In the last few hours there’s been some “going-ons” that are causing a lot of bad speculation, misinformation, and doomsaying regarding the future of Minecraft and CraftBukkit, which is what most servers run. Kindly ignore these overreactions, which are not uncommon. The drama started when the core Bukkit team decided to halt development, due to some misguided fear of Mojang enforcing the EULA despite their close cooperation and mutual benefit. But since Bukkit was bought by Mojang some time ago and in fact contains much of their code anyway, Dinnerbone of Mojang promptly announced that he’s going to continue Bukkit’s development. He’s already started updating it for 1.8, which will be no small feat. It’s too early to tell if this will mean we’ll get 1.8 earlier or later than we would have otherwise, but I’m hopeful that Dinnerbone’s familiarity with 1.8 as well as Craftbukkit will help the process along.

Notable changes in 1.7.6, 1.7.7, 1.7.8, 1.7.9, and 1.7.10:

• I’ve got nothing.

These updates only really add support for features that we can’t use (yet), and the switch to UUIDs (for the forthcoming name-changing) have caused headaches for both admins and programmers. For example, before I was able to add an offline player to the whitelist with “/perm player setgroup PseudoKnight Everyone”. Now I need to get a player’s UUID and use “/perm player setgroup 617a67e5-7988-4645-af56-42c770a6dda5 Everyone”.

So why did I update? Eventually I had to take the plunge to take advantage of plugin updates as well as 1.8. So I waited for Forge support and for plugin authors to fix some major issues caused by the UUID changes. It took me a few hours to sort out some unpredictable bugs, it seems to be running smoothly now (minus an extension). We’re technically on 1.7.9, but we’ll be on 1.7.10 shortly and the clients are compatible.

Our server costs are modest — about $40/month — and they’ve been largely funded by supporters. However, when those funds fall short, ScottyD covers the bills. Our supporters get some things in return, but nothing major. But now a few things are changing. First, ScottyD is going through a work transition, and while he can cover the costs for the next billing cycle, it would be nice if he didn’t have to. Secondly, Mojang made some clarifications on what is and isn’t acceptable for server funding. While I don’t believe our current system violates the spirit of what they’re trying to do, I want to respectfully adhere to the strictest interpretation of their rules. So, moving forward we will no longer give supporters some of our own materials through Frog Park coins, and we can no longer call them donations since we want to give something back.

Instead, when you help pay for server costs, you also get cosmetic “perks” according to the cumulative amount you have paid. This is to be compatible with our previous donation system, so all previous donations are being converted to the appropriate tier. Currently I’ve only created two tier perks, but more are forthcoming and will be retroactively applied. Accordingly with Mojang rules, all current and future perks will be cosmetic.

• $5+ tier
  You get a green name and icon showing that you’ve supported the server.
• $10+ tier
  You can shoot off randomly generated fireworks in Frog Park.
• $15+ tier
  You leave a trail and death locations on the live map in survival.

There will soon be a new page called “Support Our Server” in the above menu where you can see the current tiers, perks, server costs, and payment methods (and maybe a progress indicator of some kind, though that might be challenging), but we wanted to make a post to note the changes and so that people know that it’s a good time to contribute. Until I can setup a more appropriate payment method on the page, you can pay through this link.

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, please comment below.

[Update #1] Scotty informed me that only 14 hours after sending out his email to past donators, we’re already set for another six months, thanks to two generous contributors.
[Update #2] Apparently we’re up to nine months now. Wow, guys!

This small but dense course is comprised of many subtle height changes that contribute to a unique course challenge. This is mostly due to the prevalent use of cocoa beans in various configurations. It’s enjoyable, but fairly hard.

Screenshot by Raymond_II

A couple of recipes were added in today’s 1.8 snapshot, so I added them to our server ahead of time. Using a combination of gravel and dirt, you can now craft “coarse dirt”, which is the dirt where grass cannot grow. You can also bake stone brick to make cracked stone brick.

To facilitate coarse dirt, I also made it drop itself when you break it. This means you can also get coarse dirt from mega taiga biomes, where this stuff naturally generates. There does not appear to be a way to make coarse dirt back into regular dirt in the snapshot, so be careful for now. All coarse dirt will get the new coarse dirt texture when we update to 1.8 in the future.