As you might already know from the update channel in Discord (join our Discord btw, way more news than here) the server has recently been on a path of updating one step at a time from 1.16 to 1.19. That journey is now finally over as we’ve finally arrived at 1.19.

The road to 1.19
This has been a really hard update as the server was barely holding together with duct-tape and strings and needed some serious cleanup and rework.

The first update, the one with the very long maintenance downtime, was 1.17. In it a huge amount of dead meat like broken mini-games and dead plugins was cut, and more importantly it separated creative from survival into a separate server (still the same network though!). In this update a lot of player data had to be migrated and converted (a very slow progress), a lot of features had to be let go and new features had to take its place (hence the migrations) and corrupt databases had to be mended.

These issues were only made worse by the separation of the creative world as there were now suddenly two separate servers that needed a lot of mirrored changed to the configurations and software with a bunch of small differences here and there to make it work for creative. Things like player homes that were made in the main server showed up in player’s home list in the creative server but didn’t actually work, which would cause confusion. The main server homes had to be removed from the creative server and vice versa, but after doing that everybody’s homes were suddenly under the bedrock, great. For some reason ‘y’ is an invalid key in YML while ‘x’ and ‘z’ aren’t (stupid PHP YML parser, pff). And if that wasn’t enough all players that were in creative when they logged out now had to be moved to the hub, set to survival and have their inventories cleared (sorry about that), otherwise they would keep all their creative items when going to survival. This took basically a full day to fix even with a purpose-built script as the player data isn’t exactly stored in an easily manageable format, and multiple sources had to be used to definitively figure out where a player was last seen at.

Anyhow, I won’t go into all the details and hiccups I encountered but you get the point. Luckily the following two updates (1.18 and 1.19) were now a lot easier thanks to all the work done for 1.17. There wasn’t as much broken glass left on the floor so to say.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why we had to move the creative world to a separate server: A lot of players figured out how to glitch items from creative to survival. This was already a moderate issue for many years and we tried to patch as many holes as possible but now the inventory system, which was already iffy, broke down entirely in 1.17 so something had to be done. I had planned this separation for a long time already but now, together will the big cleanup of the server I was doing anyways, felt like the perfect time to finally do it.

What changed?
Not much visibly as a lot of the work was behind the scenes. The biggest noticeable change is the creative server (including the before mentioned clearing of your inventory if you logged out there for more than a month ago, sorry) and the removal of the PVP survival server. Chat is now shared between servers and a new portal and warp system is implemented. In creative, players can now open chests and crafting utilities, which was previously blocked due to cheating. Everybody now has double the amount of homes (actually same amount but one set per server) and the render distance has been tripled when possible.

There is probably a lot more but I can’t remember them all at the moment and the rest were all uninteresting back-end changes.

The future
So, what’s next? Well the idea right now is to fix a new hub (one that isn’t riddled in dead mini-game portals), a new survival world generated in 1.19 (probably just a huge newly generated area in survival 1 with a new spawn) and to allow Bedrock Edition players to join (still have to look into this, but looks promising). We might also have to rework the entire donation perk system at some point as they are currently kind of all over the place with functionality that no longer works and overpowered commands that don’t make a lot of sense.

Any new updates should now also be easier to do and should have a much smaller delay thanks to most of the bottlenecks being gone now, so hopefully we won’t be stuck in 1.19 for 2 years.

The last thing that comes to mind is the 10-year anniversary of the server that will be coming up in October, I think. Would be fun to do something special with that, but we’ll see. If you have any suggestions please message us in Discord.