Search the Community

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

Man. Crazy to think we've been going nine years. Nine years is a long time. Typically, the past anniversary posts have been worded along the lines of "yea we're pretty quiet now but we'll get somewhere soon i promise!". Last year, I wanted the 8th anniversary announcement to be the final one following that format: Well, we aren't quite there yet unfortunately. That being said, we are undeniably closer to that target than we have been in a very long time - possibly closer than we ever have been. Which, hey - I'll take it. Any progress is good at this point. So, let's take a look back and reflect on the past year. Reflecting on Year 8 We started the 8th year off with, once more, a promise of hope for the future. We were hard at work on updating to 1.14 - though it still took much longer than any of us would've liked. It saw the departure of several staff members and the introduction of new ones. While year 8 wasn't as groundbreaking as we all obviously would've hoped - it was still a new beginning nonetheless. It marked the point where we fixed a number of the deeply-rooted management issues with CU. Not server issues per se, but issues with how I managed the people. I'd had a pretty serious issue with holding on to staff members for far too long. People were on the staff team for no other reason than I was used to seeing their name in Blue or Green. The vast majority of those people didn't even need to be demoted - when I laid out the new expectations going forward, they simply stepped down to avoid that uncomfortable situation. With those folk out of the team, room was available for new users to fill that role. The most notable addition is, of course, @Z0mbieslayer2013. You know him, you love him - and believe it or not, this is his first time as a Moderator. While there are certainly times where this is clear, he's done something that really doesn't happen as often as it probably should - he asks questions. Not just questions on "how do I do x", or "what do I do if Y happens?" - no, no. He stands up straight and asks questions about why things are they way they are. Questioning things that have been the case for years and pointing out things that should be obvious improvements. And while not all of his ideas and suggestions have been implemented - the fact that he still proposes changes and enhancements at all is important. When you as a leader surround yourself with people who just agree with you all the time, you're living in an echo chamber. And if nothing else, Zombie is ensuring that I'm not sitting in one. The second half of year 8 saw us hit some of the biggest population spikes we've seen in years. As unremarkable as reaching 10 or more users on the server at once seems, it's a step in the right direction - and a step we've not seen happen in years. The last time we saw numbers that high was in early 2017, roughly 3 years ago. And while those heights tend to happen at random with much of the activity still hanging much lower, activity as a whole has improved. 0 people on isn't the norm during the whole day - you'll typically only see it at a couple specific parts of the day (typically very early/late). And of course, we've been slowly working on migrating everything over to BungeeCord - in an effort to remove technical issues. And this will be our primary focus for Chaotic United's 9th year. The Plan for Year 9 Our plan for this year is similar to what we did in Year 8. Where Year 8 was the year of fixing management-related issues, Year 9 is the year of fixing all the technical problems that have been building up since 2014. Fixing long-time issues, and making future issues easier to nail down and resolve. However, due to the sheer volume of issues that are scattered about, there's no way for us to have a single, coherent memory of each and every issue. This is where you come in. If you find any bug - or anything that so much as looks like a bug - report it on our Bug Tracker. Our goal is to start the decade off with a solid technological foundation - and to enter the second decade of Chaotic United as a strong, stable, secure, and reliable server. A server that doesn't have a series of ridiculous roadblocks keeping people who would otherwise enjoy the server from having fun. And most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough - do NOT just tell me about a bug. My memory is NOT reliable and I guarantee you I'll forget about the issue entirely within 24 hours - if not sooner. This is the reason we have the bug tracker, so that issues aren't just "forgotten" and so that their status can be tracked. If you've told me about an issue before, report it. Anything that you'd consider strange or "probably not intentional" is something that should be reported. I want to know any and all issues you guys might have, severe or not. Even if it's a completely harmless bug, report it. I want to get each and every bug on that bug tracker fixed - I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say I'm sick and tired of having a buggy server - and I'm sick of making you guys constantly put up with a buggy server. Speaking of Server Stuff... Something sort of huge has been developing here lately - and you might've already heard me mention it. But if you haven't - in the coming months, we'll be doing a bit of server consolidation. Most of this is outside of Chaotic United entirely, but one change that will affect CU (slightly) is that the Elaztek Gitlab will be hosted on the same machine as the MC server. For a while (and still at the time of writing), it runs on its own machine with a couple of things that aren't CU or Elaztek related. I know what you're thinking: "I don't give a damn about server consolidation - that's not exciting". And you're absolutely right. However, the next part (at least for me) is. As part of this consolidation, I will be taking over the payment of the CU/Elaztek servers moving forward. The only things I won't be paying for are the relays - as those are so cheap that Michael will continue paying for them. That being said, a couple of the unused ones are being dropped. If you're worried - don't be. If you use a relay, the one you use will be kept online. Several that we have are just not used whatsoever - and as such, they're being dropped. For those of you who have been around for a while, you'll know that Michael has been fairly crucial to paying the bills for most of the time of the CU revival. He hosted the server out of his house from late 2014 through to mid-2015 when we merged with ND. From there, we moved to a VPS which I paid for. A while later (2017 if I'm not mistaken but don't quote me on it), Michael stepped back in to pay for the dedicated server that we've been using until today. After finally getting a stable job that shows no signs of going anywhere, I'm finally in a position where I can actually cover these bills. And with this transition, I think it's all the more important that we all thank and honor Michael for what he's done for CU since 2014. It's no exaggeration that, if he never came along, we absolutely would not be here today. I'd have likely given up on it after my old laptop died and I'd probably be on a whole different path - never getting a chance to know any of you guys. The legacy of Chaotic United would've ended in mid-2016, possibly even sooner - when ND shut down. That would've been it and the book would've closed. But thanks to Michael - we persevered. As small as we are, we've held strong and steady and managed to hold this thing together all this time. We've made sure that, if nothing else, Chaotic United's story didn't end several years ago - to ensure it lives to see a new year, a new decade, and a new generation. And while there are numerous people who have contributed to that (see the credits page (which im aware needs some updating)), Michael is easily the biggest contributor by far. So - on behalf of all of us, thank you Michael for all that you've done thus far, and will hopefully continue to do. Oh yeah - sidenote, Michael won't be leaving the community. I know the way I wrote all that makes it sound like he is, but in reality he's still gonna be a big part of the backend management of CU - it's just that he won't be putting his own money into it anymore. When we start moving things to the new server, we'll be sure to announce it both on Forums and Discord - as there will be a little bit of downtime during the migration. Wrapping Up - For Now... Well, I think that about wraps it up for now. Some of you may think that this is yet another "hope for the future" post. And I suppose in a sense, it is. But this one is a bit different. I'm not proclaiming that we're starting a new beginning today. We already did that last year. I'm saying that right now, we're a little behind schedule - but still on track. This isn't the start of a new age of CU, but rather the next building block of that new beginning. I can't say how soon it'll be, but our goal is to be running smooth and stable and with either minimal or no bugs by December. Will we achieve that goal? Only time will tell - so stay tuned.

Hey everyone! Some exciting new developments have been happening today! We once again have a dedicated server. You guys may remember a while back we had a 32GB Dedi from OVH - that was dropped due to the steep pricing that we simply couldn't afford. However, with our expanding services and our desire to make a bigger, broader, and more epic Minecraft experience, the time has come once again to bring a dedi into the picture. It isn't as grand as the old one, but still is going to spell huge improvements as this server boasts 16GB of memory - more than sufficient for the MC server as well as leaving plenty of room for expansion. That means no more random crashes every time some players get on, and no more running out of memory all the time. Additionally, you guys may recall several instances where MC had to be abruptly taken down in the past and certain stats (namely Time-based ranking) got reset every single time (though was restored thanks to backups). That was all due to the fact that our VPS had only 40GB of disk space. Unfortunately, the MC server was really pushing it on resources as was evidenced by the several periods of time where the VPS just ran out of space. This also is what caused the recent reinstallation of the VPS last week as we believe it was this progressive running out of space that caused several system packages to just stop working. This ultimately resulted in the reinstall you saw not too long ago. Well, this will no longer be an issue, as the Dedi that powers MC has a hefty 2TB of space - WAY more than enough for MC. The server has already been migrated and is up right now. But wait! What about the VPS? Good question - it isn't going anywhere. In fact, this isn't just upgrade day for the main MC server, but the Beta 1.7.3 server as well. The server now has been given 4GB of RAM allocated to it since it no longer needs to share resources with the main server. Along with that, it has been given port 25565 and has its own IP as of now: b173.chaoticunited.net. Additionally, all Discord bots will continue to remain on the VPS and will have plenty of wiggle room. Soon, the old MC files will be downloaded and removed from the VPS to clear out the space for other potential smaller/lighter services in the future. Our plan is to let MC have that 16GB all to itself. Moving forward, you should see major improvements in stability on all our services. This was a necessary change that probably should have happened a long time ago. But hey, better late than never, right? :^) Lastly, I want to thank Michael/AwakenedRage/Kryptoaware for solely paying for this Dedicated server out of his own pocket. Give him some love! Have a good day everyone, and happy crafting on our new and improved infrastructure!