First, I’d like to welcome any new players to the server. Hopefully, if you’ve found this post, you’re looking to be more involved in the community, and looking forward to the future of the server. Well, let me go over a few things on the horizon. The biggest thing I’m looking at currently is the update to version 1.20.2 of Minecraft. Unfortunately, Mojang has gone into a pre-release version just as I finish launching the server – but that’s how it usually works. We will cover that, as well as some quality-of-life additions that will be coming to the server!

The Big (Small) Update…

The 1.20.2 update will bring an increased spawn rate for diamonds. Unfortunately, most of our map is already pre-rendered. This means you will need to go outside of the previously rendered area (Which is a very large area – check the online map) to start generating chunks where diamond spawns more frequently. This is to be expected and is typical server behavior. There’s not much I can do to help that – but it’s something players should be aware of. It complicates things further that we use a plugin that will allow players on updated clients to join our server (Even if the server itself is on a previous version). It’s the same technology that allows you to join with older versions of the game. I don’t want players to think the chunk rendering has updated to 1.20.2 and then run outside of the pre-render area, and then be disappointed when the server is still rendering based on the 1.20.1 update. These are issues we will confront whenever that release is available.

Upcoming features…

Part of working on a server is the constant flood of ideas and things you want to implement. The basics of the server changes are laid out – and I don’t want to do anything else major for the time being. Instead, I will be tweaking values and adding quality-of-life features. The first one will be a new item in the main server menu. It will allow you to toggle an ignore sleep mode. If enabled, When night arrives, you will automatically be counted as “in a bed”. Let’s say that you and 2 other people are on the server. If you have sleep ignore mode on, and both of the other players lay in a bed (at night), it will count you as “in a bed” and automatically switch to daytime.

This is great if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t carry a bed around – but doesn’t mind skipping the night. This system will essentially allow people to not be a part of the decision to skip nighttime, but it also gives you the ability to toggle sleep ignore mode off, and complete any mob fighting nighttime activities you may have planned! If everyone on the server has sleep ignore mode on, only one person needs to go to bed to skip nighttime. Hopefully, this explanation made sense. I may put together a short video showcasing how it works – once it’s ready to go. EDIT: This has now been implemented. It is on the main server menu.

Another thing to consider is a longer daytime. I wanted this from the start – but it’s a tricky thing to implement. I’d like to make the daytime about 2-3x longer than normal and leave the nighttime the same. The issue is that almost all plugins end up breaking the daytime tick cycle, and the sky will oftentimes get “glitchy” from the tick rate change. I think ideally it would pause mid-day for the extra time, and then continue the regular cycle. I wish this was something vanilla Minecraft would have already implemented at this point.

Documentation, Documentation, Documentation…

Another focus is going to be creating my own documentation videos for the server. You may have noticed on the plugins page that there are documentation/example videos specifically for the server. This is in an effort to make the wall of text a little simpler to understand. I despise reading documentation for servers – and hope in the future to have video alternatives for everything. On my list currently:

• Server Introduction Video
• Claims System Video
• Trade System Video

There will be more, but you have to start somewhere.

Hopefully, this post wasn’t too wordy. It’s really just a place for me to put down my thoughts and try to determine the direction of the server. As always, I encourage you to comment and tell me what you think.