A Letter to Every Player

The clock has to be set back to July 2026. On a holiday boring enough that I went looking for something to do, I picked up Minecraft 1.16.1 all-advancements speedrunning again. On a repost account, by chance, I saw Feinberg playing DRAFTOUT.

Honestly, DRAFTOUT felt like a very fresh way to play, and I was already a little taken by it. But it runs on 26.1, and I'm a player who knows next to nothing about higher versions — the only one I ever played was 新蒸程, back when I was running it with friends, and that mod had little to do with Vanilla either. So even wanting to try it, I never did download a DRAFTOUT client: nothing pushed me on.

A month went by like that. Then, on a voice call with pluginl, I learned for the first time how strong AI agents have become. It's a bit funny: I study cybersecurity and only realised then how far AI had come. The idea I'd sat on for a long time started surfacing around the same time.

At first what I wanted to build was AI image search — plainly, let AI sort desert terrain for me and free my hands during an all-advancements run. What changed my mind was the high-speed train back to Taiyuan in early September: the idea I'd sat on for so long suddenly got very clear — why not make DRAFTOUT for 1.16.1?

1.16.1 has mature techniques and is the version proven on paper to be the fastest to clear. It may carry less content than higher versions, but most of its strategies are already fully worked out. To me, on content and handling, 1.16.1 has a natural edge over higher versions. So I said it and did it: back in my dorm, I started the research and my first steps into making a mod.

What the research turned up: speedrunners here and DRAFTOUT players both complain hard about how difficult this mode is. Because of the board difficulty, and because of how much content higher versions carry, a normal player needs 30 minutes or more to get through a match. For a competitive game that's far too dull. In theory a 1v1 shouldn't be stretched out that long — it grinds down a player's confidence and patience bit by bit. And DRAFTOUT boards are first-come: two players chasing the same advancement on the same seed leaves the weaker side with almost no chance against the stronger one.

(I'm writing this at 11 p.m. on September 16. DRAFTOUT's number one right now is Snakezy, on 1721 points and a 100% win rate.)

So I think DRAFTOUT may be a little short on fairness as a competitive mode — though maybe they never set out to design a Ranked system in the first place. This is only my own view, and if it offends 7rowl, I'm sorry here.

All of that together is what made me want a 1.16 version of DRAFTOUT that wasn't "for speedrunners only". But the problem sat right in front of me: 1.16 speedrun strategy is completely mature, and EDCR — the player at the top of MCSR Ranked's Elo with an 89% win rate — proves it. Even just "completing advancements" gives a speedrunner a natural advantage over a normal player.

How do you close that gap? My answer is the two points below, and they are the core of how I designed this mod. First, Ranked only ever adds score and never takes it away, but a hidden rating runs underneath, so players of similar strength get matched together without messing with a normal player's head. Second, more custom options are open, so normal players aren't forced to compete with speedrunners and can pull in more friends around them instead — what I build is the open platform that lets them do that.

There are also balance changes that go in a very different direction from DRAFTOUT — advancements can be completed more than once, pools are split by difficulty, and so on. I won't go into the details here.

Over these past weeks I learned how to bring up a server and how to register a domain. This website existing at all was an accident: reading account info needs a Microsoft token, and that has to go through a private domain, which is why I registered one.

Before the registration my mod had been called BingoRank all along — naming it was never a consideration when I started, and by then I had to pick one. Since this is a mod made by a Chinese person, it should have a Chinese name and an English name; and the game is just whoever reaches the win condition first wins, so "掠板" fits the theme. Let's leave it at that: BoardRaid 掠板.

A server needs people, so the first one I brought in was 5x — he was very interested in the project and agreed to test it with me. Later I brought in 瑕玟 and 初晨西瓜, and through 5x and 初晨西瓜 I brought in Cmeans, a DRAFTOUT expert.

They're all friends I've known for a long time, and all of them were interested in this project. After that, in every multiplayer test, they did everything they could to hunt down bugs for me and gave me practical advice. Every piece of that advice was precious — the project's stepping stones, one after another, until the BoardRaid mod was built. Without them the project could not have gone on.

Beyond that, I want to thank the people who helped me spread the word because they were interested in the project, including but not limited to 瑕玟, 5x, the owners of the 雾雪-残阳 repost account (初晨西瓜, 5x, Cmeans, 程程小小兔), Baron_2333, xbd15 and other players. Without their promotion, my project and what came out of it would never have been known.

I'm very grateful to the friends who helped me along the way — you're the best partners I've met in my speedrunning career. And thank you to the whole speedrunning community, for taking me in and giving me a platform to show what I can do.

These days I may not have the fire I had when I was pushing for PBs, but I'm still optimistic about the whole speedrunning community — a lot of new blood has come into it, and that's our main strength for reaching the world stage.

For now the website and the client are both run by me alone. If you're interested in this project, contact me too — let's explore BoardRaid's future together, and I'm willing to grow along with everyone. Thank you all.

Written on 2026.9.16　HQEmployer