Howdy Folks,

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve updated the blog. A lot has been going on – and I’ve been in a bit of a burnout period. Thankfully, over the last week or two – I seem to be fully back in the swing of things, and I’ve made some major changes to the server to hopefully improve your experience!

Our Own Proxy – FINALLY…

We have been dealing with proxy issues for a long time. Our first proxy was from TCPShield – and they were pretty decent for awhile, but eventually we started having serious issues where it would just kick folks or not let people on at all. Then other times there’d be massive lag spikes for everyone from proxy to the main server. I switched us to a newer proxy from Neoprotect – and it was a good bit more stable – but everyone had horrible ping, and the free tier doesn’t allow more than one of their “proxy servers” to connect to our server.

So, I finally gave in – and got my own proxy server in the US-East server block in Ashburn, Virginia. It has been pretty solid. It also allows me to do some really cool stuff like set up fallback servers, and bedrock support (See more further down in this post). I still have some work to do on it. Right now I am working on a way to properly return folks from the fallback limbo servers after the main server comes back up. However, it’s so far been pretty solid – even for folks outside the USA.

Bedrock Edition Support (Experimental)

With the addition of the new proxy, we are finally adding bedrock support! Granted it is very limited – and very experimental – I will not be offering full support or bug fixes for bedrock – as it is inheritantly kind of broken. Especially with chat formatting and menus, but the basics should work just fine. You can join on any bedrock client by using the normal IP address (play.minecraft.country) and the default bedrock UDP port of 19132. You will receive a warning upon entering the server explaining limitations.

Bedrock accounts have a . before their name to denote that they are on bedrock (This is important for plugins to be able to properly track authentication and bedrock UUIDs). However, You can LINK your Java and Bedrock account to achieve full account parity (Both accounts will be under your Java username/save). You can find out all the details on the new bedrock support documentation page – which I will be updating over the next few days.

New Optimized Server Software

This one isn’t available quite yet, but I will hopefully be adding it shortly after this post. Our previous server software appears to be abandoned, and so we’ve been using PurPur – which is decent, but when we get a fair amount of folks on – we end up with occasional performance issues. I’ve finally found a highly optimized paid fork of paper – which promises significant performance gains (I’ve done some digging and heard good things about this particular fork). I’ve made the purchase, and will be installing as soon as our numbers drop a little so that I don’t interrupt anyone playing on the server.

And a big ole thank you!

Thank you folks for making this server what it is. We’ve always had a fluctuating community, but I am very proud that everyone seems to enjoy most of their time on the server. I appreciate your patronage – and your continued support. Have fun!