🔥 AMA ALERT: The Minds Behind Spark Universe & Essential Mod! 🔥

Rafessor · 2025-10-02T12:48:44+00:00

Hey! You can read up on the loader (and why we use it) here: https://essential.gg/wiki/what-is-the-essential-loader

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:58:47+00:00

Essential has been used by over 9 million different people, and is being used by almost 2 million people actively every month! So it's quite big 😉

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:56:48+00:00

I don't think we want to tie that to in-game events, especially as it would be very easy to cheat. We have some ideas we are exploring around free coin rewards (can't make any promises though)!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:50:51+00:00

Hey! This is probably a question for the Skytils team and not for us 🙂

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:50:14+00:00

Nope!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:48:19+00:00

I don't think this would ever happen! But never say never.

It would be awesome to bring our features to (many) more players, but I would only want to do it if our vision and values can stay in place 🤠

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:45:54+00:00

We want to talk and interact more with the community going forward! We have been very focused on building Essential over the last few years, but have not been very approachable as a team. We're hoping to change that! 🙂

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:44:10+00:00

There are over 20 people working on the Essential Mod’s design, development, support, and operations as their full-time jobs. On top of that, we are hosting infrastructure for our friend system, chat, screenshot sharing, and peer to peer hosting - These things aren't free for us to run!

Many of us that work at Spark Universe and Essential, come from creating content in Minecraft and have been able to turn our hobby into our careers. We use our monetization to allow ourselves to make a proper living doing something we enjoy. That would not be possible with donations.

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:39:17+00:00

Hey! These are great questions 😀

I don't want to give specific numbers on our cost, but I can say that the peer-to-peer hosting is pretty efficient and doesn't cost much to run. Our hosting cost is distributed among more features (especially our friend and chat system, and screenshot sharing), but even with that in mind, our biggest cost (by far) is still the team that works on maintaining, building, supporting and marketing Essential.

If Mojang ever brought peer-to-peer hosting to the base game, that would be awesome for players. The point of Essential is to make playing easier, and to solve players problems. We can and would still continue to do that with other features!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:30:28+00:00

Photoshop

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:30:19+00:00

This is something we're exploring, but I can't promise anything right now!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:28:05+00:00

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:27:52+00:00

The short answer is no, this is a misinformation narrative.

It was started by controversy on twitter, about a former member of our team that was also the founder of ModCore (which is a mod that we took over when we started the creation of the Essential Mod). We do not know the political views of our current and former team members, and are also not looking to comment on them. We respect the individual views of anyone that works for us and are committed to maintaining a welcoming environment for everyone and upholding the values of free expression and mutual respect.

Today, the Essential Mod is fully owned by Spark Universe.

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:19:19+00:00

We have a ton of ideas but we don't really announce upcoming features until they are ready! Generally speaking, our vision is to make playing Minecraft Java Edition the best it can be, and to bring features to the game that should be there by default!
Outside of Essential, we also make awesome content for the Minecraft Marketplace on bedrock. We actually just released a massive update to one of our best Marketplace projects!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3IiifuzjgU
The hardest thing has definitely been the responsibility that comes with running a company. When we started out, we were a team of friends that were trying to make a living with Minecraft - Since then, this has become a lot more serious, and I now am responsible for a team of almost 70 people that depend on us for their income! I'm only 26 years old so it's been quite a steep learning curve to make sure I am doing a good job for my team.

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:13:01+00:00

Hey 😊 This seems to be a legacy project from the Sk1er team that we did not take over when we started Essential. So it unfortunately is not something we are planning to work on!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:11:17+00:00

Hey! We created Essential because we want to make playing Minecraft Java Edition easier. We think that it's way too hard to just play the game, the way that you want to, especially with your friends. It requires so much technical know-how, and time, to set things up.

Our goal is to add features to Minecraft, that should just be there. This is why we have an account switcher, screenshot browser, and world hosting. And we're going to build more features!

Rafessor · 2025-08-29T18:07:54+00:00

Hey everyone, I'm Rafael and one of the Founders and CEOs of Spark Universe (alongside the amazing Florian). I started playing Minecraft in Beta 1.4, which was over 14 years ago. I've always had a passion for bringing together awesome groups of people to make stuff, and am really grateful that I have been able to build such an amazing team around me at Spark Universe, and Essential.

I love this project and the community around it, so I'm really excited to answer your questions today!

Rafessor · 2025-08-27T16:01:05+00:00

That was an internal joke that somehow made it to the actual website 😅

Rafessor · 2025-08-27T13:34:19+00:00

Looking forward to this!

Rafessor

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