game or the server console: check who is online, run commands, and keep an eye on the server.

Beyond administration, the bot runs small community games. The most-used one is Oblivion Minesweeper, a web game that opens as a Discord activity and posts results back into the server.

How it was built

The bot is written in Python with discord.py. Commands are organised as cogs, which are discord.py’s way of grouping related commands into modules, so each feature lives in its own file. Configuration comes from environment variables, and the bot runs as a systemd service on a Linux box, with logs available through journalctl.

I built it with Claude Code. I wrote the plan and the requirements, reviewed what came back, tested it against the real server and fixed what broke. Over about six months and 125 commits it went from a single script to a bot the community relies on every day.

Status

I handed the bot over to the Oblivion SMP community in spring 2026. They run it and use it. I no longer develop it, but the repository is public, and the commit feed below shows the latest activity.

What I got out of it

This is where I learned to run software for real people: deploying to a server, keeping a process alive, reading logs when something breaks at midnight, and making changes without taking the bot down. It also taught me to write clear specifications, because an AI coding tool is only as good as the instructions and the review it gets.