Sudo reboot -> Failed to talk to init daemon

I didn't remember screen having a daemon mode, apparently it does. Change the screen line for the following:

screen -dmS minecraft.start /home/phirephoenix/minecraft/bukkitserver/start_server.sh

The new parameter -dmS "Start as daemon: Screen session in detached mode.", which is the combination of -d -m and the -S that you are already using.

Yes, this is how you traditionally tell a regular init system what state to boot into. If you're running sysv-init (or pretty much any widely used init system other than systemd), you can put a number between 1 and 5 at the end of the kernel arguments and it will boot into that run level (1 is always single-user mode, the others are system defined, 3 or 4 is what most Linux distros have conventionally used as the default). If you're using systemd, you can pass single or emergency at the end of the kernel arguments to boot into those modes respectively.

Using this mechanism for passing arbitrary arguments however is somewhat difficult because the kernel does the absolute minimum of parsing, which means in particular that:

• Arguments with whitespace in them can't be passed at all, because the kernel doesn't parse quoted strings (that is, 'some string' gets parsed as two arguments 'some and string').
• You can't reference any environment variables at all, because the kernel doesn't do variable substitution (which is normally done by the shell you're running the command from before it even starts the command).
• In general, the arguments have to be correctly interpretable under the POSIX C locale (essentially US ASCII), which throws internationalization out the window unless you want to use something like base64 or punycode.
• There is an upper limit on how much data can be passed in kernel arguments, but I forget what it is.

These limitations combined are why you can't find anything on Google about doing this type of thing, no systems integration engineer in their right mind does it, because it's far more effort to work around the above limitations than it is to just write a script containing all the required arguments and call that instead.