The great thing about community driven games like Minecraft is that the fans who help create the great content that populates the game are sometimes hired on to work with the team. Mojang is the latest to join this trend with the Minecraft team hiring four people from the community.

The Mojang blog announced on Tuesday that the team has hired on the four main developers of bukkit to help improve the official Minecraft server. For those who haven’t heard of bukkit, it’s a “community-based Minecraft server implementation.”

The four people who were hired are Warren Loo, Erik Broes, Nathan Adams and Nathan Gilbert. They were hired to build a new server API that will support client-side modding. They hope to make it compatible for current bukkit users to convert to the new system, but they can’t promise backwards compatibility. They are going to make bukkit compatible with Minecraft version 1.2 though so no worries for the immediate future.

They chose bukkit over the other teams in the modding community because of their extensive experience in server modding. The hope is that Minecraft multiplayer will improve with these new hires.

It seems that the team hasn’t left Bukkit completely yet. They are talking about new updates being made to Bukkit on Twitter so both bukkit and Minecraft should see many updates for the foreseeable future.