I’m exhausted, so I’ll keep this brief. The fantastic fellows at spigotmc.org managed to get around all the legal issues and produce an update to support the largest Minecraft update thus far. Many tests, bug fixes, and workarounds later, we are now running 1.8 smoothly. Check out the extensive changelog to see what’s new in Minecraft 1.8. There’s something for everyone. I found myself a furry little friend on the way to my house. If you’re interested in the new stone blocks, head on over to the new outworld. You may even be able to find an Ocean Monument. I recommend everyone install the updated Optifine for much smoother gameplay. I look forward to talking about what we plan to do with all these new features in the coming days.

It’s been a while since my last State of the Server post back in April. So before I talk about the future, let’s see what you may have missed in the last 7 months.

Survival Updates

New Bavaria by The_Vicar

• New recipes — cracked stone brick, coarse dirt
• Re-enabled sponge behavior (some shops have them); Drying is not required until 1.8.
• Disabled block damage from creeper explosions above 62 y
• Halloween event that included mob head drops and new ridable zombie/skeleton horses
• Disabled minecart dispenser parking if the dispenser is powered
• Tilrasmon built the north-south roads in Omega to the borders of the world — a great addition to the transportation infrastructure on that world. I’ve started the work on the east road so that more people can be connected.
• The coin shop is re-stocked to the brim. Just want to get that out there.

Frog Park Updates

Museum of Modern Art & Pants by froggerooh

• New courses — Jungletree and Nethour
• New massive last-man-standing PVP game — Showdown — with 14 unique classes to choose from, and 11 new arenas.
• New minigame by Mortiseraphim and myself — 7 Seconds to Live — where you have seven seconds until you blow up, but you can extend your time by running over ores over several different arenas.
• New TNT Run minigame created by myself and gothem8. Survive the longest while the floor falls away and explodes.
• New gigantic modern art museum built almost entirely by froggerooh. It contains several cakes, a couple challenge courses, some secrets, and a pair of pants.
• New custom spectator mode for PVP games. “/pvp spectate <arena_name>”
• New explorable structures to discover and get cakes.
• Countless tweaks and improvements.

I also updated our server support process and rewards to pay for server costs. If you’ve donated in the past, you’ve been upgraded to this new system. This is still a work in progress, but it now adheres to Mojang’s guidelines better.

Looking Towards the Future (ie. When 1.8?)

It looks like the Spigot team is doing the hard work necessary to update Bukkit to 1.8 — a massive undertaking given the extra challenges involved. They have a working build and private testing went well on their servers. However, there isn’t a public build available yet. Once they release something I’ll be testing it against our server setup. Rest assured, it’s a high priority for me. So when will that be? Unless something goes wrong, it should be within this month!

Moving forward we’ll be needing more staff. If you’re at all interested in helping, please read up on how you can contribute.

Continue reading →

In addition to having costumes for you and your pets, there’s a few other treats on the server this Halloween.

We now have pumpkin mobs running around. They might not be tougher, but they stick around during daylight hours. So watch out! If you kill any mobs during the next week, you might be treated with a head drop. (1-5% drop rate for most mobs) This will include PLAYER HEADS! Yes, player heads will drop 50% of the time from PVP deaths in survival worlds. You just need to fight in a pvp enabled region. If you don’t know where one is, you can use the Colosseum in the West of Final City.

Lastly, any horses spawned (including natural spawns, breeding, and spawn eggs) during the next week will be skeleton or zombie horses! This is your only chance this year to make your own spooky horse and the first opportunity ever on this server. Remember, you can transfer or share ownership of horses.

From the windy spire on the mountain-top, to the spider infested cabin deep in the woods; from the moaning in the swampland graveyard, to the dripping in the dark dungeon below. What are some of the spookiest places on the server? Share the location in the comments. If you’re unsure whether it’s spookiness level qualifies or if it requires a certain perspective, post it anyway! I wouldn’t be playing Minecraft if I didn’t have imagination. I’ll pick some, take some spooky photos, and share those in a follow-up post. If you fancy some photography of your own, share those too!

This year we’re using LibsDisguises, which gives us a broader range of options. Above you can see me using “/d player Dinnerbone setskin PseudoKnight”. You can disguise as almost all entities with a wide variety of options. It’s enabled in all worlds but Frog Park. You can even disguise other mobs! This is especially fun with horses and dogs.

Commands:
“/d <entity> [options]” (disguise yourself)
“/u” (undisguise yourself)
“/dentity <entity> [options]” (disguise another mob)
“/undentity” (undisguise another mob)
“/dhelp [entity]” (get available options for an entity type)

Examples:
“/d irongolem setviewselfdisguise false” (don’t display the irongolem disguise to yourself, so you can go in first person)
“/dentity cow setcustomname Dinnerbone” (set another mob as an upside down cow)
“/dentity player PseudoKnight” (set another mob disguised as me)
“/d horse setbaby true setstyle whitefield setcolor black” (set yourself as a black and white baby horse)

Have a happy Halloween!

UPDATE 2014-11-05: Disguises have now been disabled.

You know how in the last post I said “Calm down. Everything’s going to be fine.” Well, it turns out that may not be true.

A week ago someone with enough leverage decided they didn’t want everything to be fine. As I previously mentioned, a few of the major Bukkit developers decided to tear everything down, but failed. Mojang came and saved the day. There’s only one problem. There are code contributions from countless authors in Bukkit. One of the major contributors, upon learning that Bukkit was owned by Mojang, decided to legally enforce his copyright. So he sent a DMCA notice to any sites that distributed his code. The only comment I’ve found from Mojang on this issue was this post explaining their point of view and claiming the “allegations are therefore wholly unfounded”. There has been nothing since then, so clearly it’s not so cut and dry. In the mean time no one can access or update Bukkit. Everything’s in limbo.

So, the community stepped up, leveraging many developers growing distrust of Mojang and years of frustration with Bukkit’s organization, to work together on a new API for servers. It is called Sponge. This would take a LOT of work to accomplish, but would avoid some> of the legal issues with Bukkit as well as learn from some of the more fundamental issues with Bukkit’s API. Obviously the situation isn’t ideal, but the community is trying to adapt as fast as it can in a difficult situation.

This brings me to yesterday’s rumor that Microsoft is in talks to buy Mojang/Minecraft for $2 billion. At first I dismissed it outright. Notch has consistently shown resistance to this kind of buy out, as well as a distrust of large corporations like Facebook and Microsoft’s influence on the PC gaming space. However, this rumor isn’t going away and there was no response from Mojang. And as more small details trickled in, I began to doubt my intuition. I hope this isn’t the case, but if Microsoft controls the future of Minecraft, we have a problem. The mod community in part depends on Mojang’s good intentions. If Microsoft decided to enforce their copyright and EULA more strictly, this would nearly destroy the modding and possibly server community. Even if they didn’t, the mere threat of such litigation would be enough to stifle much of the work that has already been done. The golden days of Minecraft on PC could be over.

I’ve been waiting to see how things play out before I made this post. But while I know you may have missed the Bukkit fiasco, it’s doubtful you haven’t heard of the rumor of the Mojang purchase. All of this is following one of the longest development times for a Minecraft update (over 10 months), making you wonder: when will we ever see 1.8? I really don’t know. It’s frustrating and sad, but as always I remain hopeful when there is doubt.