Today we launch a new compact hub to replace the old cylinder we have been using since 2013. The cylinder hub has evolved over the years with new additions, events, themes, leaderboards, Easter-eggs and ever changing mini-games (until most of them died eventually), but it is time to say goodbye. The new hub is set with a moodier theme, similar to the new survival spawn, and is more focused and easier to navigate (no more elevators) with Mario 64 styled portals leading to the three survival spawns, creative and the shop. The shop will for now simply be the old one but the idea is to eventually build a new one with new items. The remaining spots in the hub can eventually be filled with other activities, so there is room to grow. Oh, and we’ve plopped down some snow and particle generators in the new spawns for the season :).

Those who have logged out in the old cylinder hub will still be there but you can just type /hub to get to the new one, or use the portals which should remain functional for a while at least. The idea is to make the old hub available to visit in some way in the future for those good old nostalgic reasons, so you don’t have to set a home there ;).

We also want to bring attention to our recent 10-year anniversary and thank all the players who have joined our server during the last 10 years. Merry Christmas y’all.

Construction begins 5th July 2013.

Construction done

Christmas decoration

Halloween decoration

Final resting state

Today we’ve opened up a huge new area in survival to play around in, freshly generated in 1.19 so no more age old pre-explored caves and tiny mountains.

While starting over entirely would have been nice, we decided it would be even nicer to preserve the old worlds so old players might still find their homes the way they left them. So instead of a completely new world we opened up a massive new area instead. 3 times the size of the old world! This will also make it easier to navigate for players unfamiliar with the structure of our server, like what happened with Survival 2 (which by the way is still there), and will make more sense when it comes to nether portals.

Speaking of nether, we have also regenerated the nether to get rid of all the old generated areas nobody was actually using anyways. This way everybody will have a fresh start with all the new nether features added a couple of updates ago.

You can find the new survival spawn from the hub. This survival world will simply be called “Survival” from now on and will be the only major portal. The old spawn and survival 2 will still be accessible via the smaller portals to the sides. This should make the decision of which world to use easy.

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.

The new SkyWars map is now live on the server! It's called SkyIsland and it is a 4 player map with a bunch of islands to get to. You spawn on one of the four small islands and you'll have to quickly get your way to one of the other islands before the enemies do. Besides the island where you spawn on there are resource islands with everything from coal to diamonds, then there is the middle or central islands that are connected with bridges where there are chests, resources and real estate. This place is great if you get there fast. Here you'll be able to shoot almost everybody on the map due to it being right in the middle and stretched across the width of the map. There are also two sets of tower islands consisting almost only of stone which is a great place to setup your defenses and bring the fight to you.

We also made a few minor tweaks to the classes as they were pretty unbalanced before. Now there are three classes to choose from. The first one is the default one which gives you a simple starter bow, wooden sword and pickaxe. The second one is focused on archery and gives you a stronger bow and more arrows but won't give you a sword. Then there is the still debated extra life class which gives you one extra life in exchange for all starter gear. You'll start with nothing. This class also costs 838kr ($100) (in-game currency) to activate at the moment of posting this.

We are still testing and changing this minigame a bit and we hope you all enjoy the new content and changes we have added. But nothing is perfect so please do give us your feedback on the topic through Discord or any of our other contact methods :)

This is just a short update to tell you that we have now added the minigame Skywars! This minigame has been requested to be included for a long time now and we have now finally come around to adding it!

For the few who don’t know, Skywars is a PVP game mode were each player spawns on their own island which are all circled around a big center island. Every player has to get resources, mine, craft and build to survive and eliminate the other players. You can sit tight and hide or build your way to the center island, or other player’s islands and take the victory with pure strength. How you play it up to you. It is kind of like Survival Games except everybody is closer to each other and you have to build and mine to survive.

Interested? Head to the hub /hub and go to the Skywars lobby on the first floor. We currently have one map but more are on their way, probably.

In other news we have rebuild the entire permissions system to fix a bunch of problems that were appearing recently. One of them being the Discord chat. The Discord chat is now finally reconnected and you can now once again talk to people on the server through Discord on Discord our server, on the text-channel #minecraftchat. If you haven’t already, you can join our Discord using this link: discord.me/asp . One of the other things we have fixed is Spleef. Spleef should once again work a little better and not trap people in the arena, whoops. Hopefully it won’t break again ;)