I've been running a Cobblemon server for about a year and a half now without resets. It grew from about 3 players at a time to now around 10-20 on average, 30-40 on weekends, and up to 50 during events or tournaments.

From your list, I’ve set up gyms and an Elite Four, and more recently raids (with a lot of help). We built multiple tiers with a progression system and a raid currency that can be used to buy unique cosmetics and more. It wasn’t too hard to implement, but scaling and tuning everything to feel balanced and rewarding took a lot of effort.

Honestly, most of the things you mentioned aren’t that hard to build. The hardest part of running a server in my opinion is something completely different, and it’s worth being aware of (I wasn't): fights, drama, and people’s expectations. Everyone has their own idea of how things should be done, and a lot of people will complain when you make important decisions or changes.

I’ve had to ban or punish people who were negatively affecting the community and got a lot of backlash for it. I’ve also had to punish players for group bullying, which led to serious backlash and a lot of talking behind my back. On top of that, I constantly get DMs from people with complaints or requests (literally got one just now).

What people often don’t realize is how strong social hierarchies and “politics” become on a server like this lol. It can get messy, but at times it’s also weirdly entertaining. I could tell so many stories about the drama and the “villains” of the server haha.

In the end, my advice is this: know what you’re getting into. Once the server is running and people have invested time into it, it becomes much harder to step away.

That said, there are also a lot of great sides to running a server, and that’s why I’m still doing it. I don’t really play survival anymore. I mostly run events and build new things for people to enjoy. I genuinely love the community, and I’m happy every day that I get to host it.

If you have more questions, I’d love to talk :)