First of all, Amalthea is not Civ. Tritonio always had trouble keeping his friends in Civ because of the high risks. Most of them would quit after a raid or big war. After CivRealms went down, Tritonio created an easy, highly moderated, very close to vanilla Minecraft server with land claims and trading chests for him and his friends to play in. The server was too easy so eventually almost everyone reached endgame gear, hoarded lots of materials and lost interest. Amalthea is an attempt to make a much harder, grindier, almost unmoderated but still low-risk server with harder-to-maintain endgame.

• Griefing is allowed. (exactly like Civcraft in terms of rules)
• There are trade chests that exchange one item for another.
• There is no server-defined currency.
• Production is cheaper when you do it in bulk.
• We have semi-random spawning.
• No vanilla mending.
• In-game chat is as free speech as is allowed by UK law and as long as there is no attempt to bypass muting or impersonate the staff.

• The map has no border.
• We have unbreakable claims that expire relatively quickly if the player doesn't log in.
• PvP is almost 100% luck based and highly favors the player who fights closer to what the server thinks is their base.
• Instead of having factories, regular crafting is effectively more expensive than vanilla but you can lower the costs by crafting items in bulk. This incentivizes people to trade since it's way more expensive if everyone crafts just what they need for themselves instead of each player mass-crafting one thing cheaply and trading for the rest. This is functionally equivalent to carrying all your civ factories with you, the factories being able to make every vanilla recipe, and regular crafting being nerfed.
• Breaking blocks is effectively slower than vanilla but you improve as you do it (per block type). This is NOT an RPG leveling system. You need to keep practicing block breaking if you want to keep being fast at it. Again, this incentivizes players not to try and be experts at everything and instead trade with each other. Becoming an expert at mining can happen only at the expense of not becoming as much of an expert at chopping down trees.
• All materials are useful because we have adaptive material sinks: Shrines are blocks where players offer materials to “gods” to get buffs or curse their enemies remotely. The cost of a curse/buff is fixed but the value of a material for the “gods” decreases every time it's offered, creating a sink for materials that adapts to people's willingness to part with a material.
• No prison pearls. Curses (debuffs), muting, the customized PvP and the unbreakable claims are how you avoid or deal with griefing.
• Snitches do not exist, but every 16x16x16 area has a virtual snitch that shows the timestamps for the last edit of each player who has edited the area.
• VPNs and alts are allowed but plugins are designed in a way that minimizes the advantage of having multiple alts.
• Mobs spawn like in vanilla and villager trading is an important part of the game.
• In-game chat is global but anyone can mute usernames or even terms from being shown to them.