haloman30

Changed Status to Fixed

Changed Status to Closed

Changed Status to Closed

Changed Status to Closed

Changed Status to Confirmed

Toast.

baguette

So, last night the forums and main website went offline for a little while. The reason? It wasn't just some typical maintenance this time - rather, it was a frantic effort to try and restore corrupted SQL data. What happened is that last night, my power flickered for just a mere second - and this would end up creating a nightmare scenario that I'd have to untangle. The webserver runs out of my house of course, and the power flicker caused it to briefly shut off. As a result of this power flicker, the SQL server used by the cPanel/WHM VM that hosts the websites themselves became corrupted - and I was initially unsure if I'd be able to get anything back. Luckily, it turns out that we had an automatic backup from just a couple months ago. Along with that, I was able to drag and drop the current databases into a clean mysql folder - and most of them turned out to be undamaged. A handful of tables were refusing to load - as part of the restoration process required a file called ibdata1 from the backup, and several new tables have been created since then that didn't exist before. These tables were the ones that failed to load. Chaotic United's forums didn't suffer from those tables much. Only one table was in that state, and it was just a table for basic caching - nothing important. Elaztek's website however had tables for Stratagem that were added - which is what we use over there (and in CU as well) to track various bugs, features, and overall progress for various projects. Thankfully, I was able to start up the old, damaged mysql folder with innodb_force_recovery set to 5 - and was able to then dump the stratagem tables for Elaztek, start up the clean and good mysql folder, and reimport them - and it worked. At that point, all tables in all databases were found to be clean with no obvious errors, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. We were extremely lucky to escape this situation unharmed, however it's still partially my fault. Not the power outage, of course - but the fact that the most recent backup was still two months old. You see, WHM (the software under which Chaotic United and Elaztek's websites run within, and used within virtually any webhost plan out there) can (and is) configured to run automatic backups. It was previously set to run backups every other day, once a week, and once a month together. The idea is that we'd have numerous backups available, going back up to 6 months. Then, in the event that a situation like this were to happen - no sweat, just restore the backup from yesterday or the day before. The issue is that there are perpetual disk space issues that I've continued to struggle with, and as such the machine that hosts the webserver is critically low on disk space just like everything else. Backups don't get created if there's less than 5% available - which, as of right now, there isn't. The good news is that Michael is going to help me solve this in the short term - since my long term solution is still nearly a year away. He's going to help me get a UPS for the machine in order to avoid any future power failures, as well as get me a spare 6TB hard disk that I can use to free up some breathing room on both my main PC as well as the webserver. This ought to ensure that this wont be an issue going forward, rather than having this be a potential risk for the next 12 months or so. The other good news is that, once again - we managed to come out the other side effectively unscathed. All data is intact, including the data for Elaztek's stratagem. All databases have been checked over and everything seems to be in order. But of course - in the offchance that you find something that seems as if it could be a sign of database corruption, let me know immediately. Other than that, well - I'm sorry. I apologize for putting us in this situation to begin with, and I'm going to do everything I can to ensure that it never happens again.

* Updated VentureChat from 2.22.8 to 2.23.3 * Hub server no longer runs under MCMyAdmin * Redesigned rank icons for donation store * Updated icons used in tab list to match classic cyan color revert - Removed Killerteddy

That isn't why you were banned, at least not entirely. It was primarily because you were spamming the gif/video that caused people's Discord clients to instantaneously crash upon so much as viewing the channel - including sending those out to many members of the Discord and generally being kind of a dick to at least myself in direct messages (as well as continued crash gif spam). Please re-submit your appeal with this information accounted for, as you haven't really appealed for the thing that got you banned in the first place.

* Fixed an issue where PlotSquared wasn't able to check permissions correctly * Fixed HardcoreDarkness being impoperly configured on Age of Rebirth server - Removed Killerteddy

+ Added MobMoney to Beta 1.7.3 (only block money support is available at this time) * Fixed solder subdomain not pointing to the correct server, thus causing players to be unable to download the Age of Rebirth modpack * Set EMC value for Basalt Cobblestone to 1 on Age of Rebirth * Set EMC value for Marble Cobblestone to 1 on Age of Rebirth * Set EMC value for Gray Limestone Cobblestone to 1 on Age of Rebirth - Removed Killerteddy

* Re-started the MC donation store * Updated Main MC server to 1.17.1 * Re-started Age of Rebirth (Modded MC) server * Reset Age of Rebirth world with a new seed * Recompiled LWCX to be compatiable with MySQL 8.0 driver * Finished migration of main MC server to new dedicated server * Updated HawkEye from 1.0.4b to 1.0.5 * HawkEye on Beta 1.7.3 now uses HikariCP instead of its own built-in connection pool * Fixed votes from vote sites not issuing rewards ingame * Fixed an issue where the server icon for the Main MC server would sometimes not display in the server list * Fixed topic thumbnails not displaying correctly in Chaotic United - 2021 theme - Removed Killerteddy

Hey, everyone! A whole ton of stuff has been going on over the past few days. For the most part, it's just technical stuff - but there's still some genuine new features in some cases as well. Dedicated Server 2: The Unexpected Sequel First and foremost, the biggest technical change that's gonna enable a lot of stuff going forward is the migration to a new dedicated server. A little over a year ago, you may remember a post where I announced the migration to a brand new 32GB dedicated server that I was paying for myself. At the time, this was more than enough to handle all of our services with plenty of breathing room. However, as time went on, things started expanding. First, we actually started hosting the MC server for another community called Ruin Community. For those unfamiliar with them, it's one of a few MC servers that I played on back in 2012 while browsing to try and find a good server to make my home - which eventually ended up being Chaotic United. The other two being Ruin Community and Legendary Island of the Lost Treasures. Ruin had closed well before the old CU did, but Legendary Island actually persisted into 2015 before it eventually closed. However, as you all are most likely aware - I've got a compulsive attachment to things, and to the preservation of history. As they became available, I've been purchasing the domains associated with both Ruin and Legendary Island. In the offchance that some of the old members (or staff) wanted to try and check things out, I left a message with contact details on the homepage of Ruin's website. One day, I was contacted that the Ruin Community folk were attempting to re-unite and have a sort of reunion server to get everyone together again. Part of that effort was to host a private, whitelist-only MC server for the old Ruin folk - and I, being the one holding their original domain, happily offered to not only point the domain to their website, but also to point their Minecraft IP to their server as well as host it for them - no strings attached. I normally have a hard, unwavering rule about advertising other MC servers - as well as staff helping to host other servers - however, seeing as this was a server from my own childhood, it was a domain that I'd already owned for years prior, and that the server wasn't even a public server - I figured that this was a reasonable approach. If you do happen to be a member of the old Ruin Community and want to find them again, check our Partners page to join their Discord. Note that their server is NOT for any casual folk - it's intended for members of the original Ruin Community and nobody else. Anyway, with that history lesson out of the way - the other, more significant expansion was the recent move to BungeeCord. I had far underestimated the resource requirements of moving to BungeeCord - and it was at this point that Modded MC had to actually be briefly shut down, as the 32GB dedicated server wasn't enough to handle Ruin, Modded, and all the Bungee servers. However, with Modded offline, everything else was able to run without issue. That was, at least, until 1.17 - where for whatever reason, the server went from having 4-6GB free with all gamemodes online, to having 3-4 free with Minigames and the Waiting Room offline. Having modded shut off was one thing - as it never got a ton of attention. But having some of our gamemodes offline is a nonstarter. Theoretically I could tell Ruin to host their own server, but even then we'd still be at our limit - assuming that'd even do it. Plus, who else is going to be willing to either host a server with full access free of charge, or be willing to pay a monthly bill to keep a barely-played MC server up? So, instead - we made the decision to upgrade. Our old server was a SoYouStart dedicated server with 32GB of memory. Our new one is a proper OVH server - with all the modern bells and whistles. Automatic bill renewal so I can't accidentally forget to pay the bill, newer and more modern features, and in our case - an upgrade to 64GB of memory. As of now, our MC server, Ruin's server, and the donation store have been fully moved over. And of course, with this newfound freedom, we've got some new things we can do - such as... Return of Modded MC Such as turning Age of Rebirth back online! Finally! Not much has changed since the last time it was started - however, since some users had previously destroyed any hope of normal progression through more EMC generation exploits, as well as the fact that it's been down since last year - we've opted to do a world reset. The previous world is currently in the process of being archived and uploaded to the download center, and once it is you'll be able to revisit the old world anytime. Beta 1.7.3 Upgrades In addition to bringing Modded MC back online, we've also done some upgrades and updates to our Beta 1.7.3 server. Up until now, the Beta server has been kind of the forgotten child of Chaotic United. It had no real integration with the rest of the community, and barely anyone ever played on it. Even features that have been standard on our main MC server either took far too long to come to Beta (land claiming), or simply never arrived at all (dynmap). Well, thankfully, all that has finally changed. A few days ago, a user who goes by leow showed up and, initially, abused a duplication glitch and spammed diamond blocks all over the place. However, rather than stopping there and calling it a day, he reached out to me and offered to point me on how to fix it. Turns out there's a whole other world of Beta 1.7.3 servers that has been quietly brewing just out of my sight. There's a modern fork of CraftBukkit 1060 called Project Poseidon - which includes several feature enhancements, bugfixes, and optimizations. He also pointed me to a Discord centered around development for classic Minecraft - where I was able to track down and locate something I've been wanting to add to Beta for ages. Discord integration. Yes - as of now, we have a #b173-chatlogs channel on Discord, which works just like #mc-chatlogs and #rebirth-chatlogs - you can see when users join and leave, and you can see their chat messages and chat with them through that channel. But that's not all. Since Poseidon is based on CB1060 instead of our previous CB1000 build, we were able to finally introduce dynmap to Beta 1.7.3. It works just like it does on the main server - where you can see different perspectives as well as see outlines of land claims and worldguards. Another thing that we've done to hopefully ensure Beta runs as smooth as possible (as well as to allow for enough disk space for dynmap to work), is that we've moved it onto the new 64GB dedicated server. The old version of dynmap has no support for MySQL tile storage - and the VPS it was hosted on (which, fun fact - is the same VPS which hosted our own MC server for a while back during the Nuclear District days) only had 40GB of disk space - not enough for all those livemap tiles. Our dedicated server on the other hand has 2TB - which is more than enough to handle some livemap tiles. With all these changes, we've also decided to perform a world reset for Beta as well. The last reset was in 2019, so it was well past time for a reset anyways. Along with that, we wanted to introduce a world border to help keep the filesize down (and to prevent people from going to the Far Lands and crashing the whole server) - and doing this on an existing world could have made existing builds inaccessible. We plan to do a handful of other minor improvements over the coming days, most notably fixing the persistent crashing issue that happens after a while by having the server restart every 24 hours. Valheim Migration Lastly, and least notably, our Valheim server has been moved away from the old Microsoft Azure VPS and onto a new server. The IP address listed on the website and Discord has been updated, though no other significant changes have been made outside of that. With all this stuff going on, we hope that all of this will be just the start of a new beginning for Chaotic United. Whether or not it'll end up being one is yet to be seen (history unfortunately doesn't bode well for that prediction) - but for now, expect this to be the first step of many yet to come. Stay tuned.2

Some of the items in this changelog were introduced within the past 1-2 days. + Added new livemap page at http://livemap.chaoticunited.net (modifying dynmap's own web html page breaks during updates apparently) + Added livemap link to navigation menu + Added plugin to Beta 1.7.3: Dynmap + Added plugin to Beta 1.7.3: Announcement + Added plugin to Beta 1.7.3: DiscordCore + Added plugin to Beta 1.7.3: DiscordChatBridge * Recompiled Vault for 1.17 * Fixed Craftconomy3 recompilation not being compatible with existing API hooks * Fixed MobMoney messages not including the word 'Dollar' in pickup messages * Fixed economy interactions (MobMoney pickups) in Survival and Semi-Vanilla not working * Fixed crates not being available in SkyBlock * Updated livemap links on website and ingame to new URL * Updated MC Beta 1.7.3 server to use Project Poseidon (fork of CB1060) instead of stock CB1000 * Beta 1.7.3 server now has a livemap (http://b173.chaoticunited.net:8123) * Beta 1.7.3 server now has Discord integration (#b173-chatlogs) * Moved Beta 1.7.3 server to new dedicated server - Disabled plugin on Beta 1.7.3: MCMA_compat (BukkitCompat) - Removed Killerteddy

+ Added plugin: IridiumSkyblock + Added plugin: Themis * Updated to Java 16 * Updated all servers to MC 1.17 * Updated to PaperMC 1.17 #71 * Reverted custom hex color to &3 in most in-game uses (not all plugins support hex colors, so changing back to ensure consistency) * Fixed an issue where the vanilla join/leave messages would show in addition to bungeecord global join/leave messages * Updated Citizens from 2.0.27-b2166 to * Updated Dynmap from 3.1-beta5 to 3.2-beta1 * Updated LWCX from 2.2.6 to 2.2.8-dev * Updated Multiverse-Core from 4.1.0 to 4.3.0 * Updated WorldGuard from 7.0.4 to 7.0.6-SNAPSHOT * Updated WorldEdit from 7.2.2-dist to 7.2.6-SNAPSHOT * Updated VeinMiner from 1.15.1 to 1.17.9 * Updated CustomCrafting from 1.6.3.0 to 1.6.6.0.1f * Updated WolfyUtilities from 1.6.1.2 to 1.7.1.0 * Updated ChatControl to 5.9.1 * Updated PlotSquared to 6.0.5 * Updated EditableSign to 7.5.1 * Updated LogBlock * Updated VentureChat * Updated ServerSigns * Updated ProtocolLib * Updated LibsDisguises * Recompiled Craftconomy3 against 1.17 * Changed memory allocation of BungeeCord from 4096M to 1024M * Changed memory allocation of Hub (cu) from 4096M to 2048M * Increased Semi-Vanilla world border from 6000 to 10000 * Increased Survival world border from 6000 to 10000 - Waiting Room (hub) server is temporarily offline - Removed plugin: uSkyBlock - Removed plugin: WitherAntiCheat - Removed plugin: Tennis - Removed plugin: Soccer (Football) - Removed plugin: PartMan - Temporarily disabled plugin: CratesPlus - Temporarily disabled plugin: MagicStuff - Disabled CustomHeads as it does not currently function under 1.17 (will be re-added once it gets updated) - Removed Killerteddy

Hey, everyone! Our MC server has just been updated to 1.17! Surprisingly, it didn't take too long compared to past updates - only a couple weeks from the initial release. For the most part, the server is unchanged from 1.16 - however, there are a few key changes to go over. Website Updates This is a fairly minor bit, but still worth mentioning. A couple days ago we quietly updated our forums theme. Not much within the theme itself has changed, however we've done some adjustments to the logo design (for the first time since 2016). Compare these two icons - the left one being our previous Discord icon, and the right being its updated replacement. One thing we wanted to do was make a more cleaned-up version of the HD logo. You see, this specific recreation of the logo came all the way back from 2016, when I was only just learning how to do graphic design. It wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't fully faithful to the original logo either. It had a little more curvature than made sense and if you looked closely, you'd be able to see some imperfections. Since 2016, I've gotten a fair bit better at graphic design, and so I wanted to go back in and make a more faithful recreation of the logo - and at the same time, make it look just a little more fresh and line up with the current visual design by turning what used to be 2 flat colors into subtle gradients based off of those original colors. Top it all off with a drop shadow, and you've got an update that - in my opinion - manages to be both a more faithful recreation of the original logo, while still feeling fresh enough to not feel like some kind of crufty carryover. For those who might be unaware of this original logo, the only remaining image of that logo is this: If you can't tell, it's almost laughably low-resolution, and was pulled from the old CU forums in 2013. From 2014 to 2016, this is as good as we had to work with. It wasn't until 2016 - where I was finally able to both recreate the icon as a vector graphic and track down the original font used - that I was able to finally utilize a higher resolution version of that logo. There almost certainly was a higher resolution out there - but the only person likely to have it is the original designer - MikeStardust. He's not around anymore, but hey - he made that original logo all the way back then, and we're still more or less using it now - so he ought to get some credit. SkyBlock Reset Now, first up in regards to the server itself, we've ended up having to make a fairly significant change to SkyBlock. Our original plan was to keep all the worlds left unchanged until 1.18, and then perform all the fresh resets at the same time as the big world overhauls. Unfortunately, our old SkyBlock plugin, uSkyBlock, has no update to 1.17 as of yet - along with that, there's been several issues that have been persistent with that SkyBlock plugin for a while - most immediately the issue with Nether Portals not taking players to the right locations. So, we've decided to switch to a brand new SkyBlock plugin - one that seems to have a lot more active development, and which is already updated for 1.17. There's no way to migrate data from the old plugin to the new one, so this will require a world reset. The silver lining is that we won't need to reset SkyBlock come 1.18 - this new world will be retained through that update. We hope that this new plugin won't be too difficult to adjust to. Please bear with us as we all explore and learn this new SkyBlock plugin - there might be some issues here or there that crop up. If there are any, feel free to report them on our Bug Tracker. Cracked Support We have to talk about cracked support going forward. Despite my own personal belief that people really should have bought Minecraft at some point during the 10 years that CU has been around, I've made it a point to maintain CU's cracked support on the MC server - primarily because, well, we've always been cracked. Chaotic United's MC server began life as a cracked server, and that support persisted even through Nuclear District. We haven't advertised it as a feature, and premium players (people who own a copy of MC) don't have to /login or /register, but it's been left in for the few cracked users we may still have from time to time. This is something that could potentially change going forward. Early on, cracked support wasn't really too difficult to maintain. It never got in the way. AutoIn helped ensure that skins were forwarded and that premium users never had to mess around with login commands. However, over time, things have somewhat degraded a bit and cracked support isn't nearly as seamless as we'd like. In terms of minor surface-level bugs, there will sometimes be cases where the "Please /login with /login <password>" message is shown after the automatic login confirmation - which has resulted in some confusion for existing and new users, causing them to think they had to log in. Not a big deal really, but still a source of confusion. There are, however, more serious bugs which sometimes show up (and sometimes don't). There have been several cases where username changes have resulted in someone being unable to play - as FastLogin will treat them as a cracked player. Now, this issue has seemingly been nonexistent since 1.16 - but still, it's an indicator that sometimes these kinds of critical issues can crop up. Along with that, cracked severs generally get treated less than favorably by both the Minecraft community as well as server lists. This is why we haven't advertised CU as a cracked server in many years. These issues alone aren't enough for me to drop cracked support, however. Most of these issues are minor, uncommon, and when major issues crop up, they often get fixed. However, those issues combine with something else that make me willing to consider it. There's been a thought floating around within the staff team for a while now that this cracked support may be holding us back further than we realize. It's possible that players join, realize we're cracked, and then dip as a result. It's also possible that server lists are able to identify us as cracked due to AuthMe and FastLogin and are quietly burying us in the deepest pages of the list. And, of course, it's also possible that neither of these are happening and that cracked support has nothing to do with our lack of player retention. So, starting sometime soon, cracked support will be temporarily dropped. The current plan is to start this with 1.17.1, though it may be sooner or later depending on how things go. We had originally planned to include this as part of the 1.17 update, but for a number of reasons we've opted to postpone it for just a bit longer. We aren't ready to commit to ditching cracked support permanently just yet, but we want to experiment and see if dropping this support happens to fix some of these issues - most likely, this will remain the case until the end of the year. The good news is that in early testing, AuthMe and FastLogin both work without issue on 1.17 - so there won't be any technical barrier to keeping cracked support. The bad news for you cracked folk out there is that if dropping this cracked support happens to turn around our population problems, then this will likely be a permanent change. Only time will tell. The Future To wrap things up, something I plan to do starting with 1.17 is properly get back into Minecraft server stuff again. I've been doing some reflection a bit to try and figure out why it is I haven't felt the desire to do anything on CU outside of the bare minimum maintenance here and there - and I think I've figured out why. The answer is in that very question - I haven't wanted to do much CU stuff for a while because for a while, it's largely just been maintenance and bugfixing and reimplementing old features again. I haven't been getting on and working on cool things because I want to make something cool, it's because there's some big problem that I have to solve in order to maintain a baseline. What I want to do starting with 1.17 is knock the two big looming clouds out of the way. Cross-server /tp and /warp functionality. I've been putting these off for a long time - and I think the time has come to finally fix this. Once that's done, I've got a comically long list of possible features that I want to work on - and I think that's the key. I need to make new things - even if those new things are small. I need to stop sitting around and working on features that already exist and fixing bugs - I need to get in and start doing what I used to do with the server - creating new things. I've devoted a long period of time lately towards Elaztek Studios and the Blamite Game Engine - it's been over a year since I last did a hard focus on Chaotic United. And while I don't plan to spend the entirety of the next year focused solely on Chaotic United, I think it's time for the pendulum to swing in the other direction for a bit. Stay tuned.

+ Added theme: Chaotic United - 2021 + Added theme: Chaotic United - 2021 (Dark) * Set default theme to Chaotic United - 2021 * Updated logo design on main website * Updated Discord icon - Removed Killerteddy

You're persistent - I'll give you that. I'll admit - originally I wasn't going to lift the ban. However, I've thought on it a bit further and I've decided that I will give you another chance. I looked back on message history and found out that it was actually longer ago than I had originally thought. That time duration combined with the wide-scale messaging of seemingly everyone who is or was formerly part of the community in an effort to rejoin demonstrates at least some level of commitment. That commitment isn't something we see very often - and combined with the fairly lengthy time since the ban suggests you may indeed have changed since those times before. Your ban has been lifted and you are free to rejoin the Discord at https://discord.gg/chaoticunited

* Fixed an issue on Chaotic United - 2020 where the color picker wouldn't start with the current color selected - Removed Killerteddy

* All forum groups can now store an unlimited number of private conversations * MC Server: Enabled the use of /sethome abilities in SkyBlock * Fixed some groups not being able to create Gallery albums * All groups can now view display name history for any user - Removed total uploaded attachment size limit for all forum groups - Removed Killerteddy

Man. What a wild thought - to think that it's been 10 years since Chaotic United first launched itself into the world, and to think that we've still kept it going all this time later. There's been a lot of people in the past who never thought CU would make it this long - some of which who may even prefer that it didn't, rather than carry on in our relatively quiet corner of the internet as we've since done. In previous anniversary posts, the tone has always been the same old tired ramblings along the lines of "we're gonna make this year the best one ever guys". I'll save those words this time around - as I've already said them enough before. What I'll do instead is give some insight on what our future plans are - even if those plans are still quite loose at the moment. I'll also give some proper credit to a few people towards the end of the post - people who, had they not showed up and stuck around, likely would've ensured that we didn't make it to our 10th year. History Lessons First and foremost, I want to share what will likely come off as "well, duh" for most of you - but is something that I've only come to fully understand over the past year or so. As many of you know, I have a borderline obsession with history. More specifically, the history of CU and any of its siblings, cousins, and other distant relatives. I've put in countless hours and a lot more money than is reasonable in an effort to preserve as much of that history as possible. The most expensive single purchase I've ever made for Chaotic United was the acquisition of the chaoticunited.com domain name. Now, you may be wondering - what's so important about the .com domain? After all, we're still on .net - so clearly it must not be that important, right? Well, you see, there's two major "eras" of Chaotic United. There's the "Old" Chaotic United, which refers to the original CU server and staff team from 2011 to early 2014. Then, there's the "New" Chaotic United, which refers to the re-established CU that we've been running here on chaoticunited.net from late 2014 through to the present day. The old CU operated out of chaoticunited.com, and we initially were hoping to launch under that domain as well - but at the time it was held by either Josh or Killerteddy, we never really found out for sure. So, instead, we started up on chaoticunited.net and never really left. After many years of it being consistently unavailable, the domain finally became available in June 2017. Sort of. Normally, domains are relatively cheap - usually 12-14 bucks a year per domain name. However, there are also such things as "premium domains". These are often older domain names that either once carried a lot of traffic, or names that are considered desirable. When one of those older, traffic-heavy names nears expiration, a premium domain reseller will often make a deal with the registrar (the site/company that the owner registered the domain with) and buy it off of them before it ever fully expires. From there, they'll make it available through them for a massive markup in price. In most cases, I'd never deal with them. In fact, several years prior, one of them got ahold of tidalwavegaming.com and tried to sell it for over a thousand dollars. After a few years, though, nobody bought it and it did eventually expire - at which point I snatched it back up for the standard 12 bucks for a year. However, chaoticunited.com was different. This was, to me, an opportunity that could not be missed. It may never become available again - some other random person or company could grab it, and any hope I'd have had for ever obtaining it would be crushed for good. On top of that, the domain was also the key to unlocking all of the preserved content on archive.org's Wayback Machine - which at this point is likely all that remains of the old CU's forums and website. I was not missing that domain. So, $800 later, I was the new owner of chaoticunited.com - and it's been that way ever since. Luckily, the high price tag was a one-time fee, and all later renewals have just been the standard rate. I imagine that for virtually everyone reading, that kind of money sounds absolutely batshit insane for what amounts to 3 changed letters in an address bar and URL. And for most people, yeah - it's not worth it. My point is that for me, these are reasonable and acceptable lengths to go to when it comes to preserving the history of this community. When Nuclear District shut down, the admins at ND agreed to send me a copy of their forum topics and posts, which I then was able to merge into CU's own forums - and you can see them all to this day. I've ported and re-ported old forum themes from the past and brought them into the modern day. The MC server, while certainly not identical to the old CU's server, still has all the hallmarks of the original server. You've got the same ranks, with the same perks, at the same prices. The hub is still a big biosphere, and the survival spawn even has those CU letters in the sky pulled straight from a classic CU spawn. However, all of this focus and emphasis on the past has, for many years, left me somewhat blind to something. Something that should have been obvious - and sometimes I even seemed to sort of get it, only for nothing to come of it. For new players, the history doesn't matter. As much as I may wish it to be different, the reality is that someone coming into CU for the first time in 2021 doesn't really have much reason to stay. The MC server certainly has a large number of features, including two dungeons and a custom ore. There's a wide variety of gamemodes, ranging from minigames to creative, from skyblock to a more purist form of survival. But for someone new, it's not enough. Why build in creative when there's seemingly nobody to show your creations to? Why set up shops in survival when there's no customers? Why strive to have the biggest, baddest island in skyblock when there's no obvious competition? Oh, and the minigames? Well, most of them require 2 or more players - and if you're online by yourself, that kinda limits your options. And most importantly, why stay here whenever virtually all of those gamemodes can be found elsewhere, in more populated servers? The uncomfortable realization I'm coming to is that, outside of some brief nostalgia for old CU veterans, or at best maybe joining the Discord which is comparatively quite lively, there isn't. For someone who is joining Chaotic United's MC server in 2021, there is virtually no reason for them to stay. We have a community, of course - CU isn't dead. But most of it lives exclusively on Discord. And if you're joining the MC server, you see a server with 0 players on, and likely decide to move on elsewhere. It's quite the sad realization, really - and certainly not the kind of thing you want to read (or write) on the 10 year anniversary post. The Future But, there's a silver lining in that realization. It is that realization that will allow us to move forward. Now, make no mistake - my fetish passion for CU's history isn't going anywhere. I don't believe that anything I've been doing in terms of preservation has been the problem. Rather, the problem is that there hasn't been much besides that. There's no reason why CU can't act as both a time capsule of its own past, and also act as an enjoyable experience in the present. After all, hasn't that been the point the entire time? So, the plan going forward. What is it? What does it entail? Well, we recently did a poll on Discord asking about the idea of introducing RPG elements into our survival mode - which the votes were heavily in favor of. The idea behind RPG as well as other ideas is this: to get people in the door, we need two things. One, we need something that is unique. We need a reason for people to be here and not on some other server. This concept isn't alien to us, as it's what led to the Teddy dungeon, the Magic plugin, and Durite. However, I feel that these features, while fun, aren't impactful enough to get new players hooked. Clearly they aren't - or else we'd have a bunch of people by now. The other thing we need is content that can be enjoyed alone. While it may seem counter-intuitive to join a server only to be playing a solo experience, at the end of the day - we have no real choice at the moment. If there's nobody on the server, we pretty much have to design around that. This is one of the ideas behind RPG elements, and potentially later down the line, a full-fledged RPG gamemode. These features are going to be built with both solo players and groups of friends in mind. The content should be fun alone, and it should be fun with friends. We've also got a few ideas for minigames that also follow this philosophy, though those are still in the early drafts at the moment. And... yeah. In terms of plans, that's all we've got at the moment. Nothing is super fleshed out yet, but this is the direction we plan to move towards going forward. Our history is, and will continue to be an important part of CU. However, we have to be more than just a large museum of our own past. We can have the museum, sure - but that museum needs to be a part of something more. Special Thanks Lastly, I feel that it's only appropriate that we list off a few key people that have helped ensure that CU made it to its 10th birthday. I won't be naming every key figure of CU, but you can find a (mostly) comprehensive list over on the Credits page. First up, a guy known as ntx2 - he was a former Manager/Admin of the old CU, and even hung around Nuclear District in its early days. He did a great deal of work for the old CU, many late nights staying up to fix issues and iron out bugs. Even made a couple of the old spawns, too. Without his presence, the old CU server likely would've had its playerbase drop off much faster than it did - potentially leading to an early demise. He was even the one to find me on HurricaneCraft and introduce me to Nuclear District - had he not done that, it's entirely possible that I would've never known about ND at all. Next up, Stoneharry - the primary developer of old CU's World of Warcraft server. While this isn't something that I ever really played on, it was still a key service of CU for many years, and one that from what I heard had quite a great deal of custom content. After him, Atomicbeast101 - another former Manager of old CU and the Founder of Nuclear District. He footed the bill of old CU's server in Teddy's absence, and later left to pave the road for ND to rise up and carry the torch forward - free from Teddy's attitudes and mismanagement. The last person I'll name here is none other than Michael, who has gone by many names over the years - LetsplaymasterDR, AwakenedRage, MysticaWare, and EpticRikez just to name a few. From 2014 to 2015, he hosted our MC server out of his own hardware - free of charge. Back then, my only other alternative would've been my Acer laptop or some weak PC - which needless to say wouldn't have made for a very fun server experience. Not only that, but he's continued to serve as a more technically-knowledge admin over the years, and for a few years up until early last year, once again paid for a dedicated server for CU - out of pocket. And if that wasn't enough, he's done something that may end up being even more significant than that just recently. After my continued struggles for employment, bouncing from retail job to retail job, he was able to offer me a job - creating content for a game that his studio is working on at the moment. It's a small team of only a few people, but even so he was willing to hire me on as an employee. I don't have to keep sifting job boards and hoping to find something that's tolerable at best. He's given me an opportunity to do something creative and exciting - and get paid doing it. A job that I can take pride in, and an opportunity that I feel as though I hardly deserve - an opportunity that I absolutely must not let go to waste. Along with those 4, I do encourage all of you to take a visit to the Credits page, the Veterans page, and the CU Timeline page - as they each have a walk-through of CU's history, naming important members of CU's past and present. Lastly, but most certainly not least - as cheesy as it sounds - is you. Yes, you. Each and every one of you who have stuck through, whether that be for a few weeks, months, or even years. You are the reason we have a community, the reason why despite everything that's happened, CU continues to keep on going year after year. Without you, there is no Chaotic United. Wrapping Up And with that, I suppose it's time to wrap this thing up. 10 years of Chaotic United - and hopefully at least another 10 yet to come. Whether or not we reach our goals of bringing CU back to it's former glory is something that will only be told with time. I can't (and won't) promise that this year will somehow be different than the last, but I can say that I think we're slowly but surely moving onto the right track. It may take a long while yet, but I'm not one to give up so easily. I think that, with all of us united together, anything is possible. Here's to the next 10 years.

nice (?) also i love how this shit is just a fuckin announcement and its just me talking about my laptop dying

Well, it finally happened. I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. I just didn't know for sure when it would exactly happen. And after being there through the vast majority of my life that I was able to still remember, he definitely made an undeniable impact on me. Back when I was a small child, as in 9 or 10 years old (roughly speaking, I don't know the exact year), we got a chihuahua named Chico. My mom and grandma were coming to pick me up for something, and Chico was in the car with them. At that moment, in a strange twist - I knew I wanted to have that dog. Which, at the time, was unusual as I largely wanted nothing to do with dogs - I was exclusively a cat person. But Chico came along and changed that forever. It's no exaggeration to say that I grew up with him. He was there as I went through basically all of my schooling, from 4th grade until I graduated High School. He was there when I got my first several jobs. He was there when I met new friends online through Xbox LIVE, and he was there when I brought an online community back from the dead. Through nearly every significant event in my life thus far, he was there. A few years ago or so, he started having a serious coughing fits. After taking him to the vet, we learned that he was in the very early stages of congestive heart failure, and that he had a heart murmur. Good thing is it was largely treatable through special food and a few medications. And after the medicines kicked in, he was fine. No more coughing, and everything was back to normal. Mostly. He did still have what seemed to be potential blindness, as his eyes were found to be very cloudy, and he couldn't jump up onto the couch and things like that without considerable effort - but otherwise, was entirely fine and healthy. Originally, I didn't plan to get another dog immediately after he eventually passed. But seeing as Chico was fairly important to me - I wanted to have another dog with me. Not just any dog, but one that was one of Chico's descendants. In early 2019, that opportunity presented itself - and Landon, Chico's great grandson, joined the household. At first I had some regrets as he started tearing things up left and right, but eventually things settled down, and things were put away properly enough - and we of course kept him. Fast forward to a couple days ago. Chico seemed to eat less than usual, though that wasn't a cause for concern by itself, as he'd sometimes not eat for a day but was otherwise normal and would eat the next day no problem. However, he also seemed to start walking a bit funny, and his breathing seemed to get faster. My sleep schedule was backwards, so I woke up yesterday afternoon and notice he needed a slight push to get out of bed, and he stumbled a bit when he got off the bed. But hey, he kept walking, so not too much concern yet. But later that night (or rather, early this morning I suppose), it became clear that something very bad was happening - and I pretty much knew where it was heading. I went to give him one of his medicines for the night, and when I went to move him to give it to him, he was extremely weak. I moved him, gave him the medicine, and he pretty much went right back down. He was on a blanket and pillow next to a corner by the couch on the floor, which became his sleeping spot after some reorganizing in the living room. That weakness, combined with the fact that he refused to take his two pills - even the one he normally takes no problem, it was clear where things were headed, and that his time was coming to an end. I'd already called dad earlier, but that was before things progressed to this point. I had originally intended to head to bed, but seeing how weak he was, it was clear he wasn't gonna be able to make it to the bed - so I stayed up and stayed in the room with him. Mere hours later, I turned around to check on him and watched him take his last breaths. And that was it. Chico had passed on. His fairly long and rich life had come to an end. The one plus of it being so abrupt as it was, is that he at least didn't spend a bunch of time suffering. I did my best to give him a good home and a loving companion, and he gave me the same in return - plus the gift of being able to love and appreciate dogs. Rest easy buddy - you might be gone, but your impact will stay with me for the rest of my life.