Since I'm writing this with the intention to develop servers and mods and assuming that if anyone reads this they are probably in a similar situation, I'm going to approach this from a developer perspective. That being said, that doesn't mean I'm going to discount the ingame mechanics and jump immediately into modding. In fact, I'm going to do the exact opposite, as I believe that understanding how the game and associated tools work is going to be essential to developing any sort of server.